Oh good grief

I rarely bother with Inside Catholic anymore but when I do, I find sad little essays like this . You wonder why so many 20somethings have left the Church? It's not for love of Facebook. Young people usually leave the Church not because of some great trauma but because for many of them, there is nothing to hold them. Chad and Jessica may not hate their parish but they sure don't  love it. Their parishes are nice, very nice but fail miserably to show Jesus as anything more than their nonjudgmental buddy in heaven. To paraphrase Archbishop Fulton Sheen many parishes fail to image the real  Christ who  makes us "hate evil with a passionate intensity, and love goodness to a point where we can drink death like water."
My generation, the one before the Millennials  were fed an ooey gooey, pretty pony gospel instead of the Faith that sustained the martyrs. Most of us grew up in parishes that were repulsive.The music, the teen masses, the rap sessions (shudder) and the Youth Leader were supposed to be relevant but were quite lame and we knew it. We had too many effeminate priests who looked and behaved like they were put together by the ladies gardening committee. The brave and devout young man who felt called to be a priest faced spending his life with such fellows as companions and superiors. Is it any wonder that many a vocation withered on the vine?  The girl who wanted to be like St. Therese found a convent full of Sr. What's Cool Now and Sr. Feminist. Naturally, she fled and didn't persevere in her vocation.

Things are better now.  With only one exception I haven't met a priest who was ordained after 1990, who used the "priest voice" or made me doubt his masculinity. Healthy religious orders are booming and we are seeing young habited nuns again but the damage is done. People talk about the 20 somethings as a lost generation when they ought to be talking about the lost generations and Facebook had nothing to do with it.