Generational Splits, A Reader Responds

John Wittig, a recent graduate of St. Thomas Law School, writes in:

While I usually attend Mass every week, I am one of those young (just 
turned 30) Catholics who feels a "level of disagreement with, dismay 
towards, or merely disregard for the Church's teachings on issues like 
contraception and homosexuality." You noted that many Catholics born 
after Vatican II simply don't attend Mass, and I think that is because 
the Church tends to foster an environment where one is either all in 
or all out. I've tried to straddle the middle by being invested in my 
parish community while largely ignoring the wider Church. I don't want 
it to be this way, but it feels like the only things I can do outside 
my parish as a layperson is to stop giving money, to stop showing up, 
or to wait for the Pope to die and see if things magically change. 
None of these are attractive options, nor do they seem fruitful.

Just as I do not desire the current state of affairs, I don't think it 
has to be this way either. I think the Church could take a lesson from 
the Obama campaign. One of the ways the Obama campaign got people to 
be so involved and invested was to make them stakeholders. The 
campaign did an excellend job of helping people feel like (then) 
Senator Obama and his staff listened to and cared about what they had 
to say. This doesn't mean he acted on their ideas, and he sometimes 
even went against them, as he did when he voted for telecom-immunity 
in the FISA bill. But it did mean there was a genuine dialog going on.

I am not asking the Church to change it's positions on these, and 
other, issues. Rather, I am just asking for the Church to provide some 
mechanism for there to be dialogue, to give all of us an opportunity 
to be agents of Grace, to let us be a part of helping the Church move 
closer to Truth.

I do my best to live the Gospels. I want to make the world a better 
place, and that includes the Church. But if the Church is going to 
insist on only giving me those three options I mentioned earlier, I am 
going to continue to ignore it. If I've learned nothing else in my 
short time on Earth, it's that if we can't talk, we can't do anything 
together.