John Allen has been reporting from the Catholic Theological Association’s annual meeting in Miami. I found today’s report very interesting:

Generations” is the Catholic Theological Society of America’s theme for its annual convention this year, motivated by a hunch that today’s younger generation of theologians brings a different sensibility to the guild.
Here’s one possible sign of the times: At the halfway point of the conference, so far only one speaker during a plenary session has referred in any extended way to John Paul II, Benedict XVI, or official church teaching. Not coincidentally, it was a younger scholar who observed that Catholics who grew up without a strong ecclesiastical subculture to rebel against are often “more inclined to question a troubled culture than an imperfect church.”

Julie Hanlon Rubio of St. Louis University spoke this morning to the CTSA convention on the subject of family and marriage.
Hanlon Rubio humorously described her own upbringing in a decidedly liberal, post-Vatican II Catholic family – in her home, she said, the books were by Hans Küng, the dog was named Berrigan, and Hell was mentioned only in jest. She was taught, she said, “to love God and be skeptical of the church” – in part because her dad was suing a bishop at the time.
Hanlon Rubio said she’s held onto much of that heritage, and she’s definitely not one of the “neo-orthodox” young Catholics often described in press accounts these days. Nonetheless, she said, she’s attracted to much of Pope John Paul II’s theology of the family. To some extent, she implied, that’s because like so many Catholics of her generation or younger, the primary point of reference, and hence the reality against which one is inclined to rebel, is not the church but secular middle class culture.
John Paul II, Hanlon Rubio said, described the family in 1981’s Familiaris consortio and elsewhere as “a community of love, called to be church together,” and “to soften the hard edges of society through works of charity, mercy and hospitality.” She called that “the most integrating, challenging vision of marriage and family I know.”
In that regard, Hanlon Rubio criticized modern Catholic parishes for failing to nurture such a vision of the family – especially large and affluent suburban parishes, which too often, she said, sponsor events such as auctions, golf tournaments and carnivals, but without offering opportunities for sustained family-based service to those in need.
In practice, she said, parish life too often “caters to the needs of the middle class tribe.”
Families need to be brought into regular contact with the dying, the handicapped, and the poor, Hanlon Rubio argued, in ways that go beyond donating to a food pantry at Thanksgiving.
“Catholic social teaching can’t really penetrate the church unless it goes through the family,” she said.
Even ostensibly family-oriented programs, Hanlon Rubio said, such as youth ministries or men’s and women’s groups, she said, tend to isolate family members rather than bringing them together.
Parishes, she said, “should encourage spouses to reflect on the pace of middle class family life, helping them find time to build communion.” She ticked off a host of forces that limit the ability of families these days to find time for one another: the demands of two careers, an explosion in activities for children, the difficulties of commuting and getting kids to and from multiple schools, and so on.
“The kind of relationship between spouses John Paul II seeks cannot be achieved when they’re just too busy to pay attention to each other,” she said. Rather than adding a host of other activities they simply further fragment family life, she said, parishes should be a place where an alternative ethos is fostered.
Parishes should also, Hanlon Rubio argued, “develop ties that bind parishioners more closely in community,” such as small faith-sharing groups. (Currently, Hanlon Rubio observed, only five percent of American Catholics participate in such a group.)
“Parishes must sustain an environment in which the demands of discipleship trump those of middle class culture,” she said.

The challenge, of course, is to figure out how to do this, how to make parishes and other manifestations of Catholic life reflect this without taking families out of the home for one more night or splitting them up, as she notes, into subgroups or making the mistake of thinking that one-size-fits all (as in the case, for example, with small groups, which are helpful to many, but not everyone’s cup of tea.)
I wonder sometimes if it takes a more radical kind of questioning, a question that is not “how can we fit this into contemporary family life” but rather, “do kids and families really need to be doing all of these things?”  What is the purpose? What is the ultimate end?
Another, rather fundamental question raised by the presentation is the segregation of parish life, rooted in the socio-economic segregation of our environment. I don’t experience that much here – our neighborhood is very mixed in every way, as are most of the parishes in about a five-mile radius. But you get out into the suburbs…and you know the story. It’s a constant question, I think, for any parish located in that type of suburb. How do we break through that particular kind of parochialism and live Catholic lives that are…catholic?