May 16, 2024
A Chaplain’s Thoughts: Don’t get married, Part 3
By Rev. James F. Quigley, O.P. ’60
Associate Chaplain, National Alumni Association
Dear Young Alums and Not So Young:
Some of our alums have disengaged from the Catholic Church, from faith in God, faith in Christ. Of course, as you would guess, that saddens me. I live for God, Christ, the Church, and I want to share that with anyone I can, and especially with Providence College friends. The Dominican mission at the College ultimately is to preach Christ to anyone who will listen and to offer a gospel, moral vision for human life. I know some alums have moved away from religion in general and Catholicism in particular. They join a good number of others. I’m told there are 26.1 million Americans who were baptized Catholic but are no longer practicing. What are their reasons? Let me humbly share what some have told me.
Sandals, sexual and financial, along with a rigorism toward segments of the American population, have wounded the credibility of church leaders, clergy, and some believers.
Tomáš Halik, a Czech writer and priest, claims many disaffiliated see religious people as “embittered moralizers,” criticizing those who don’t live like them.
The American culture permeates all of life and for the most part is not kind to organized religion. Belief in God, Christ, a gospel moral vision, is at times mocked, dismissed, opposed by social media, the press, music, celebrities, political personalities. It also promotes a view that objective truth, that something is right or wrong, is intolerant and backward and harmful. Freedom is a kind of radical self-determination that lets the individual say what is moral or not.
Many consider faith and religion to be incompatible with science and reason and so out of step with reality.
Some see religion, church, faith in God, Christ, a gospel way of life as boring or inhibiting to a lifestyle of choice. Others simply don’t think in terms of spirituality, the meaning of life. What subverts faith in God is what a Jesuit, Adolfo Nicolás, describes as “the globalization of superficiality.”
Christian religion, Catholicism, is a faith in God, faith in Jesus Christ, and not simply an intellectual position or a cultural practice but a relationship, a spiritual relationship. Today many young men and women fear, despair of, run from, the responsibility of relationships. They go it alone and live lonely lives.
Quite a number leave the Church because they were not properly educated and do not really understand the basics of Catholic teaching, rejecting something the Church in fact does not teach.
I think it important to say that God, Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church, will never give up on all these good young people or on anyone. God, in divine providence, watches over them, cares for them, relates with them, won’t walk away from them, even if they walk away from God. So if the Lord Jesus Christ is searching for them and they are searching even a little bit for the truth, then I think and hope all will end well. And there are some, a growing number, of young people who are increasingly dissatisfied with an absence of values and look to something or Someone beyond what they see and hear and meet daily.
Perhaps we can pray for what St. John Henry Cardinal Newman suggests, “a second spring” for the American Catholic Church.
