Even if we never read the book in school, I sure most of us are familiar with the literary concept of a white whale – an obsession to be pursued even to one’s own destruction – which comes to us from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. For the protagonist of that book, and for most of us besides, our white whales are inextricably connected to some pain we cannot exorcise. Someone who is obsessed with money, for example, may be running from the pain of childhood poverty or the pain of never feeling good enough in the eyes of others. Oftentimes the difference between a pursuit and an obsession is that pursuits are driven primarily by the good of the thing pursued, while obsessions are also fueled by pain in our personal history.
My white whale is the mass apostasy of my generation. With a few notable exceptions, almost everyone I knew in school has walked away from the Christian religion. And this pains me because I care about these people, I care about my generation, and I know that life without Jesus is a life that is always teetering on the precipice of destruction. I have become obsessed with evangelization and what it will take to bring even a fraction of these people back to Church. Almost everything I do is somehow fueled by this obsession.
I bring this up because The Pillar, my favorite Catholic news outlet, just ran an analysis showing, like many analyses before this, just how bad the generational faith situation is. (Analysis here.) One of the conclusions of the article, unsurprisingly, is that faith habits are set during childhood and that parents matter. “So if we want to understand why only 10% of Catholics born in the 1990s and 2000s are going to Mass weekly as adults, we may consider the fact that only 18% of their parents (who were probably born in the 1960s and 1970s) were taking them to Mass on a weekly basis when they were growing up.”
Now, I have known enough Catholic families to know that the future faith of children is too complex a question to predict with a binary metric like Mass attendance. However, as a general rule, I tell parents that religion will only be important to your kids if the kids know why it is important to you. A family that does not go to Mass may experience the same results as a family who goes to Mass weekly “because we have to” – because in both cases the kids infer that Mass is not personally important. But a family whose parents are able to talk to their kids about why Jesus is personally important to the parents, how the parents rely on Jesus in their difficult times and how the Mass makes the parents better people – these kids are going to grow up with at least the default assumption that a personal relationship with Jesus is an important aspect of a well-lived life.
Unfortunately, talking about our personal relationship with Jesus is hard, especially in the Catholic Church where we are often not taught how to do so. We just assume Catholic culture is strong enough to propagate itself. Obviously, this needs to change. From a parish perspective, we are actively working to empower people to talk about Jesus through our Evangelical Catholic Reach More program, but it will still be a few more years before this has a palpable effect on our parish culture. In the meantime, maybe ask yourself – regardless of whether you are a parent – why Jesus is important to you personally, and then ask if someone you know could benefit from hearing about that.
Fr. Moore 