A guy involved in youth ministry went ballistic at me for this tweet (and blocked me before I could respond). He said I was insulting him and all who worked in youth ministry. His reaction is all-too-common and reveals a major barrier to reform in the Church.
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1) I was a diocesan Director of Evangelization for years, and youth ministry was under my office. Those who work with youth are some of the most dedicated, hard-working, and sincere Catholics I know. But they work under a model that I believe is fundamentally broken.
2) This is an important distiction: criticizing how things are done in the Church is *not* a criticism of the people working under those systems. Criticizing Catholic education, for example, isn’t saying that all Catholic teachers are terrible Catholics.
3) But the quick and personal offense people take these days has made most Church leaders afraid to offer even the slightest criticism of any program, no matter how absymal the results of that program.
4) This is why you see priests and bishops gushing over how great their parishes and dioceses are, while people are flocking out the doors. They know that to be critical of any aspect of Church life is seen as an attack on the people involved.
5) But often it’s not the people, but the underlying assumptions behind the programs they are using that’s the problem.
6) Youth ministry is a case in point. We imitate the Protestant model, not realizing it’s fundamentally flawed. Yet any suggestion to that effect is taken as a personal attack, and so needed reform doesn’t happen.
7) Until we are willing to be harshly self-critical—and not take such easy offense—we’ll never turn the corner and begin to grow the Church again.
Doing the same thing over and over again without results is insanity, and it’s shouldn’t be offensive to say that.
/fin
Doing the same thing over and over again without results is insanity, and it’s shouldn’t be offensive to say that.
/fin
