Clearing Away the Barriers: Preaching to Young Adults Today

by J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P.

Introduction

"Clearing away the barriers"— Pope Benedict used this expression in his address to the bishops during his apostolic visit to the United States. He asked "how, in the twenty-first century, a bishop can best fulfil the call to 'make all things new in Christ, our hope'? How can he lead his people to 'an encounter with the living God' . . . ?" "Perhaps," the Holy Father continued, "he needs to begin by clearing away some of the barriers to such an encounter" (Benedict XVI 2008, 43).

While my audience this evening is broader (the pope was speaking to bishops) and my focus in this presentation narrower (the pope wasn't thinking chiefly of young adults), I have made his expression my own here. Specifically, I want to take up the Holy Father's challenge by reflecting with you in this Carl Peter Lecture on the nature of some of the barriers that today seem to stand in the way of a young person's encounter with the living God.

Can these barriers be identified? Are they unique to young people, or are they in some sense shared by their elders in the faith? What can those who are charged with preaching, catechesis, and the communication of the Catholic faith to young people do to remove or clear away these barriers? These are some of the questions we will be considering.

We should note at the start that "clearing away the barriers" is a task that belongs at least in part to the art of apologetics. Although apologetics is normally understood as a reasoned defense of the faith against objections from outside the Church's ambit, sometimes it must be deployed within the community itself to address the confusions and misunderstandings that block or undermine full participation in the life of faith. There's nothing odd about this. When trying to explain something to someone, we often have to correct mistaken ideas they may have before we can communicate the truth in question.

When the barriers are at least in part intellectual, when issues of the correct meaning of Catholic faith are involved, when misunderstandings of what it is that the Church proposes can block the way to the encounter with the living God, or to participation in the liturgical worship of the Church, or to a life of faithful discipleship, and so on — in these situations, preaching itself needs to include an apologetic moment. Not all barriers are intellectual in nature, of course, but this evening we are considering the sorts of barriers that can be reasoned through. In particular, we want to consider some specific intellectual barriers that young people may face in understanding their Catholic faith.

The young adults in my title are Catholic faithful and their non-Catholic friends who are roughly between the ages of sixteen- to twenty-nine years-old. Grouping them together as a generation "reflects the idea that people who are born over a certain period of time are influenced by a unique set of circumstances and global events, moral and social values, technologies, and cultural and behavioral norms" (Kinnaman 2007, 17).

An effective preacher needs to understand how this background shapes young people's understanding of the Catholic faith. The influence of the beliefs and attitudes of non-Catholic friends on young Catholics also has to be taken into account. Research conducted by an evangelical think tank (the Barna Group) suggests that a significant percentage of Christian young people share the negative perceptions of Christianity held by their non-Christian fellows.

We have to respect and be willing to engage the intellectual challenges and questions young people pose in their struggle to understand their Catholic faith. "Young adults enjoy challenging the rules. They are extremely — you might say innately — skeptical. Today's young people are the target of more advertising, media, and marketing than any generation before. And their mindset is both incredibly savvy and unusually jaded" (Kinnaman 2007, 21-22). They are "the ultimate conversation generations. They want to discuss, debate and question everything" (Kinnaman 2007, 33).

In our conversations with young people, we have to avoid the temptation to fudge — to adapt the Catholic faith so as to make it palatable to modern tastes and expectations. This so-called "accommodationist" approach generally fails, and it fails doubly with young people. There is a risk in this approach that the Christian message becomes indistinguishable from everything else on offer in the market stalls of secularised religious faith: "In the powerful yet soft secularising totalitarianism of distinctively modern culture, our greatest enemy is . . . the Church's 'own internal secularisation' which, when it occurs, does so through the '. . . largely unconscious' adoption of the 'ideas and practices' of seemingly 'benign adversaries'"(Nichols 2008, 141).

Clearing away the barriers — whatever the audience we have in view — demands a robust sort of apologetics. No one in his or her right mind will be interested in a faith about which its exponents seem too embarrassed to communicate forthrightly. We have to be convinced that the fullness of the truth and beauty of the message about Jesus Christ is powerfully attractive when it is communicated without apologies or compromise.

Our reasoning has to be based on solid theological principles and to operate within a vision of the Catholic faith in its integrity and interconnectedness. "Apologetics is a theological art that must rest on the firm foundation of theological science. If our defense does not flow from deep preparation, deep Christian formation, it will be unconvincing at best, but merely offensive at worst" (Hahn 2007, 12). Sometimes the response "it's a mystery" is just a cover for theological ignorance on the part of people who should know better. Especially with young people who have questions, it is a mistake to cry "mystery" when an explanation is available and needed.

I shall focus this evening on three barriers or misunderstandings that need to be cleared away in order to help young people encounter the living God. I believe that they constitute the three biggest barriers to be overcome in preaching, catechesis and evangelization directed to young people today. They are powerful and well-entrenched, and it will not be easy to dispel them. They concern what it means to call Christ the Savior, what it means to be authentically human, and what it means to be moral. I want to offer you some understanding of the nature of these barriers and some ideas on how to approach the task of clearing them away.

Why we need the Savior who is not just any savior

The first barrier concerns Jesus Christ himself. The most fundamental and prevalent misunderstanding of the Catholic faith that we face, whether in young adults or in their elders, is the notion that it is arrogant to claim that Jesus Christ is the unique mediator of salvation. To ascribe a uniquely salvific role to Jesus Christ seems to constitute a denial of the salvific role of other religious founders and thus could be an affront to their communities.

The origins of this difficulty lie deep in the mentality of post-Enlightenment modernity and its multifarious theological progeny. According to this mentality, all religions express some experience of the absolute or ultimate or transcendent reality — however it is named and described — that encompasses worldly existence. No religion can claim to possess a privileged description of a reality incomprehensible and ineffable to all equally, nor to afford unique access to a realm in principle available to all equally. We might call this mentality and the religious outlook it fosters the culture of pluralism. It surrounds us on every side and helps to shore up a barrier that stands in the path of many Catholics today, young and old.

In order to clear away this barrier, we need in the first place to make clear that our faith in Christ's uniqueness does not entail a devaluation of the world's religions. The religions of the world are monuments to the human search for God. As such, they are worthy of respect and study because of the immense cultural richness of their witness to the desire for God planted in every human heart.

But the Christian faith attests not only to the human search for God, but principally to God's search for us. And what God wants to share with us is nothing less than a communion of life, a share or participation in the divine trinitarian life. This is the basic starting point for understanding the unique role of Jesus Christ in the salvation of the human race. For the idea that God wants to share the communion of his life with persons who are not God cannot come from anyone but God himself. The initiative here comes from God's side, both to reconcile us because of sin and to make possible a kind of life that would not only be impossible for us but unthinkable as well. Salvation in this comprehensive sense is not something that can be arranged or organized by human beings. It cannot come from the created order, for the created order has neither the resources to achieve nor the imagination to conceive such a destiny for human persons.

Arians, neo-Arians and their fellow travellers throughout history are willing to acknowledge that Jesus is a savior but then it seems that "salvation is nothing more than a minor adjustment internal to the contingent order. Salvation is something that one creature performs in relation to others" (Torrance 2001, 57). Given that salvation in the Christian sense of the term involves both reconciliation of sinners and the elevation of creaturely persons to a new kind of life, it cannot come from within this world. Saviors are a dime a dozen when one fails to grasp what's really at stake. We need to be delivered not just from error, or suffering, or desire, or injustice, or poverty. To understand what the Christian faith means and promises by salvation, we must grasp the peril of the human condition as well as the glory that is human destiny in the economy of salvation.

God desires nothing less than to share his life with us. If the salvation that the triune God wills for the entire human race entails communion with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then the creaturely and sinful obstacles to this communion must be overcome. It has never been claimed of anyone but Jesus Christ that he could and did overcome these obstacles, and that he could and did make us sharers in his divine life. Through him we are both healed of sin and raised to an adoptive participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity — and nothing less.

The obstacles to this participation are either overcome or not. If they are not overcome, then Christians have nothing for which to hope, for themselves or for others. In that case, they will hawk an empty universal salvation on the highways of the world. If Christians abandon the proclamation of Christ's unique mediatorship as the divine, only-begotten Son of the Father, they will have no other mediatorship with which to replace it. We need the Savior who is not just any savior.

How persons who are not now explicit believers in Christ can actually come to share in the salvation that God desires for the human race and that Christ alone makes possible is too large a topic for this evening's paper. But if Christians — in the wholly admirable desire to be respectful of non-believers — no longer confess Christ's unique mediatorship in making ultimate communion with the Blessed Trinity a real possibility for created persons, then the problem of how non-Christians can share in it is not resolved: it simply evaporates. For Christians to have a truly universal hope and confidence in the salvation of persons who are not Christians, they have to affirm the unique role of Christ in bringing this salvation about, not just for Christians but for others as well.

Why we need Christ to become authentically human

A second barrier concerns what it means to be human. Here the fundamental misunderstanding that blocks the path of many young people is shaped by what has been called the culture of authenticity. This is the idea that somehow being a Christian involves giving up or suppressing what is uniquely human in each one of us and accepting an external criterion or measure which is alien to one's true self.

Like the aforementioned culture of pluralism, the supporting matrix of ideas behind this sense that "each of us has an original way of being human" (Taylor 1992, 28) is a ingrained feature of modernity and penetrates popular culture at every level. Sometimes called expressive individualism and resembling moral relativism, it actually functions as a kind of moral ideal for many people: "[T]he soft relativism that seems to accompany the ethic of authenticity [asserts]: let each person do their own thing . . . One shouldn't criticise the others' values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do. The sin which is not tolerated is intolerance" (Taylor 2007, 484). Not only is it immoral to be intolerant of the values of others. It is immoral to allow some extrinsic measure to displace one's authentic self. Fundamental to this "moral ideal" is the understanding "that each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious and political authority" (Taylor 2007, 475).

These ideas pose a considerable barrier to a true understanding of what Christian discipleship really entails for every human being. In response, the first thing that needs to be affirmed follows directly from Christ's unique mediatorship. To become sharers in the communion of divine life, we must become like the Son so that the Father sees and loves in us what he sees and loves in Christ. We become conformed to Christ in order to be "at home" in the shared life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

But the conformation to Christ that is the principle of our transformation is not a slavish conformity to a model but the realization of our distinctive and unique personal identity. This must be so for otherwise the communion with the Blessed Trinity to which this transformation is ordered could not be achieved. The image of God in us consists precisely in the spiritual capacities of knowing and loving that make interpersonal communion possible. To claim — as does expressive individualism — that each person has an original way of being human is to deny that each person shares a human nature which can be described as ensouled bodiliness and is characterized by a range of capacities, including the capacities to know and love other persons.

In the Christian understanding, authentic interpersonal communion presupposes the full realization, not the absorption or suppression, of the individual persons who enter into it. Thus, if Christ is to be the pattern for the transformation accomplished in us by the Holy Spirit, it can only mean that in being conformed to him, we each discover and realize our unique identities as persons. This is an immense and almost astonishing claim.

"If a man wants to be my disciple, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his life? Or what will he give in return for his life?" (Matthew 16:24-26). Here Christ asserts, in effect, that each person will find his or her true self only by being conformed to Christ. In ordinary experience, this would be an outrageous thing to say. None of us, whether as teachers or parents or pastors — no matter how inflated our conceptions of ourselves or how confident our sense of our abilities — would ever dare to say to anyone in our charge that they will find their true selves only by imitating us. Yet this is precisely what Christ asserts. In effect this means that an indefinite number of persons will realize their distinctive identities by being conformed to Christ. Only the Son of God could make such a claim on us. Only the perfect image of God who is the Person of the Son could constitute the principle and pattern for the transformation and fulfilment of every human person who has ever lived. The more we are conformed to his image, the more authentically do we become our true selves. Pope Benedict made this point in the stirring peroration to his sermon at the inauguration of his pontificate: "If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything".

Why the moral law is good for us

The third barrier I want to consider concerns the moral life. It is the idea that the moral law is a more or less arbitrary constraint in which certain things are permitted and certain things are forbidden, irrespective of the bearing of these injunctions on human goodness and flourishing.

This idea has a very long history stretching back to the nominalist moral theology that took hold in the fourteenth century and has remained influential ever since. It served to foster what came to be regarded and experienced as a culture of legalism in Catholic moral theology that was decisively rejected by the Magisterium in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

A legalist perspective on the moral life creates a significant barrier to authentic Christian existence. Following the lead of Veritatis Splendor, it is of critical importance in clearing away this barrier to insist on the priority of the categories of good and evil for assessing the rightness and wrongness of particular actions.

Whereas legalistic moral systems insist or at least imply that actions are good (and thus right) because permitted, and bad (and thus wrong) because forbidden, authentic Catholic moral teaching maintains that a certain course of action is forbidden and wrong because it is bad for the agent, while another course of action is permitted and right because it is good for the agent. The commandments do not simply lay down requirements that are indifferent vis a vis their impact on human goodness and happiness.

In legalistic moral doctrine, the principal virtue is obedience: one obeys the commandments, whatever the content, because they are enjoined by God. In classic Catholic moral theology, the observance of the commandments is meant to foster the specific virtues with which they are concerned and thus the overall good of the human moral agent. In other words, the commandments of the moral law treat primarily of good and evil rather than of the permitted and the forbidden. They thus express an order established by divine wisdom — as St. Thomas Aquinas insisted — in which the moral law accords with the divinely created finalities of human nature and is given to make human beings good and virtuous.

To use an analogy of which St. Paul might approve, the commandments are more like an athlete's daily exercise and diet regime than they are like the traffic laws. Traffic regulations require that we stop on red and go on green, but it could just as well be the other way around. But the athlete follows the daily regime enjoined by his or her coach in order to achieve and maintain a certain level of performance otherwise unattainable. There is a fit between the regime and the results. The moral law is like that. It contains non-arbitrary injunctions that guide us steadily toward the good in every action and thus toward our ultimate Good.

At this point, we might turn to St. Augustine, and particularly to his Confessions, to understand what is involved in this authentically Catholic understanding of the moral law. St. Augustine frequently invites his readers to consider the things that they have desired and the things that they desire now — to consider, in effect, the experience of desire.

When we have thought about things that we have desired and sought, St. Augustine asks us to acknowledge that, in the end, we have often lost interest and become bored with these very things, and that we then move on to seeking other things. For St. Augustine, this observation is not so much a cause for lament as it is an occasion of insight. In pondering the experience of desire, we learn something very important about ourselves: no good thing that we have wanted and even possessed can finally quench desire itself, because we are made for the uncreated Good which is God himself in whom our desire finally rests.

This means, of course, that the good things of this world — and all the more so, the good of other persons — far from being obstacles in our quest for ultimate happiness, point us to the Good itself which is their source and in which they share. If we do not love the good things of this world, how shall we be able to love their Maker? The triune God, who made us for himself and who wants to share the communion of trinitarian love with us, uses the good things of this world to lead us to him who is, we could say, Goodness itself.

The danger — and, sometimes, the tragedy — of human existence is to desire and love the created good as if it were divine, to invest an absolute value in what cannot finally satisfy the human heart. There is always this possibility that we will hang our hearts on things that cannot bear the weight. That is what sin is. But — through the guidance of the moral law and the assistance of divine grace — rightly ordered desire and love of the good things of this world and the good of other persons is already a participation in the Good which is God himself. These lessons from St. Augustine help us to grasp the point the Pope Benedict makes in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est.

There we learn that eros is meant to lead us to agape, to the love of God and to the love of one another in God. Pope Benedict resists absolutely the misreading, sometimes perverse, that claims to see in Christian faith the suppression of the ordinary fulfilments of human earthly life, particularly human intimacy and love, in favor of a good beyond life. On the contrary, for Christian faith the whole range of human desire — or, to use more technical language, the inclination to the good embedded in the very structure of human existence — finds it complete fulfilment in the love of the triune God, and nothing less. Although Pope Benedict does not use this expression in the encyclical, we might call this unity of and continuity between eros and agape "the sanctification of desire." It is to this end that the moral law directs us.

* * *

In the spirit of the Carl J. Peter Lectures, we have considered how to clear away some of the intellectual barriers that may block young people's encounter with the living God. If you conclude that I have merely scratched the surface, you will be right. But I at least hope to have inspired you to go into these questions more deeply yourselves and, perhaps, to have pointed you in the right direction.

I am happy to say that I knew Father Carl Peter personally. As a young friar at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, I attended two of his most famous courses — anthropology and eschatology — at the Catholic University of America, and he directed my licentiate thesis on Karl Rahner's theology of grace's theology of grace. It is thus a particular honor for me to have been invited to present this lecture in his memory at the Pontifical North American College as you launch the celebration of your one hundred-and-fiftieth year in Urbe. Ad multos annos!

Selected Bibliography

(publication details available at Amazon.com)

Pope Benedict XVI

• Deus Caritas Est; Spe Salvi
• (2005) Give Yourself to Christ: The First Homilies of Benedict XVI
• (2007) Jesus of Nazareth
• (2008) Pope Benedict in America: The Full Text of Papal Talks Given During His Apostolic Visit to the United States

Benedict Ashley, OP

• (1996) Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (2nd edition)
• (2000) Choosing a World-View and Value-System: An Ecumenical Apologetics
• (2006) The Way Toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics

Romanus Cessario, OP

• (1996) Christian Faith and the Theological Life
• (2001) Introduction to Moral Theology

Chris Cuddy & Peter Ericksen, eds. (2007) I Choose God: Stories From Young Catholics

Dinesh D'Souza (2007) What's So Great About Christianity?

J. A. Di Noia, OP

• (1998) "Is Jesus Christ the Unique Mediator of Salvation?" in R. Thiemann & W. Placher, Why Are We Here? 56-68.
• (1999) "Veritatis Splendor: Moral Life as Transfigured Life," in J.A. Di Noia & R. Cessario, Veritatis Splendor and the Renewal of Moral Theology, 1-10.
• (2004) "Imago Dei-Imago Christi: Theological Foundations of Christian Humanism," Nova et Vetera 2 (2004), 267-77.
• (2007) "Charity and Justice in the Relations Among People and Nations: The Encyclical Deus Caritas Est of Pope Benedict XVI," in M.A. Glendon, J.J. Llach, & M.S. Sorondo, eds., Proceedings of 13th Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences (2007), 12-18.

Avery Dulles, SJ (2005) A History of Apologetics

Scott Hahn (2007) Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain and Defend the Catholic Faith

Mark Hart (2006) Blessed Are the Bored in Spirit

Philip Jenkins (2003) The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice

David Kinnaman (2007) unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity and Why It Matters (Evangelical)

Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli (1994) Handbook of Christian Apologetics

C.S. Lewis (1952) Mere Christianity (classic)

Hugo A. Meynell (1994) Is Christianity True?

Livio Melina (2001) Sharing in Christ's Virtues: For a Renewal of Moral Theology in the Light of Veritatis Splendor

Richard John Neuhaus (2006) Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy and the Splendor of Truth

Aidan Nichols, OP

• (1999) Christendom Awake: On Re-energizing the Church in Culture
• (2008) The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England

Servais Pinckaers, OP (1995), The Sources of Christian Ethics

Anne Rice (2008) Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

Jonathan Robinson (2005) The Mass and Modernity

Tracey Rowland (2008) Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI

Dorothy L. Sayers (1947) Creed or Chaos? (classic)

Dan Tapscott (2008) Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World

Charles Taylor

• (1992) The Ethics of Authenticity
• (2007) A Secular Age

Alan Torrance (2001) "Being of One Substance with The Father," in C. R. Seitz, ed. Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism, 49-61.

George Weigel

• (2004) Letters to a Young Catholic
• (2002) The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored

N.T. Wright (2006) Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (Anglican)

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