Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice (review)

Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice. By Dean R. Hoge, W.D. Dinges, M. Johnson, and J. Gonzales Jr. University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. 288 pp. Cloth, $40.00.

Numerous surveys have documented the fact that while the actions of the Second Vatican Council in 1962-1965 had enormous worldwide consequences, in America, at least, these actions were met differently by old and young Catholics. Persons who reached adulthood before the council convened differed from the generation who grew up while the council met, and even more from those born after the council disbanded. Dean Hoge and his associates wondered if this trend continues, and the Lilly Endowment funded them to find out.

In 1997 the authors chose a sample of 800, half of them Latino, the other half non-Latino. Half were ages 20 to 29, the rest 30 to 39. All were confirmed as Catholics inasmuch as they were randomly drawn from confirmation lists in the appropriate years in widely diverse dioceses. Three-quarters of the non-Latinos drawn from the lists were located, and three-quarters of these were interviewed by telephone. Half the Latinos were located, with three-quarters of them interviewed.

Much research on Catholic laity has shown that in attendance, attitudes toward the church, sexual morality, and most everything else related to Catholic identity, the younger generation is more "liberal" and change-oriented. Put briefly, they feel the greatest freedom to be Catholic in their own way, expressing little guilt about departing from orthodoxy and orthopraxis.

As for the originating question — whether this generational change has continued — the answer appears to be no. Of course no measure is precise enough to answer so large a question, but compared to the sizable gap separating the three cohorts earlier identified, the difference between the post-Vatican II generation and 20-30-year-olds studied here (the oldest one-third themselves part of that generation) is hardly noticeable. This fact might suggest therefore a "flattening out" of some very dramatic changes in American Catholicism. However, while the book under review contains significant evidence that those in their 20s and 30s are not very different from those 10-15 years older, these young adult Catholics nonetheless have distinctive qualities.

This distinctiveness shows up most in Chapters 8 and 9 on Catholic identity. "Identity" here refers to the meaning the Catholic Church has for people. This is conceived in two ways: (1) a group of "parish Catholics" ("they go to church and find meaning in parish life") is distinguished from (2) "spiritual Catholics" ("their commitment is to some . . . Catholic teaching, spirituality, and traditions, but not to the institutional church") and from (3) "contingent Catholics" ("contingent on other central elements in their identity" [chiefly family and ethnicity]).

The second conception involves the notions of "core" and "periphery": what is central to one's Catholic faith, and what is not. Three generalizations emerge: (1) "Many young adults have not learned to distinguish core and periphery," (2) "Our research team expected that various subgroups would have distinctive views about what is essential to the faith, but our attempts to identify them largely failed," and (3) "the regular Mass attenders rated everything more essential than the non-regular Mass attenders."

Many nuggets are also to be found: "Young people are not receiving much encouragement to the religious life and priesthood." Catholic education does not lessen the chances of marriage with a non-Catholic. Half of this group "find the Catholic-Protestant boundary to be unimportant." It seems that not only did Vatican II lead, as many predicted, to the "Protestantization" of the Catholic Church in America; it also led to a breakdown in the boundaries that maintained Catholic distinctiveness.

The book concludes with ten recommendations for church leaders, many of which seem unrealizable given the book's findings. This makes the book critical to any discussion of what strategies might be feasible.