imprisoned in the patterns of selfishness, opportunism, fear, isolation, hatred, and violence. For this generation of young Catholics, recognizing disciplined practice as the key to conversion and reconversion, not simply a collection of meaningless rites and shame-based conventions, makes all the difference in their embrace of Catholicism as more than “affiliation.” It is practice that can and will produce a new generation of strong and confident Catholic leaders who will prosper the Gospel in our spiritually bankrupt world.
This entire approach to Catholicism as Spiritual Path is dependent upon our ministerial capacity to help the young build bridges between their experience today and the experience which is embedded in the tradition. All spiritual traditions begin with experience—something happened in Galilee in the twenties, something that was powerfully transforming. What happened in Galilee in the twenties—and eventually in vibrant Christian communities throughout the Greco-Roman world—was not the imparting of divine information, not just ideas and words, but saving experience. Jesus’ “reign of God” and Paul’s “life in grace and the Spirit” refer first to encounter and experience, and only later to symbols, stories, thought, and doctrine. Indeed, the whole purpose of symbols, stories, thought, and doctrine is to carry the experience from one generation to another, to initiate ever new transformations through encounter with God in Christ.
Young adults today demonstrate simultaneously a hunger for and interest in spirituality and a distrust of and distancing from institutional religion. The second largest group of incoming freshmen at DePaul each year identify themselves as “spiritual, not religious.” Today’s