Countering the "Graduation Effect"

I remember hearing about a short essay by that title by Robert Fulghum a few years ago. The premise, I believe, was that the author felt that most important lessons in life were actually taught to him at a very young age in school. After that, I assume, it was just a matter of trying to live with those lessons in mind.

Could we say the same for our faith? There are certainly some powerful lessons that are communicated at a very early age in our schools and religious education programs: God is love. God created the world and everything in it. God became a man in Jesus to show us how to live. Jesus gives Himself to us in the Eucharist, and so on. These lessons are vital, but are they enough? I have come across some data that suggest that they might not be.

In 2005 the result of the National Study of Youth and Religion were published in a book entitled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teen-agers. The study was conducted from 2001 to 2005 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The results of the study offer Catholics a major challenge:

•“In our study, Catholic teen-agers, who represent nearly one-quarter of all U.S. teens, stand out among the U.S. Christian teen-agers as consistently lower on most measures of religiosity. Scanning many of the tables in Chapter 2, for example, reveals Catholic youth scoring 5 to 25 percentage points lower than their conservative, mainline and black Protestant peers on many of a variety of religious beliefs, practices, experiences, commitments and evaluations. Perhaps more important for Catholics, our findings regarding Catholic teen-agers show many of them to be living far outside of official Church norms defining true Catholic faithfulness.” (p. 194)

•“The majority [of Catholic teens interviewed for the study] tended to be rather religiously and spiritually indifferent, uninformed and disengaged.” (p.195)

The authors of the study make an extra effort to try to understand why it is that Catholic youth seem to fall below the other religious groups. What they find is very interesting and provides our Church with a possible solution. It seems that after testing several possible variables the researchers found that the faith life of Catholic teens reflects the faith life of their parents:

“Most American teens turn out to look a lot like their parents — not always, but very often — for understandable reasons. It does not appear to be the case that most U.S. Catholic parents of teen-agers are struggling mightily to live vibrant lives of Catholic faith and yet find their teen-agers to be religiously apathetic and resistant. Rather, it appears that the relative laxity of most U.S. Catholic teen-agers significantly reflects the religious laxity of their parents ... . Thus, we think the evident ‘problem’ of Catholic teens is rightly seen in part as a larger challenge of Catholic adults in general and parents specifically.” (p. 217)

If we want to affect the faith lives of Catholic teen-agers — and most assuredly we do — we must affect the faith lives of their parents and Catholic adults in general.

One of the hurdles that we must overcome in order to affect the faith lives of Catholic adults is the graduation effect. The graduation effect is the tendency to believe that everything I need to know about my faith I learned not so much in kindergarten, but in Catholic school or in the parish religious education program. There seems to be a belief that faith formation happens when one is a child or a teen-ager and once a person “graduates” from eighth grade or completes confirmation that the time for learning about faith is over. The result is that we have a goodly number of Catholic adults who are very learned in many areas of life but who still have an elementary knowledge of their faith. There may have been a time in our history when that was okay, but in today’s world, it is a recipe for disaster. That is why for the past 30 years the Church has been putting a great deal of emphasis on faith formation (catechesis) for adults.

In his encyclical On Catechesis in Our Time, (1979) Pope John Paul II says, “this is the principal form of catechesis, because it is addressed to persons who have the greatest responsibilities and the capacity to live the Christian message in its fully developed form.” (#43)

The General Directory for Catechesis, in 1997, reemphasizes the importance of adult faith formation in this way:

“Catechesis for adults, since it deals with persons who are capable of an adherence that is fully responsible, must be considered the chief form of catechesis. All other forms, which are indeed always necessary, are in some way oriented to it. This implies that the catechesis of other age groups should have it for a point of reference and should be expressed in conjunction with it, in a coherent catechetical program suitable to meet the pastoral needs of dioceses.” (#59)

As I have mentioned in this column for the past several months, we in the Diocese of Jefferson City are on the verge of doing something about this challenge. “Why Catholic?” is an adult faith formation program created by the staff of RENEW International. The purpose of “Why Catholic?” is to make adults more knowledgeable in their faith and thus to help them grow spiritually.

“Why Catholic?” is based on The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Every parish in the diocese will have the opportunity to participate in the program. You will hear more about it in the coming months.

It is my hope that “Why Catholic?” will help both adults and teen-agers grow in their sense of Catholic identity and Catholic action.