Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool by Katherine Dugan (review)

Amid deep social and scholarly interest in the "nones" and the "spiritual but not religious," Katherine Dugan's compelling ethnography, Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Are Trying to Make Catholicism Cool, reminds readers of the continued resonance of denominational differences for some young Catholics. Born during "the culture wars," long after Vatican II, these missionaries have only known the "Church in the modern world." Their Roman Catholic Church, as Dugan explains, had been swept clean of "the gaudy emotions and excessive images of saints' stigmata … in order to move forward with a clean, respectable religiosity" (83). These missionaries seek to co-create their own post-conciliar Catholicism in ways that will compel fallen-away and less-interested Catholic students to take the "Catholic pathway" through college (9). Along this path, students learned that they need not abstain from lattes and YouTube to amplify Jesus' real presence in their lives. In six thematically organized chapters, Dugan expertly argues that the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) blended distinctive Catholic elements (those elements earlier generations saw gaudy and excessive) with hipster culture to convince onlookers that "modern life is better with Catholicism" (14). They do by modeling their relationships with Jesus, the saints, and members of the opposite sex both in dating and marriage as "dynamically orthodox" (3).

Real presence, through devotional practices, Dugan demonstrates, is where FOCUS announces its Catholicism, while separating itself from other conservative Christian organizations on campus, such as Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ). Although members of Cru might have deep prayer lives to connect themselves to Jesus, FOCUS missionaries spend hours a day kneeling before his real presence in the Blessed Sacrament. These young Catholics connect the aches in their bones, after kneeling on cement floors in prayer, with the suffering of the saints. They embrace the saints in ways that had supposedly been downplayed within contemporary Catholicism. While suffering through devotion demonstrates how these missionaries reimagine contemporary Catholic practice, FOCUS teachings—such as fulfilling proper gender roles and premarital abstinence—highlight how they bring together elements of (evangelical) popular culture, like purity culture, with papal encyclicals. In each area of their lives, Dugan demonstrates how these young people are constructing a Catholicism that connects deeply to church tradition and their generation's concerns.

The nuanced ethnography presented in these pages offers much for scholars to learn about how young people create their religion rather than simply follow it. To understand the depth of this process, Dugan might have included more about the context within which FOCUS's "dynamically orthodox Catholicism" was created and is practiced. Readers might find themselves wishing she had placed FOCUS's origin story (the focal point of Chapter 1) within the context of the growing movement of conservative Catholicism centered in the Augustine Institute and elsewhere. How do these missionaries function within the culture wars that helped to create it? The broader context notwithstanding, Millennial Missionaries, deepens our understanding of contemporary American Catholicism, youth and religion, and American religion more broadly. I highly recommend it.