Continued from Part I…

Dr Graham English concludes his two-part commentary exploring the challenges the institution needs to make if it is going to retain the attention of future generations of young people. This commentary is from an address Dr English gave recently to members of the St Vincent de Paul Society.

Two choices: "to stick together" or "to change"…

There are, broadly two choices migrants can make in a new land. One is to stick together; talk the old language, sing the old songs, tell the old stories, wear the old clothes, eat the old food, honour the old heroes, impose the old rules. If you can, have your own schools. You can try to create what you imagine is the old country here. And for a while it will work: provided you or the context can supply the motivation to stay with the group; or to stay away from those outside; provided outside does not change; especially if outside can be portrayed as an enemy; provided you or your children or your friends do not fall in love with someone or some idea or some practice from out there; provided no one on the inside has a radio or television or internet or an ipod.

The other choice is to change, and to learn how to change creatively.

In A Short History of Ethics (1967) Alasdair McIntyre who is a Catholic and a philosopher says that when we are addressing some moral questions 'we may discover that we cannot answer them until we have asked and answered certain philosophical questions' (p5). He is explaining the changes in Greek society about 500BC that led away from Homeric myth towards philosophical ethics. Philosophical ethics grew up, he says, because the Greeks realised that 'social changes had not only made certain types of conduct, once socially accepted, problematic, but had also rendered problematic the concepts which had defined the moral framework of an earlier world' (p5).

A teacher has a "mission"
but they need to be also responsive to the needs of their students…

I teach Religious Education to people who will mostly teach in Catholic or other religious schools, or who do already. I often see young people grow in understanding or acceptance as the result of the religious education they experience at university. I see them fired up with social justice or determined to live searching committed lives. It is a delight to see young, awkward, sometimes disillusioned or angry people come in first year and, via their reading, experience and teaching practice become young adults who will be fine teachers of young Australians.

At the same time I am aware that I have taught Religious Education in primary school, secondary, and at university for forty five years over a time when Catholic Sunday Mass going has declined from maybe sixty percent attending each week to less than fifteen percent. The generations I have taught religion to now stay away in droves.

I know a young man who is alcoholic. I know a few but this one in particular is a chef. He has tried Alcoholics Anonymous a few times. Now I know alcoholism is a disease of denial and self delusion, but his reasons for giving up on the groups he has attended so far are typical enough of young people. Because of his work, if he goes to AA it has to be a day time group. One group he says is made up of old men who keep preaching God at him. Another is made up of 'women who continually discuss tennis'.

Of course AA is not a missionary outfit. As long as they are meeting the needs of the folk who come to that group they are doing their job. But I am a teacher, and I teach Christianity and try to live it. I still want people to hear anything good that I have to say. I am still on a mission.

So like those 500 BC Greeks I have to realise that social changes have not only made certain types of conduct, once socially accepted, problematic, but have also rendered problematic the concepts which had defined the moral framework of an earlier world. I cannot teach the young people now the way I taught my first class in 1964, or the students I taught in the 1970s, or 1980s. I can't teach in Strathfield as I taught in Bondi, or as I taught in Canberra, or as I would teach at Lakemba were I teaching there now. I have to teach the people in front of me, as they are or, having plenty of choice they will walk away. Some young people just give up, but most of the ones I come across are loathe to put up. If I don't listen to them and teach to who they are they will shop around to find someone who will.

Applying these lessons to the Catholic Church…

The young that I meet are growing up in a world where the Church has long since been unable to provide them with the motivation to stay with the group or to stay away from those outside; where outside does change all the time; where they do not see outside as 'the enemy'; where they fall in love with people and ideas and practices from 'out there'; where they presume that radio or television or internet or ipods or facebook or google have been around since Adam and Eve and they cannot imagine a world without them.

There are, of course, young people who really want to belong to the Church. Some of them are fundamentalist: biblically, doctrinally or in their model of church. But to the non-fundamentalist majority (and it is a big majority) we who belong to the Church often seem to have little to offer. To many of them we are irrelevant.

Relevance…

Now 'relevant' is a tricky word. Some folk use it as a synonym for 'trendy' and employ it as a swear word but I think it is a rich word and my experience is that so much of what we, the official Church, do is irrelevant to the young. That is, it does not engage them. They feel they can live happily or even better off without it.

That is serious.

The American philosopher John Dewey pointed out in 1913 that unless a group can have the young enthusiastic about what we believe and do then the group will die out. This applies as much to the Church as to any other institution. We could die out. After all Iraq was for six centuries a vibrant centre of Christianity, so was Egypt. Of course if we cease to have anything to offer it is best we die out. But I believe we have a lot to offer.

For example, I want to have my students know that God finds them delightful and that nothing they do can stop that. I want them to know and experience that the whole point of the Incarnation is that God takes creation so seriously as to take on its limitations. Jesus is God limited by the everyday mess of being human. The whole point is that these molecules I am made up of somehow reveal God. That's what I want my students to know, rejoice in and to pass on.

What being Catholic is all about…

Raimond Gaita tells the story of the nun he once worked with in a psychiatric hospital for the grievously mentally disabled in Melbourne. Gaita was moved by this sister's capacity to treat all human life as precious and so treat all humans with great dignity. Her behaviour, Gaita says, was striking because of its power to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction made their humanity difficult to see. This seems to me the basis of what St Vincent De Paul and Frederic Ozanam were about. It is I hope what being Catholic is all about.

But whatever I think being Catholic is all about, I have to teach it to the folk I find in my classes. There is no mould for what a good young Catholic should be like. There used to be. It was the Cinderella mould. Cinderella went to the ball in a pumpkin coach and the prince fell in love with her but she had to flee at midnight, leaving her glass slipper on the step as she ran. The day after the ball he sent his servants to find the girl who had won his heart, by trying her slipper on all the young women they could find. When the palace flunkies came to Cinderella's house her wicked sibling insisted on trying on the slipper. It did not fit her foot, so she cut off her big toe. Then it fitted. In the Catholic Church I grew up in this model was often used. If you did not fit they cut bits off until you did.

Now, the young people I know will not put up with it. It is a waste of time trying it on them.

I have already said that they are as good as we were; at some things they are better and at some they are worse. That is always true. My grandmother and my father could ride a horse well and plough fields using draught horses because they were farmers before cars and tractors were available, and had to. I have never been on a horse and have no desire to. Horses frighten me. But I can use a word processor and neither of my parents could.

A few more things that young people I know seem to be like, though I hasten to add they are not all like this.

Living in a world of contradiction, paradox and unpredictability…

They have different issues. Some things we think are terribly important they don't see as an issue at all. There is evidence that one-issue politics, abortion and gay rights for example, cuts little ice with most of them. They have different concerns. They are also eclectic. Grandma Carmody said she did not believe in the Little People, but added, 'But of course they are there'. Humans always have been able to believe in contradictories, that is, propositions that cannot both be true, and both be false. Young people now are specialists at it.

They live with unpredictability. There are jobs they are doing or preparing for now that will not exist all their working lives; and many of the jobs they will work at sometime in their lives do not exist yet. Often they cannot explain to their parents what they do for a living, or what they are training for because their parents do not understand what they mean.

They are not 'joiners'. My father wasn't a joiner, nor am I, but for the young now it seems to be a general thing. They will play golf if they want to but they won't join the club, they will crew for the sailing club races on Wednesday afternoon and become good at sailing but they won't pay the fee to join the club. They will say 'Yes' when you ask them to a function but you know that it has a condition on it; 'Unless I get a better offer'. If you are in a club, or a union, or a political party it is probably struggling for numbers because the young people are not joining. This is just as true of the church club as the sailing club. If you commit yourself, something better might come up in the meantime.

You cannot scare young people into being good…

They get frightened but not of the things we were frightened of. You cannot scare these people into being good by telling them they will go to hell. You cannot scare them into being good at all; shock and awe didn't work in Iraq. It doesn't work with young people here either. They have enough to contend with. They are not interested in a God who is used to frighten them. They believe in a benevolent, all-loving God.

My father's two ambitions, after the big one of saving his soul, were to have a government job with superannuation and to own his own house. All he wanted for us was that we did our best. Young people now want different things. What they are we need to ask them.

When I was at school we were segregated from girls. They were dangerous beings who could lead us into sin. I had no really close female friends until I was in my late twenties. Young people now have friends. They now have different attitudes to sexuality and friendship. Relationships loom large in their universe.

Loyalty and respect has to be earned…

You cannot keep information from the young. If you don't tell them, or if they pick you are lying or patronising them they will Google it. Sometimes of course the information they get there is wrong too but for most of them 'what father said', whether father is the pope, or the clergy, or a teacher, or a parent is not conclusive proof of anything. They quite like the pope, some of them love him, but that is no guarantee they will do as he says or even that they know what he says. If they disagree they say, 'Whatever!' In the Church if the authority of 'father' wasn't shot to pieces already the sex scandals have been the coup de grace. The young people I know are loyal but only if you earn their loyalty.

When I was in my twenties I thought for a few brief moments that I understood the world and that I knew what was going on. Of course that did not last. So what I have been saying must be measured against my awareness that, about most important things I don't know what the answer is. I am not sure what the young are like or what they want or need, except that they are worth being with, and passing on the Good News to and that they will pass it on if it is Good News to them. Often I am amazed by them. I have no desire to live to be a hundred but I would really love to know what these young people are like when they are my age. I am very hopeful for them.

There is a saying in psychotherapy: In counseling, counselors work from one of two positions: they listen to a theory, or they listen to the client.

Good counselors don't categorise, they listen to the client. My experience is that if we want to know what the young are about, and we need to if we want them to carry on the good things about our community; we need to listen to them rather than our favourite theory.

We have something to teach them but as they are going to be the ones who do it all next we need to listen to who they are so that we know what bits of our stuff we can pass on to them and how we best do it. And most importantly we have to do it in language they can understand, language that touches their needs and invites them to be participants in something that is unfinished, not observers of something that is complete and merely passed on.

Old beliefs and ways of doing things die out, not necessarily because the new ideas and ways are better but because the people who held the old beliefs and who did the old things die out.

In no time at all we will have died out so we have to listen now to ensure that, though we and the way we do things and even some of the things we believe might die with us, the essentials of what we hold dear will persist.

Graham English
Australian Catholic University

Return to Part I…

Image Credits:
The student images used to illustrate this article were sourced from the ACU National websites. The cartoon is by Dr English and clicking on the other images will take you to the original source.

©2008 Dr Graham English

[Index of Commentaries by Dr Graham English]