editor of the Indianapolis Archdiocesan newspaper, the Criterion (the link takes you to their blog<\/a>) and his wife Laura, who were kind enough to make the trip over!<\/p>\nI always feel kind of beat up after these trips, although the 90+ miles drive back and forth to Richmond didn’t even approach the insanity of going back and forth to Cleveland or Columbus for evening talks both of which I’ve done.<\/p>\n
An interesting subtext to the evening which has been on my tired mind in the hours since: young adult and adult children leaving\/absenting themselves from Church. It seemed as if most of the people who bought copies of the Loyola Saints <\/em>or Heroes<\/em> book, for example, sighed, as they bought it, "It’s for my grandchildren. Their parents don’t go to church anymore, but maybe they’ll read to them…" And when buying Here. Now. ..<\/em>"I’ll leave it around…maybe my son will read it." <\/p>\nWhen you work in a parish, and are involved in the daily lives of parishioners, especially those stalwart daily Mass attendees, that’s the most common prayer you hear voiced – for adult children who have left the Church.<\/p>\n
Brandon’s blog post I linked to above touches on that problem, by way of the "new" study on Catholic young adults noted by CNS last week or so. I have to say, I think he’s right. Step out of your uber-involved, hyper-informed Catholic bubble for a moment, and look at things from the perspective of the typical shoddily-catechized young adult who steps into a typical parish on a typical Sunday. <\/p>\n
Given their background, which usually consists of the message, "Be nice and admire Jesus" and given what they typically encounter in that Mass which is more of the same plus perhaps a more urgent, "It’s really important to be a part of Church and for faith to be important in your life…we can’t get more specific, but trust us…it’s really important…<\/em>"…<\/p>\nAnd<\/em> since probably the primary moral precept they absorbed along the way was, "Don’t have sex before you’re married" (for reasons that were probably never really explained), and since most of them probably have or are presently or are at least not ill-disposed to having sex before they are married, they are already predisposed to seeing themselves, in some sense, as irredeemable outsiders to this group of families and old people gathered here…<\/p>\nWhy would they come back?<\/p>\n
Update: <\/u>I’d just like to clarify something. I <\/u>didn’t say in this post that people leave because they are uncatechized. I said that if poorly-catechized folks venture back for whatever reason, and have no deep sense of the Christian faith – with that unfortunate background and with what is too often presented to them in parishes…what’s "there" inside or outside of them to open them to the deeper call of Christ? Big obstacles, that’s what I’m saying. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Had what I thought was a decent talk last night down in Richmond, IN – a Catholic community which seems to have weathered the priest shortages quite well. The three Catholic parishes in town still exist, but share resources and two priests. Schools still exist, too, having been restructured, and, as I posted yesterday, a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
Thanks, Richmond! - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thanks, Richmond! - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Had what I thought was a decent talk last night down in Richmond, IN – a Catholic community which seems to have weathered the priest shortages quite well. The three Catholic parishes in town still exist, but share resources and two priests. Schools still exist, too, having been restructured, and, as I posted yesterday, a…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-02-16T08:52:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Thanks, Richmond! - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Thanks, Richmond! - Via Media","og_description":"Had what I thought was a decent talk last night down in Richmond, IN – a Catholic community which seems to have weathered the priest shortages quite well. The three Catholic parishes in town still exist, but share resources and two priests. Schools still exist, too, having been restructured, and, as I posted yesterday, a…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2007-02-16T08:52:56+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html","name":"Thanks, Richmond! - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2007-02-16T08:52:56+00:00","dateModified":"2007-02-16T08:52:56+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/thanks-richmond.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Thanks, Richmond!"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}