Build Upon The Lessons of Earlier Generations

Last week I wrote about teenagers, young people, and my experience of their faith and attitudes. That age group has always presented challenges to their parents and older adults. Teens and young adults are experimenting, growing, innovating, thinking, and building upon the previous generation’s thought and work. At times, they are making mistakes and becoming involved in unhealthy and unhelpful activities and relationships. The mistakes are what give us old people gray hair, but the younger generation has always done this.

These young persons must live, try, succeed, and fail as every other generation has done before. Still, the rest of us must be present to them in helpful and supportive ways. Helping them does not mean that we will agree with everything that they do or think. At the same time, we must look for proper and respectful ways to share our disagreements and opinions. Sometimes, even often, we must hold our thoughts to ourselves and allow the young person to live and learn. Of course, we must be good examples of love, generosity, compassion, and care in the way of Christ himself. We must be involved in the lives of teenagers and affirm their personal and individual value, rejoice in the equality of males and females, celebrate their differences, and show them the respect each person deserves.

We must teach them how not to be sexist (one sex is not better than the other), or misogynist (women haters), or misanthropic (men haters), or homophobic (fearing homosexuality), or xenophobic (fear of strangers or “foreigners”), etc. These kinds of hatred and fear have caused great harm in the history of humankind. As a society, and as a world community, we must do better than previous generations. As a Catholic Christian community, we must do better and build upon the lessons of earlier generations.

A key question that we all must face in Christ-like ways is how will we love and respect in this contemporary world? The Church and society as a whole are learning to find ways to respect and love those who inform the world that they are sexually attracted to others in diverse ways. The Church’s teachings on living sexually chaste lives apply to everyone, and the commandment to love one’s neighbor as yourself applies, always and everywhere. The Catechism of the Catholic Church on homosexuality teaches: “Such persons must be accepted with respect and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” (n. 2358).

We live in a world that is discovering newness, even as we can say “there is nothing new under the sun.” The “newness” we discover has already been present. The new is that we have greater love, respect, and acceptance of the diversity of God’s creatures, including our brother and sisters in the human race.

Peace, Fr. Andy