For these millennials, faith trumps relativism

This doesn’t happen very often, so when it does it needs to be applauded and pointed out.  Today USA Today has an article on concerning World Youth Day and the generation of Millennials.

At first glance, studies such as Pew’s 2010 report “Religion Among the Millennials” seem to indicate that young Catholics (age 18-29) exemplify their generation’s tendency toward religious indifference. To wit, they are less likely to attend Mass weekly, less likely to pray daily, and less likely to consider religion “very important” than Catholics 30 and older. Yet the millennial Catholics whodo practice and value their faith are doing something odd: They are spearheading a resurgence of traditional Catholic liturgy and disciplines that their parents and grandparents had largely abandoned.

Anna Williams the author of the article diagnoses why she believes this to be true and her conclusions seem to me quite sound.  There is a lot to pick out from this article so best to just read it.  But I liked this:

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.

Dissent is usually easy since often it places no demands upon you.  You don’t have to repent or reevaluate your opinion and what is almost always the case you flow with the tide of secular society.  As much as they talk about “prophetic voices” usually they are preaching to the secular choir.

Anna Williams is an editorial page intern at USA TODAY and a recent graduate of Hillsdale College in Michigan. She has attended World Youth Day twice: in Cologne, Germany, in 2005 and Sydney, Australia, in 2008.

USA Today more from her please.

Thanks to the reader who sent this in.