In my experience working with Boston College students in campus ministry and social justice programs from 2011-2016, few virtues play as central a role in the way in which young people articulate their beliefs, values, and aspirations as that of authenticity. On retreats and in small groups, students employed the language of authenticity to describe the kinds of friendships and relationships they were seeking (and often perceived themselves to lack). They articulated key dissonances in their lives – between their burgeoning senses of vocation and their practical, parent-pleasing majors; between their innermost desires and their outward lives – as crises of authenticity. And when many explained why, despite having been raised Catholic, they had stopped going to Mass in college, they again drew on the language of authenticity. As some described it, new experiences and challenging encounters had caused them to question the belief systems within which they were raised. While many of them continued to identify as Catholic, they had stopped participating in the liturgy because they perceived that doing so would be an inaccurate and unfaithful reflection of where they found themselves on their journeys of faith – that is, it would be inauthentic.
While students’ articulations of authenticity weren’t always theologically or philosophically watertight, their desire to construct lives of integrity evinced a deep Christian impulse. They resonated with Jesus’ invocation against the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew’s gospel, who “preach but they do not practice,” who “tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen.” (Mt 23:3b-5a). The moral authorities my students most admired, including their favorite Boston College Jesuits, were those who seemed to lead lives of integrity, lives that echoed the inclusivity of Jesus’ ministry and simplicity of Jesus’ way of being. Conversely, they reserved their most palpable contempt for proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing (Mt 7:15)—for hypocritical authority figures who used shame and deceit to manipulate the vulnerable.
Those of us who work with youth and young adults must keep their admiration for integrity at the forefront of our minds as we seek a way forward in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Pennsylvania and beyond. Indeed, within a moral galaxy whose center of gravity is authenticity, few transgressions are graver than that of hypocrisy. Young Catholics may not explicitly name the abuse crisis as a reason they have left or would consider leaving the Church. Yet the horror of the crimes and the conspiratorial expanse of the cover-ups contributes to the image of a church steeped in the sort of hypocrisy that young people vehemently reject. The lack of accountability among those responsible for perpetrating and covering up these crimes seems to reemphasize the image of a church whose leaders are not doers of the Word but hearers only (cf. James 1:22).
When young people hear about the abuse crisis, they are hearing about an epidemic of violence whose primary victims were and are their generational peers: children, teenagers, young adults. As is often true with social sin, it is children who bear the brunt of the crimes and failures of the powerful; young lives become collateral damage. As if the abuse itself wasn’t terrible enough, the actions of bishops who concealed crimes, protected abusers, and silenced victims communicate a chilling message to young people: this is an institution in which young lives do not matter. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and in light of growing critical awareness of rape culture among young people, many undoubtedly feel conflicted at best about their continued participation in an institution whose leaders were complicit in such crimes. Additionally, many responses to the crisis have scapegoated homosexuality and devolved into polarized infighting, further alienating many young people.
Young Catholics have many questions for the church, questions born both of betrayal and of hope. What does it mean to call myself Catholic, and thus to identify with an institution whose leaders have often proven themselves complicit in perpetuating a culture of rape and silencing? Does my life – as a young person, a victim of sexual assault, an LGBT Catholic – matter to those who hold power in the church? Whom can I trust? What is my role in helping to transform the church’s culture? What kind of leader might God be calling me to become?
The church and its ministers should respond to young people first by listening to their honest questions and conflicted feelings. With middle and high school aged youth, it might seem at first that they have little to say. As a “token Catholic” in my public high school when news of the sexual abuse crisis in Boston broke in 2002, I remember nervously laughing off the situation as “awkward” to friends who raised the issue. But be patient. Allow the conversation to unfold. As has become abundantly clear, silence only compounds violence. We must also listen to their parents, many of whom are asking difficult and in some sense unanswerable questions about what it means to raise Catholic children in this historical moment. They, too, need support and a community of conversation.
It is equally vital that our response to the crisis include a critical examination of our practices of youth, young adult, and campus ministry. In particular, we must recognize the sometimes irresponsible and manipulative ways in which we continue to place young people into vulnerable situations. When we consider abuse in the church, we must bear in mind that members of the clergy are not the only authority figures capable of harming young people. Indeed, today, most youth who are involved in the church have far more contact with youth ministers and other lay adults than they do with priests. A great deal of youth ministry programming is explicitly designed to lead young people into a state of profound emotional and psychological vulnerability. Youth ministers then find themselves improvising the roles of psychologist, social worker, or confessor, roles for which they are neither trained nor qualified. It is a situation with the same potential for abuse as the situations by which the church has been so recently horrified.
Rebuilding the church’s moral credibility is a process that will take not weeks or months but lifetimes. In this liminal time, the church and its ministers would do well to make young people’s hunger for authenticity, integrity, transparency, and humility the litmus test of our work.
SUSAN REYNOLDS, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Catholic Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University.