USA Today columnist: Millennials embrace orthodoxy

Anna Williams:

Pope Benedict XVI will arrive this week in Madrid for a weeklong celebration marked by up to a million teenage and twentysomething Catholics as World Youth Day. The international event gives young Catholics a chance to learn about and practice their faith together: Think Mass, lectures, prayer and more Mass.

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What attracts today's youth to such "old-fashioned" orthodoxy?

As a member of this strange millennial cohort, I have wondered this myself. I think the answer comes down to this: 1960s-style liberation — from moral codes, family obligations, religious commitments — has betrayed us.

Sometime in the past century, a new creed emerged, saying everyone should make his own creed. This tolerant, open-minded ethos seemed to promise freedom: safe sex with many partners, drugs and alcohol galore and quick, no-fault divorce. So our Baby Boomer parents partied hard, yet in so many cases left us only the hangover: heartbreak, addiction and broken homes, plus rising rates of teenage depression and suicide.

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With these realizations in mind, many millennials reject the assumptions of 1960s liberationists in favor of something more substantial: the creeds, practices and moral codes that defined religious life for centuries. Unlike reductionistic scientism or vague romanticism, traditional religions propose specific, compelling explanations for the world in front of us — broken, fraught with suffering, enslaved to sin, but nonetheless revealing glimpses of beauty and greatness.

More intellectually coherent than relativism, orthodoxy is also more demanding. It makes us place others above ourselves, the truth above what we'd like to be true, the fight for virtue above the pursuit of pleasure. In a word, it preaches sacrifice.

These themes will be prominent in Madrid this week, as Catholics of all nationalities gather for prayer and festivity. So why are they happy to be Catholic? Because they have concluded that the church's teachings are, in fact, true, and because they've recognized that true freedom lies in self-sacrifice. Far from repressive, such realizations are — as millennials of other faiths can attest — thrilling.