My first ministry job was teaching high school theology, and in my first year, I was assigned a semester-long morality class for an unruly group of sophomores.
It was a good Catholic school, but, like many today, the students came from homes with widely varying levels of faith practice. As I began teaching from the assigned textbook, it became clear I was speaking a foreign language. It felt to me as if I were simply telling them what their parents and the pope did not want them to do: issuing moral directives with no clear connection to their lived experience. My preaching fell on deaf ears.
So, I threw out my previously prepared lesson plans for four weeks.
Instead, in week one, we opened Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and grounded human flourishing (“happiness”) in eudaimonia, a state of soul born of a life of virtue. In week two, we confronted the incoherence of moral relativism and worked toward a shared understanding of the good life. In week three, we explored human freedom and law, showing that law is meant not to suppress freedom but to help it flourish.
And in week four, I spent four days preaching the kerygma. Using a four-part framework (“Creation, Sin, Salvation, Response and the Church”), I sought to reveal the Church’s moral vision not as rules imposed from outside but as an invitation to their free choice into the “life to the full” Christ offers.
I cannot claim that every student became an intentional disciple, or even remained Catholic to this day, but the tone of the class changed dramatically. For those with “ears to hear,” something significant shifted.
I was grasping for answers, overwhelmed as a twenty-three-year-old first-time teacher, but there was a core conviction that I think was useful. I could not get them to care unless I could connect the Church’s teaching to the pressing and relevant questions of their lives, their felt needs. They needed to see that I recognized their high school worries as being worth listening to and then provide guidance to connect those more immediate concerns to heart-level ones: What is the meaning of life? Is there more than this? Can I know the truth and be happy? Can I live well and be great? Is it possible to order society today so that all can flourish? Can I make a difference in that?
I have thought much about these lessons as I consider the place and voice of the Church in our current cultural climate. My concern is that the Church may be missing this moment.
A world starving for answers
A brief look at the news or your social media timeline will quickly remind you that we are living through massive social upheavals that cannot be explained simply by technology or political division. They are the downstream effects of a lengthy secularizing project, centuries in the making, in which God has been systematically removed from public life, and a host of competing anti-Gospels have rushed in to fill the void. This tidal wave of secularization poses a civilization-level threat, undermining our very capacity to sustain a society, let alone one ordered toward human flourishing.
For a time, the secular humanist project aspired to preserve the cultural goods born of a Christian worldview while severing them from their supernatural foundations. A recent example is Senator Tim Kaine’s attempt, rightly challenged by Bishop Robert Barron, to locate the source of our inalienable rights in government rather than in the Creator who endowed them. This is categorically impossible but has been tried, nevertheless.
As the secular project has advanced, even those inherited goods: human dignity, authentic freedom, creativity, truth, beauty, goodness, and the very notion of the communion of persons, have eroded at an alarming rate. The loss is now so widespread and self-evident that it scarcely needs defending.
This is, obviously, tragic but also a remarkable missionary opportunity for the Church. To wade into the mess, as Jesus did in the muddy waters of the Jordan to meet Simon and Andrew. The question I would pose, however, is: are we, as a Church, rising to this great challenge of our age? Are we doing enough to connect the Gospel to the felt needs of the world as we all navigate the anxieties of turbulent times? Or have we accidentally allowed an awkward and uncomfortable chasm to develop between “church” and “real life” for many?
Rising to the occasion
I am as engaged in the “Catholic world” as anyone, and my perspective is this: given the magnitude of the threat, and the resultant tidal wave of people now desperate for answers, I am not convinced the Church fully grasps the depth of the need or is prepared to respond in a coherent and compelling way.
The Church, it seems, is effective today when particular concerns require us to denounce or defend. When a contemporary political issue arises, whether new legislation, federal overreach, or a global crisis, we are, in general, moderately competent at issuing statements, clarifying doctrine, and responding to the moment in that way.
However, for fifty years, we have repeatedly heard the call to be a Church that “goes out.” That begins, first, with simply being present to the least and the lost, accompanying people in a real relationship. But as the Church also utilizes her teaching office and engages her civic responsibility to help renew culture, I worry we are failing to address first the pressing needs the world is asking for help with, not necessarily with practical solutions, but to let those who are clearly lost know their cries have not fallen on deaf ears.
What I would argue is not happening enough, writ large, is the Church stepping into her prophetic role to propose as readily as she responds, to spread the foundational light of truth in the most personally and culturally relevant places with the same consistency and confidence with which she issues corrections or defenses.
This is not to say the work is completely absent, as the recent jump in OCIA numbers across the country attests. Many are laboring to offer the culture fundamental answers; I think of ecclesial leaders like Bishops Barron and Varden, and lay thinkers such as Ryan Anderson and Abigail Favale. But given the depth of the cultural crisis and the urgency of the moment, it is not happening nearly enough, and the vacuum of truth within which much of the world finds itself continues to expand.
Into this vacuum has rushed a host of online “prophets” (true and false alike), captivating young people, and especially young men, simply by re-proposing some of these forgotten truths. With simple, foundational messages on how they would propose one live well (“Have discipline! Work hard! Be great! Don’t give in to the world! Get married and have kids!”), they are drawing countless young people in search of identity and direction to their waters.
Today’s Areopagus
What made Charlie Kirk compelling to so many, young and old alike? More than just his conservative politics, it was that he showed up in the very places where confusion runs deepest, the modern universities, and met people with joy, boldness, confidence, and love, speaking directly to their felt needs, to relevant issues and contemporary challenges that concern them most. He told people that their cries were not falling on deaf ears. He also spoke plainly about God, family, and a vision of life that transcends political squabbles. He held up the light of truth.
Now, any serious Catholic will note that some of Kirk’s positions fall short of the fullness of truth. But his impact came from something the Church is meant to embody: he showed up.
He went to the people who were searching, and he spoke with conviction. It worked, dramatically, because he actually did it.
His impact should prompt us to ask a hard question: why are young people looking elsewhere for the kind of bold truth-telling that should characterize the Church? If his presence and courage bore such fruit, what does it reveal about our own hesitations and blind spots?
Too often, we instead remain shut up in our bastions, absorbed in protecting our own kingdoms and debating internal concerns. We fixate on every new ecclesial appointment and the latest skirmish between factions within the Church, while masses of people starve, literally (amid rising “deaths of despair”) just outside our walls.
The Catholic Church and Catholics, given our rich intellectual tradition and capacity to hold tensions in creative “both-ands,” should be at the forefront of answering these questions. Every teaching we hold rests on incredibly thoughtful, rationally grounded foundations.
Yet as we find ourselves in a moment where many have lost not only a sense of God and the supernatural, but also many of the human goods the secular project once tried to preserve, I sense that many Church leaders today are so afraid of appearing “political” in our polarized climate, accused of being “culture warriors,” that they avoid speaking on cultural issues altogether. But when fear of being labeled left or right silences the Church on matters like politics, economics, work, family, education, gender, sexuality, human dignity, or the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, no one benefits. There is nothing political about telling a starving world where bread can be found.
The recent electoral success of Zohran Mamdani is telling, particularly in the support he drew from young voters: 78% of New York City voters under thirty backed him, as did 66% of those ages thirty to forty-four. In interviews, these young voters consistently said they chose Mamdani because he understood their struggles and offered a future they could believe in.
Now, I would argue that the future Mamdani is proposing would be disastrous, but the examples of both Kirk and Mamdani reveal how deeply people, especially the young, long for voices that show up in the midst of their real struggles, speak into their lived experience, and acknowledge their humanity.
This insight is not new. Pope St. John Paul II, during his 2001 visit to Athens, reflected on Paul’s preaching at the Areopagus, noting that the great apostle understood the same need: to engage the concrete reality of the people before him.
If God constitutes the inner mystery of every creature, this particularly concerns the human person. Speaking at the Areopagus, the apostle connects this truth above all to humankind. ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ and he adds, ‘as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.” As we can see, Paul knew not only philosophy but also Greek poetry. The pedagogical method of the apostle, his ability to root the evangelical kerygma in the culture of the place, should be admired.
The culture has made its questions unmistakably clear. It should be Catholics and the Church who, like St. Paul, step into the public forums, digital and in-person, and connect that search to the fullness of the light of truth.
In doing so, we are not simply imposing an irrelevant, antiquated, repressive intellectual framework. We are showing the way out. Everyone is feeling the social disruptions in our culture today. What they so often do not see is the light at the end of the tunnel.
The lion’s share of this renewal depends on Catholic lay professionals (politicians, economists, medical and mental-health professionals, educators, artists, and more) speaking with expert clarity and abundant charity in public conversations. Their witness in the public square is irreplaceable.
Beyond that, parishes and schools can host public teaching series, forums, and panels on the most pressing issues of our time, open not only to parishioners but to the wider community. Church leaders can step into secular spaces for campus events, civic panels, and “ask me anything” conversations. Lay and clergy alike can engage digital evangelization with intellectual seriousness, unafraid to address difficult topics; today, one thoughtful 60-second reel or a simple livestream Q&A can reach thousands.
Parishes can also invest intentionally in forming families, husbands, wives, and children, not only spiritually and intellectually but in the human formation needed to live their vocation well in the world. And lay Catholics can take up civic responsibility on school boards, library boards, and city councils, bringing the light of truth to the places where culture is shaped more than many of us realize.
Hope does not disappoint
In this work, the example of the apostles should both instruct us and fill us with hope. We have done this before. The early Church walked boldly into a dying culture and proclaimed the light of truth. It was the suffering witness of that Church, persecuted and bloodied throughout, that allowed the Gospel to sweep the ancient world, setting thousands of hearts “burning within them” as they encountered what is real and true. In this new apostolic age, we have no reason to expect this time around to be any different.
I knew when I saw 120 sophomores in front of me almost fifteen years ago that a conversation on the Church’s teaching was not yet even possible. So much of the long work of pre-evangelization, re-establishing a common language for moral conversations, was needed before we could even talk coherently about what the Church proposed as the path to life to the full. Today, this problem is even more acute.
Yet, we also now find ourselves in a moment marked by renewed hunger, an unexpected openness to the deepest questions of life and to religion as a place where answers might be found. This is a moment the Church cannot afford to miss. I still believe in a Church that can, and must, go out again, bearing the light of truth and healing the brokenhearted.
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, I sense that many Church leaders today are so afraid of appearing “political” in our polarized climate, accused of being “culture warriors,” that they avoid speaking on cultural issues altogether. But when fear of being labeled left or right silences the Church on matters like politics, economics, work, family, education, gender, sexuality, human dignity, or the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, no one benefits.
“There is nothing political about telling a starving world where bread can be found.”
Exactly where are these “church leaders” who are afraid of speaking out for fear of being politically categorized? Was Bishop Wenski, when he publicly urged the cessation of immigration law? When they axiomatically oppose the death penalty, even for the most heinous of crimes? No, they are afraid of speaking out on things like homoaexuality, contraception, the indissolubility of marriage. Nor should they opine on the dismal science when most have no education or experience with it. You must understand for example that if you promote something like an increased minimum wage-there are costs associated with it-fewer jobs, reduced hours and benefits, increased experience requirements and probationary periods. Bluntly, if your degrees are theology and philosophy and/or you aren’t a participant in the exchange economy, you have no business opining on such things, just as you shouldn’t installing electrical wiring or seeing medical patients.
As for telling the hungry where there is bread, physical hunger is a rarity in the United States. Our poverty is moral. Public grants and subsidies as well as extensive private and charitable efforts make hunger almost non-existent except in rare cases. Our health statistics do not show great numbers of people underweight. Obesity and diabetes are rampant and the internet is filled with “food stamp haul” videos where recipients show the results of their shopping at public expense-and often their choices are filled with pre-processed, salty, sugary things that should be avoided or consumed sparingly.
New York is going to find out “there is no free lunch”. Mandami shouldn’t be eligible for election-he should be deported as an a subversive. He is telling the starving where to find bread-he’s telling them he will create it ex nihilo for them-and since he isn’t the Son of God who can multiply fishes and loaves, he’ll do what all Pied Pipers do-he’ll attempt grand theft. I’m awaiting the reenactment of the final scene from Planet of the Apes, where Charlton Heston recognizes the Statue of Liberty wreckage and curses the people that “blew it all to hell”.
Errata:
He is NOT telling the starving where to find bread-
Pitchfork: perhaps we dwell in different places, homelessness and hunger are common here.
I never addressed loneliness but since you introduced it as a red herring, I will answer. It is a gathering Tsunami. You are now starting to see on anti-social media, along side the vapid twenty-something females who demand “three sixes” in their dates (six feet tall, six figure income and “six-pack” abs) an increasing number of women who are in their thirties, who’ve suddenly realized they want to be married and mothered, but their future is cats and box wines.
Forty is the new thirty was a catchy slogan for a while, but biologically it is taurine excrement. Any woman who beats the long odds game of postponing real life for sex in the city and careerism and does manage to become pregnant at 35 will find herself automatically diagnosed with “supervision of ELDERLY primigravida” by her OB-GYN.
The devil promises prosperity and independence, he delivers privation and isolation. And this is matched on the male side by “Men Going Their Own Way” or Men Grabbing Their Own Wieners, as it should be called, because they are attacked as toxic and unnecessary, so they immerse themselves in things like Warhammer and the innumerable digital red light districts.
Where do you think the acculturated of rejection of marriage and anti-natality leads? It is the culture of death JPII so presciently coined.
As for hunger, it exists as well, but not the physical hunger we are told is pervasive-I am not saying nonexistent, because this is an imperfect, fallen world, however, there are innumerable resources devoted to the relief of physical hunger.
When I physically report to the office, I park near a Lutheran congregation (where the exterior signage displays the insipid “all are welcome” and rainbow colors).
After years of seeing people load bag after bag into late model SUVs with out of state plates, I realized their inventory is sufficient that they have no need to turn away freeloaders. The hunger people have-for beauty, calm, order, peace, truth are gifts of God, not the products of charity, state redistribution or exchange economics.
So yes, we dwell in different places, my vision is not impaired by the reality distortion zone that our job in this life is to feed the body and ignore the starving soul.
The author writes: “Church leaders can step into secular spaces for campus events, civic panels, and “ask me anything” conversations.”
It costs next to nothing to set up a couple of chairs in a public space with a sign like this clearly visible. Another suggestion is to do the same with a sign reading: “I’m Catholic and am willing to listen to anything you have to say.” What opportunities to evangelize!
Yup, typical fluff…. “I’ll listen to you, but then I’ll tell you the truth”
So, clarify if you will. Are you agreeing with what I’ve written or not? Hope it’s not just a snide remark that being willing to listen is “fluff”.
Amen, Deacon Edward.
I’ve seen some of our separated Christian brethren doing that in their own way.
We have a local priest who shows up at parades and public events to hear Confessions. And I’ve read about Anglicans distributing ashes at train stations on Ash Wednesday. You meet people where they are.
A lovely Catholic doctor we knew, RIP, used to open up his office as a free clinic to the uninsured on Tuesday evenings.
The owners of a building in a town down the road from me allowed an elderly homeless gentleman a parking spot to camp in his truck with his dog.
Christians may need reminders to do the right thing but we shouldn’t require an invitation.
mrscracker: Blessings of the Christmas season!
Thank you! And to you & yours also, Deacon Edward.
🙂
The last person to enter decidedly secular spaces for campus events and listen as much as he talked ended up with a bullet in his neck.
Sharing the Good News has always come with risks.
That’s cold.
I have been a counselor to a number of male doctoral students, most often in their mid-twenties and several years into their studies, who present with the Chief Complaint of “existential despair.” They often report a history of unresolved family issues, ongoing disconnectedness or detachment from others, and a pervasive awareness that despite their formidable academic prowess, they do not understand life, its meaning, or how they fit into the wider world.They are aware of critical theory as an overarching orientation among academics but are skeptical or confused by competing truth claims. They observe some contemporaries who seem to have things better sorted out than they but their capacity for abstract thought raises objections to the answers that satisfy others. Yes, they are depressed and would benefit from counseling, yet suffusing that and beyond is a sense of hopelessness and futility—the world as passed along to them is not coherent and they long to make sense of things. They definitely have NOT been exposed to the Nicomachean Ethics (though some have read Nietzsche), they have heard no counterarguments to moral relativism, and they do not understand that culture and law can lead to flourishing. They would be beyond skepticism that the Catholic Church’s moral vision was not “rules imposed from outside but…an invitation to their free choice into the ‘life to the full’ Christ offers.” Following the lead of this article, they are in need of “the long work of pre-evangelization, re-establishing a common language for moral conversations.” I introduce some traditional concepts now sanctioned in secular settings through Positive Psychology (e.g., forgiveness, gratitude, strengths and virtues, acts of kindness) or other nonreligious frameworks (e.g., Aristotle’s three levels of friendship). These views generally are unknown or not seriously engaged by these men. I would be very glad to see the ideas outlined in the four week high school curriculum of fifteen years ago available for men as such as these. The longing for truth is very much there.
PR above (2:43 p.m.) – I’m not sure you’ve understood the article.
I disagree. Explain what aspect of the article you think I failed to grasp.
More on Amazing Parish, please.
TPR: Brilliant! Simply brilliant. You speak a truth the vast majority knows in their minds and hearts but fears saying publicly.
If I were still preaching, I’d ask you permission to repeat verbatim what you’ve written here.
Deacon, if me running my keyboard has any value, it is because God gave me the ability to write-in spite of my best efforts to contrary (avoiding classes with written requirements like the plague), so I hereby place my rants in the public domain.
For all his “meeting people where they are” it’s worth noting that in the months leading up to his assassination, Charlie Kirk had his marriage convalidated in the Church, prayed the rosary with his family, and was likely inching towards conversion
Rich Leonardi: And that’s undoubtedly why the Forces of Evil had to murder him!
Glemkowski explores the angst of the existentially “poor” and of the “relevant” questions. While still a pre-Council teen, the entry point into a reality extending beyond personal piety was an accidental exposure to Rerum Novarum–line by line the connection between the whole Faith and the circuitry of trainwreck modern history.
But, about “the poor” and the “relevant” questions, in addition to the cited Aristotle, we also have this:
ST. JOHN PAUL II: “This option is not limited [!] to material poverty, since it is well known that there are many other forms of poverty, especially in modern society—not only economic, but cultural and spiritual poverty as well” (Centesimus Annus, 1991, n. 57).
C.S. LEWIS: “But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of modern European thought comes in so useful. The Enemy [God] loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking ‘Is it in accordance with the general movement or our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is it the way that History is going?’ they will neglect the relevant [!] questions” (The Screwtape Letters).
AND—OUTSIDE THE WEST: the jihadist network clearly knows that killing of innocents is immoral, but they are experiencing a horrified “desire to escape reality [!] or transform it along the lines of a second reality more congenial to the pneumopathological terrorist imagination.” The italicized term applies to a spiritual sickness rather than any psychological disorder or more rational thought process at least calculated to achieve justice, if by whatever means. They know what they are doing; “They are not psychopaths who cannot distinguish good and evil or innocence and guilt” (Barry Cooper, “Jihadists’ and the War on Terrorism,” The Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2007).
The need for “fraternity”…and its existentially fatal limitations?
“It should be Catholics and the Church who, like St. Paul, step into the public forums, digital and in-person, and connect that search to the fullness of the light of truth.
“In doing so, we are not simply imposing an irrelevant, antiquated, repressive intellectual framework…” Pope Francis may have disagreed.
The desire of many Catholics to help the lost has been stymied. Many lost hope inside the Church. We debate internal ecclesial appointments because some appointees would distort and others have obscured the deposit of faith in misguided efforts to engage the world. Many Catholics are lost in the cognitive dissonance of the hierarchical Church which seemed to have lost its way in the midst of her secular passion. Many hierarchs have not known Christ and His way, so how could they/we lead His Church?
A holy recovery is needed. Yet the likes of Fernandez are still teaching, obscuring and obfuscating the bold and stark truth.
“I am not convinced the Church fully grasps the depth of the need or is prepared to respond in a coherent and compelling way.”
I would go a bit farther and state that the Church, understood as the collective whole of its members, does not yet understand the scope of the problem described here, summarized quite well as the
“downstream effects of a lengthy secularizing project, centuries in the making, in which God has been systematically removed from public life, and a host of competing anti-Gospels have rushed in to fill the void”.
Some people grasp the problem but others do not, or may grasp it only vaguely, or may even be in denial about it. And some members of the Church who grasp it may feel overwhelmed by the great tidal wave of secularization that swamped the world in recent decades, while others may prefer the secularized state of things, as became apparent during the Synod on Synodality.
So I believe it’s too soon for most of the Church to respond in a coherent way, let alone a compelling way. But it’s not too soon, for those who are ready, to seize the moment and start laying the groundwork for what comes next. There may be floundering around at first, but that’s no matter for concern. I am actually glad that more members of the “professional Catholic world” are publicly acknowledging, in various ways, that so much has changed that we are are in something like a new Apostolic age.