David QuinnMost Catholics believe it would be a very good thing if more men would join the priesthood, but there is a lack of any real sense of urgency about the pending shortage of priests in Ireland. It’s the same with youth ministry.
How many parishes in Ireland have a strong, youth-oriented ministry? Some do to be sure, but not enough. This leaves many parents despairing of how they are going to keep their teenage children engaged with the Faith.
No different from any of us, teenagers are extremely influenced by their peer group. I say ‘no different from any of us’ because we sometimes make the very basic error of imagining that we adults are not so easily influenced by our peers. We are, or nearly so at any rate. How else do we think social norms develop? How else do we think we have arrived at a situation whereby even many older people have stopped going to Mass?
If many over 65s, who grew up in a time when the vast majority of people want to Mass, have stopped going, what hope is there for teenagers when the vast majority of their peers don’t go and probably never did?
Many teenagers wouldn’t want to join a local parish youth group even if one was available. But a sub-set would. Some teenagers are genuinely interested in their faith but often can’t find like-minded peers in their own locality.
Is it beyond the bounds of possibility for a cluster of say three parishes in a given area to form a youth group which say a dozen or even half a dozen teenagers might join to begin with?
It would have to be properly promoted by the parishes and a group of likely candidates, possibly via their parents, would have to be recruited to give the initiative a kick-start.
Those in the diocese with experience in youth ministry and with knowledge of how to make youth ministry interesting to teenagers, could help in the early stages and then leave a locally-raised youth leader in charge.
The Evangelical Churches are much better than the Catholic Church at forming youth groups. A few years ago I was with my family in Co. Waterford and came across a ‘beach ministry’ which was essentially a youth outreach that went to where teenagers actually were on a sunny day; the beach.
They put on a show of some sort every hour or so and a group would gather. But was the beach ministry Catholic? No it wasn’t. It was Evangelical Christian. And were the team members even from the South? No they weren’t. To judge from the accents they were all from the North.
So a team of youth ministers had come all the way from Northern Ireland to a beach in Waterford in order to bring the Gospel to young people.
There were fish out of water (no pun intended) in two ways because not only were they from the North, they surely knew they would be speaking mainly to Catholics (however nominal they may be) and not to fellow Protestants.
Comfort zones
I admired them for what they were doing. Christians are supposed to leave their comfort zones when necessary in order to share their faith with others. And they had done exactly that.
A further challenge for us Catholics is that we are used to priests and religious taking the lead in any given ministry. Evangelical Christians, while they have their pastors, are much more strongly imbued with the notion that all Christians, lay and clergy, are ministers in a certain sense, that they all have a responsibility to share the Gospel.
There are obviously Catholic groups in Ireland specifically orientated towards youth. One is Youth 2000. Another is NET Ministries. But they are not in enough parishes unfortunately.
In a way, the lack of urgency about youth ministry, about the vocations crisis and about declining Mass attendance all stem from the same problem; we are not sufficiently evangelistic, by which I mean we are incredibly reticent about finding new ways of sharing the Faith, or any ways at all.
Catholicism used to be the majority culture in the country. As I have argued before, when your views – or some version of them – are in the majority, then social norms do all the work of evangelising for you.
You don’t have to do much work to form your children in the Faith, because of the whole of society is helping you, and it’s also helping you to keep a hold of your own faith.
What we’ve long since discovered is that a faith that is merely conventional won’t last very long once the conventions of society change.
Now that they have changed, so that the conventions and norms are either indifferent to the Faith or actively hostile towards it, we suddenly find ourselves having to give witness in sometimes very difficult circumstances and when we’re simply not mentally prepared for it.
When the social norms no longer produce vocations, encourage Mass attendance and no longer keep young people in the Faith, we have to find ways of doing all these things ourselves.
Youth ministry can’t succeed, and nor can any other kind of outreach unless and until we are prepared to put in the work and try things. Until we do, the decline of the Christian faith in Ireland won’t be stopped.