Let’s agree that we’ve done a poor job passing on the faith to the current crop of Catholic adolescents. OK, now what do we do about it?

Sean Reynolds cheerfully agreed to torpedo tired old thinking at the National Symposium on Adolescent Catechesis last November.

The symposium, dreamed up by Catholic leaders who have been staying up nights worrying about the dismal showing of Catholic youth in the ongoing National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), gathered more than 100 Catholic leaders who work with youth. Their charge? To ask themselves what must change about the Catholic approach to forming adolescent faith.

Reynolds’ presentation, late in the gathering, was designed to blow up any thoughts of convenient retreat into conventional Catholic remedies, such as, “All we need are some better religion books.”

No way, he said: If Catholic youth have not learned nor committed to the faith in the way we hoped, we need to turn our attention to our parishes, to our sacramental system, and especially to parents, who today are asked to do much more with far less support. Parents need help and training to introduce their kids to Catholicism as “a comprehensive way of life,” says Reynolds, borrowing a phrase from church historian Scott Appleby at the University of Notre Dame.

Reynolds has spent the last year and a half visiting parishes to explain the hair-raising results of the NSYR to parents and parish staff members in his Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Just as he did at the symposium, he raises quite a few eyebrows.

Why were Catholic youth the only ones to get their own chapter in Soul Searching (Oxford), which discussed the results of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR)?
I asked the author and head researcher Christian Smith about that, and he said it was because the NSYR researchers were so absolutely stunned at how poorly Catholic kids did relative to other Christian denominations and relative to the researchers’ own expectations.

Researchers were looking to find out, among other things, whether young people attend worship services, do Christian service, read the Bible, pray, and whether they are involved in some sort of youth ministry or religious education program.

Catholic young people were found to be 5 to 25 percentage points lower than their conservative or mainline Protestant peers on many of the indicators that they were looking for.

Is there any good news to go with the bad?
The good news and bad news are two sides of the same coin. The good news is, as the Catholic Church has consistently taught, that parents have the most significant impact on the faith of young people. I’m a Catholic parent myself, and we have much more authority in a positive sense in the lives of our young people than we give ourselves credit for. That comes not only from the NSYR but from other studies on millennial youth, which suggest that the more that kids are barraged with information from the Internet, from media, and from electronic devices they’re plugged into, the smaller the circle of voices they trust.

A few years ago our office in Cincinnati decided it would be a great idea to develop a video highlighting the heroes of young people. We were going to be real cutting edge. Well, it was the most boring video you can imagine because all the kids talked about was mom and dad or grandma and grandpa.

Isn’t that interesting? Kids are taking their signals from their families, despite the popular assumption that kids are rebellious regarding faith, that they’re going to reject our beliefs and traditions and maybe later in life come back to them. The research shows that this is not true for this generation.

So the good news is that parents have a tremendous amount of impact on the faith of kids. The bad news is that parents have a tremendous amount of impact on the faith of their kids. If parents aren’t living their faith, if they are not insisting that their kids engage in faith—just as they insist that kids engage in a variety of other things that are good for them—then it turns out that kids are not very committed. Parents can look in the mirror and see by and large what their kids are going to be; they have that much impact.

So by “insisting that their kids engage in faith,” you mean dragging them to Mass on Sunday, right?
I do use the word “insist,” but I use it in the sense that there are many things that we as parents don’t bend on.

If one of your kids would say, “You know, Dad, math is boring. I don’t want to go to math class anymore,” would we even consider saying to the child, “Oh, honey, you’re right, math is boring and so you only have to go to math class through the eighth grade and then no more math for you”? Of course not, but something has happened in us Catholics over the last 40 or 50 years so that the faith component in our kids’ lives has become optional. Connecting the dots, that would suggest that it’s become optional for parents as well. Math has not become optional, but somehow faith has, when Mom or Dad say, “Once confirmed, that’s it for religion classes, and Sunday Mass is up to you.”

Getting back to your question, I really am very blunt with parents. Now I don’t want them going home and yelling at their kids: “No more Mr. Nice Guy; there’s a new sheriff in town, mister, and you’re going to Mass.” Rather we equip parents with a couple of assessment surveys [available at uscatholic.org] for both parents and teenagers, so they can look at how they are living their lives in faith, consider how they can improve, and talk to one another about how to do better.