The Greatest Truth of Youth Ministry

Perhaps a more proper conclusion to my recent series “The Five Lies of Youth Ministry” would be to conclude in hope, a hope the Church constantly calls us to renew in ourselves and in our parishes.

Recently in his World Youth Day remarks, Pope Francis declared to the young people, “What is it I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day? I want a mess. We knew that in Rio there would be great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses!... I want to see the Church get closer to the people!”

            Powerful words from the pontiff, those—words that should trouble the bureaucracy and planned programming of diocesan directors. They are words which call forth not a stagnant institution, but a living, breathing being. They call forth a being with a freedom, a freedom which makes the sureties of the world merely contingent. Those words of Francis renounce what his predecessor referred to negatively as “a certain euphoric, post-conciliar solidarity.” They call forth a generation not of reformers or restorers who look to the past with nostalgia or to the future with undue optimism. Rather, they call forth a generation of saints who “remains faithful to the today of the Church” yet “moves forward toward the consummation of history, [who] looks ahead to the Lord who is coming “ (Benedict, 1985).

            And in these years and those ahead, while we never deny the temptations and threats ever present to the Church, we see that perhaps the true fruits of Vatican II are finally beginning to shine. And that is one of the greatest truths of youth ministry today. For it has become apparent that these fruits are not even rightly attributed to the council, but to the Spirit. We all too easily forget that in the bleak decades of the sixties and seventies and eighties, the Spirit still moved, still worked within the Church. Though sometimes the Spirit shouts, this time it grew in silence. And this silent growth was among the young people. And it grew like any other organism—sporadically, unpredictably, and vibrantly.

This evening, I read the following excerpt from an interview with Pope Benedict (then Joseph Ratzinger) in 1985. My prayer remains that these words, and the words of his successor, continue to call forth a generation of martyrs for the Church. The pontiff-emeritus explains:

What is hopeful at the level of the universal Church is the rise of new movements which nobody had planned and which nobody has called into being, but which have sprung spontaneously from the inner vitality of the faith itself. What is manifested in them—albeit subdued—is something like a pentecostal season in the Church… I am now, to an increasing degree, meeting young people in whom there is a wholehearted adhesion to the whole faith of the Church, young people who want to live this faith fully and who bear in themselves a great missionary élan. The intense life of prayer present in these movements does not imply a flight into interiority or a withdrawal into the private sphere, but simply a full and undivided catholicity. The joy of the faith that one senses here has something contagious about it. Here new vocations to the priesthood and to the religious orders are now growing spontaneously.

            What is striking is that all this fervor was not elaborated by any office of pastoral planning, but somehow it sprang forth by itself. As a consequence of this fact, the planning offices—just when they want to be very progressive—don’t know just what to do with them. They don’t fit into their plan. Thus while tensions rise in connection with their incorporation into the present forms of institutions, there is absolutely no tension with the hierarchical Church as such.

            What is emerging here is a new generation of the Church which I am watching with great hope. I find it marvelous that the Spirit is once more stronger than our programs and brings himself into play in an altogether different way than we had imagined. In this sense the renewal, in a subdued but effective way, is afoot. Old forms that had run aground in self-contradiction and in the taste for negations are leaving the stage, and the new is making headway. Naturally it does not yet have its full voice in the great debate of dominant ideas. It grows in silence. Our task—the task of the officeholders in the Church and of theologians—is to keep the door open to them, to prepare room for them.”

Yes the Church is alive, and it is alive in her young people. Rise up, young Church. The Lord goes with you. Remember that the opposite of “conservative” in the Church is not “progressive,” but, as Benedict explains, “the opposite of conservative is missionary.” And this missionary spirit we see in our young people. Thus the greatest truth of youth ministry: that young people, more than any other age or generation, have a pilgrim spirit. While children and adults are tempted to complacency in established ways, young people are always on the journey, always in via. And until youth ministry joins them on this pilgrimage, it will continue to be left behind as simply another outdated and unresponsive program. The young people have grown in silence for decades now. And now they have grown too many, and are beginning to make a mess of things. And what a glorious mess it is.