A Church that goes out to the hungry and brokenhearted

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.