Young and Hungry
Each day for the past seven years, Matthew Lickona has ended his morning shower by reciting three Hail Marys under a blast of cold water. He does this not because it gives him pleasure but because it doesn't. "I am hoping that this exterior tickle of discomfort will be a reminder that the world is not paradise, no matter how satisfied I feel," Lickona writes in his new memoir, Swimming With Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic , a chronicle of both the questions he has had about his faith and the joy and sustenance he derives from it. "I am hoping that the shock of cold will rouse me from my God-forgetting material stupor, and remind me to offer him, along with this brief suffering, my entire day."
With his so-square-they're-hip glasses, Lickona looks like the wine columnist he is for a San Diego alternative paper. But, at 31, he's also the father of four--the result of his and his wife, Deirdre's, belief that contraception violates God's design for human sexuality. He embraced this notion just as his junior-high classmates were rushing in the other direction. "My faith taught me that sex outside marriage for your personal pleasure was selfish," he says. "I couldn't be [simply] a Sunday Catholic, because I had Friday and Saturday nights to deal with."
If Lickona's Catholicism made him atypical growing up, he has plenty of company today. Even though the majority of American Catholics favor birth control, for instance, a growing number of young Catholics are drawn to the conservative doctrine espoused by Pope Benedict XVI in his pre-election homily before the College of Cardinals two weeks ago, where he spoke out against relativism. These Catholics are a minority in the United States (where only 23 percent of the younger generation attend mass every week), but they are following a global trend. The recent World Values Survey shows that in 58 countries "millennial" Catholics (born in 1982 or later) are more likely to attend mass, pray every day, consider religion important, and have a larger degree of confidence in the church than the previous generation. "It was a surprise," says Mark Gray, a research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University: In its traditionalist religious attitudes and behaviors, the millennial generation most closely resembles the generations born before World War II.
It isn't just Catholics, either. Colleen Carroll Campbell, the author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, has identified what she calls "a countercultural trek toward traditional Christianity" --with young men and women embracing some of the very sacraments and rituals rejected by their boomer parents. Data are hard to come by, but a survey released last month by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles showed that 81 percent of college freshmen attend religious services at least occasionally, 40 percent follow religious teachings in everyday life, and 64 percent feel spirituality is a source of joy.
Other numbers suggest the trend is growing. Since 1995, Campus Crusade for Christ, an interdenominational ministry committed to spreading the Gospel, has grown from 18,000 students nationally to 55,000 this year. Enrollment in the 100-plus member colleges of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which teach subjects from a biblical perspective, has jumped by 64 percent since 1990.
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