Recommended Reading: Peter Steinfels

In today's New York Times, Peter Steinfel's "Beliefs" column is very interesting and provocative.

What Does the Selection of the New Pope Portend for American Catholic Youths?

By PETER STEINFELS

   

n the days after Pope John Paul II died, only his role in helping bring on the collapse of Communism earned more comment than his gift for reaching young people with the challenge of the Gospel.

That testimony, along with the images of youthful backpackers swelling the crowds of mourners in St. Peter's Square, stirred memories of things witnessed firsthand in Denver 12 years ago at World Youth Day, and elsewhere.

But those recollections only made it all the more jarring to be simultaneously poring over a National Study of Youth and Religion, undertaken at the University of North Carolina, and its findings about American Catholic teenagers - findings that raise obvious questions about the way leadership will be exercised in the papacy of Benedict XVI.

Those findings have recently been published in "Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers" (Oxford University Press, 2005), by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. With a mixture of good news and bad news that punctures many stereotypes about adolescent religious beliefs and behavior, this extensive study deserves attention for what it reveals across the full range of American religious groups.

But what leapt out during this papal transition was that the researchers had felt compelled to devote a separate chapter to their discovery that Catholic teenagers "stand out among the U.S. Christian teenagers as consistently scoring lower on most measures of religiosity."

On various questions about beliefs, practices, experiences and commitments, the researchers found Catholic youths "scoring 5 to 25 percentage points lower than their conservative, mainline and black Protestant peers." In-depth interviews showed many of these Catholic adolescents "living far outside of official church norms."

Catholic teenagers were far less apt to affirm belief in a personal God, to report having ever undergone a very moving, powerful worship experience, or to say their faith was extremely important in shaping their daily lives or major life decisions.

There has been a lot of impressionistic talk, often verging on boosterism, about a new "John Paul II generation" of deeply committed, conservative young Catholics. So what should be said about this quite different-looking crop of John Paul II teenagers? How did this happen on the watch of the very pope who undeniably exhibited such magnetism among youth?

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Michael P.