The Five Lies of Youth Ministry: Part Five - "It's About the Heart, Not the Head"

Our faith is not about rules and regulations. Our faith is about an experience; it is about making the connection between our heads and our hearts. We need less theologizing and more evangelizing, less ratio and more fides. We need our young people to know Jesus in their hearts, not their heads.

This is, perhaps, the most dangerous and subtle of all the lies, and it is for that reason that I conclude this series with it. The reason being that I agree with almost the entirety of the statement above: our faith is not about rules, but an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. We must make the connection between our heads and hearts. And we must evangelize before we catechize. Yet there is a dichotomy developed in the “lie” which has done incredible damage to youth ministry in the last forty years. In fact, this lie has crippled along with it modern science, philosophy, and, perhaps most fatally, theology. The lie is this: that we need more fides and less ratio—more faith and less reason—as if the two could be separated. I assure you, they cannot.

            Our young people are being raised within a rather strange spectrum of theology. On the one hand, there is an over-intellectualization of the faith among some. Here the faith is in danger of becoming just another academic discipline. It is something simply to be studied. It lacks any power and dynamism. It does not change lives and hearts, but only serves as an historical reality, which can be compared and contrasted with other historical realities. It ceases to live and grow. In this understanding, the Church appears to be a stagnant and bureaucratic organization rather than a living and breathing organism.

            On the other hand, there are those who have made faith a sentiment, who have abandoned all doctrine and dogma for the sake of a shallow emotivism. Cardinal John Henry Newman diagnosed this state in his own day, writing that “it has become fashionable to say that Faith is, not an acceptance of revealed doctrine, not an act of the intellect, but a feeling, an emotion, an affection, an appetency.” This epidemic most directly threatens our young people today, even more so than the first, and threatens to drag them into a state of tolerant mediocrity, in which heresy and Truth are joined together under the mark “opinion,” and human scandals are put on par with the scandal of the cross.

            The resolution to this issue is not impossible, though it is elusive. The resolution is a proper view of the mystery of redemption, in which Christ came to unite faith and reason, the heart and the mind. Pope Benedict writes,

[In Christ] the world is now seen as something rational: It emerges from eternal reason, and this creative reason is the only true power over the world and in the world. Faith in the one God is the only thing that truly liberates the world and makes it “rational.” When faith is absent, the world only appears to be more rational. In reality the indeterminable powers of chance now claim their due… to establish the world in the light of the ratio that comes from eternal creative reason and its saving goodness and refers back to it—that is a permanent, central task of the messengers of Jesus Christ.

Reason is not and never was opposed to faith. In fact, faith by definition is an intellectual ascent! That is why Archbishop Sheen was so confident to say that those who hate the Catholic Church are those who know nothing about her. The intellect, properly ordered, leads to the Truth. Cardinal Newman writes: “Right reason, that is, Reason rightly exercised, leads the mind to the Catholic Faith, and plants it there, and teaches it in all its religious speculations to act under its guidance.” Reason and faith are so closely united, that St. Thomas asserts the beatific vision to be a “vision of the intellect,” before which all human senses fail.

            Therefore, it becomes apparent that youth ministry must seek to bring young people to a knowledge of Jesus Christ through both faith and reason. Intellectual formation should never be abandoned for more popular and emotive methods. Young people must be trained to know the Truths of the faith in their minds, which are less likely to be swayed than their feelings. In this way, even when they wander far from the cor Jesu, they will look back on their Catholic faith like Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, as a terrible inconvenience they wish were not true but cannot deny with their being. And thus they will be drawn back, like a twitch upon the thread.

            Youth ministers must seek in their mission to reveal to young people the whole person of Jesus Christ. And they should pray with the great Saint Josemaria Escriva, that young people with their hearts and minds “may seek Christ, may find Christ, may love Christ.” May God bless you.