God and the Teenage Mind

Religious education and youth ministry often sacrifice intellectual rigor for sociability and sensibility. Jesus devolves into “Our Homie,” and normal adolescent questioning leads mostly to apostasy under another name.

People who underwent Catholic sacramental catechesis from the 1970s on take that as the norm. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In some places today, it is not. Brad Rothrock, who teaches religion at St. Mary’s High School in Lynn, MA, notes with satisfaction in America magazine :

A transfer student from another Catholic school arrived in my sophomore Scripture class several months after we had completed the unit on the doctrine of God. As I was explaining that ancient Israelite cosmology viewed the universe as composed of three tiers, with God residing above the dome of the sky, one of my students raised his hand to say that technically this could not be correct because God is infinite and cannot therefore be confined to a single space; that would place a limit on God, who transcends all limits. The transfer student raised her hand in confusion, and I attempted to explain what the other student was talking about by mentioning that God has no body. Still confused, she said that she had always thought of God as being like Hercules, “but real.” Several students then tried to explain to her that God is not a “thing,” but rather the act of existence itself from which all “things” proceed. Though the transfer student remained confused, and I suggested she see me later, this was one of those moments teachers dream about. My students had actually listened, understood and were able to communicate that understanding in response to live questions.

The sort of pedagogy that had made such a moment possible was fairly common before Vatican II. The post-conciliar collapse of catechesis made it rare. Some would say that the Rothrocks and their students must remain rare, what with the iPods, texting, and torrents of glam that now shape the teenage mind. But many teens do hunger for more. Though a good teacher is needed to cultivate and sustain interest in that more , the novelty of real thought seems enough to arouse it.

Now if only Rothrock had substituted a little Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger for a few of the theologians he names: “Karl Rahner and Elizabeth Johnson.”