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Research suggests that "Generation X" Catholics might be more spiritual and more vocationally oriented than once thought.
As the first step in a five-year project geared to recruiting "Generation X" Catholics to ordained and lay ministry, market research has shown that college-age Catholics have relatively well-established patterns of worship that they retain from high school, that they are open to the possibility of ministerial service to the Church and that students involved in campus ministry are more likely to consider a vocation than others -- with men more open to the possibility of a religious vocation than women.
But the study also showed that the students polled had little awareness of lay ministry as a career choice, or as anything that would require a professional education similar to that required for law or medicine. It also showed that students enrolled in traditional "service majors," such as education and nursing, are less likely to consider a church vocation.
Aquinas Institute of Theology launched the survey as background for its project, "Generation X: Good Ground for a New Call to Ministry," funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis.
"Our project is a response to the fact that fewer than 5 percent of the more than 30,000 Catholic lay students studying ministry and less than half of our seminarians are under the age of 30," said Charles Bouchard, OP, president of Aquinas Institute. "When the Lilly Endowment solicited proposals that would improve the quality of congregational leadership, we thought that the presence of more young people in our seminaries and schools of ministry would certainly be a step in the right direction. By partnering with undergraduate schools and campus ministry centers, we hope to create a temporary feeder system like the one we had in the 1950s and 1960s through our parishes and Catholic schools."
Ronald Knapp, director of admissions at Aquinas Institute, said the most encouraging news of the study is that nearly a quarter of those interviewed said they might be interested in "ecclesial ministry," which author Zeni Fox defines as those who are "professionally prepared (or designated for a particular community) who commit themselves to a period of service for some duration, and who are accepted by their bishop to be ritually designated as an official lay minister."
Still, Knapp noted that while students are still familiar with the traditional ministerial role of the priest, most don't see lay ministry as a career possibility that requires any kind of professional training.
"So as we try to recruit young people for ministry study, we are faced with the difficulty of trying to attract them to a career that they don't perceive as a career," he said. "It would be like saying to a group of prospective law students, 'You'd make a great lawyer. Let me tell you what a lawyer is.'"
Aquinas Institute plans to follow up on the study with printed and video materials that will be used in a series of campus recruitment visits, 10 full-tuition scholarships to be offered through 2003, and a special summer experience of ministry education in the Colorado mountains.
Conducted during the spring of 1999 by Prescience Associates, the study consisted of a telephone survey of sample populations of undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in selected Catholic-sponsored colleges and universities. Four hundred and eighty 20-minute telephone interviews were completed.
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