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CV NEWS FEED // Many young Catholics aren’t interested in typical “hot-button issues” — and they’re happier because of it, according to Catholic author and analyst George Weigel.
Weigel wrote for First Things that a group of young Catholics he knows in Rome have exemplified desirable Christian characteristics that prompt them to live a happy, satisfied, and missionary-like life.
“They are all thoroughly converted Christian disciples who love the Lord Jesus and Our Lady. They have a deep but not cloying piety,” Weigel wrote, adding:
They embody dynamic orthodoxy, meaning that they firmly believe what the gospel and the Church proclaim to be true, even as they seek ways to make those truths come alive in the twenty-first-century world. They worry about the toxic waste dump of contemporary culture — not least because they’ve seen the damage it’s done to their friends and relatives — but I don’t sense in them any desire to retreat into the bunkers of sectarianism.
Weigel said his young friends’ enthusiasm for philosophy, theology, Pope St. John Paul II, and Catholic virtues has given them energy to reform the culture around them.
“They intend, in their various vocations, to try to change the world for the better,” Weigel wrote.
Weigel contrasted his young Catholic friends with two middle-aged, progressive Catholic priests he also saw in Rome, saying, “It was easy to imagine that they were slicing and dicing the Synod on Synodality, which was in its second week, especially in terms of those ‘hot-button issues.’”
Weigel then wondered if the progressive priests or his young friends brought more hope to the future of the Church.
“Who’s got the future?” he asked. “Aging proponents of a march back to the Catholic seventies under the rubric of ‘paradigm shifts’? Or these young friends of mine, who are inspired by the teaching and example of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and who think we can still learn a lot from Augustine and Aquinas?”
Weigel concluded that “if the goal is evangelizing a broken world with the healing, saving message of the gospel,” his young Catholic friends are the future of the Church.
