I left the Church soon after my children were born. They were both baptized, but because of the sex-abuse scandal, as well as the usual culture-war issues, I left in anger and never looked back.
Yet once a year I would take them to my family’s parish, Our Lady of Czestochowa, in New Jersey, for a memorial mass for my father, whom they had never met. He had been active in his Polish church, sitting on the altar on Holy Thursday with eleven other men to have his feet washed by the priest in the late Lenten ritual, carrying a basket from pew to pew for the weekly collection. Most of our extended family lived directly across from OLC, a neo-Gothic church on a quiet, tree lined street. I was in the choir and often read at Mass. I eventually joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.
But I had given all that up for a secular life, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t adversely affect my children’s moral and ethical development. I continued to teach them right from wrong, bought them a children’s Bible “for the stories,” and even brought up Jesus from time to time. It wasn’t Jesus I had the beef with, I explained to them repeatedly. It was the Church.
Not going to church never seemed to bother them. At an extended family dinner once, a local bishop asked my young son, Dean, what church we went to. Dean matter of factly answered: “We don’t go to church.” At one of our annual OLC visits, when the priest greeted six-year-old Dean before Mass, my son informed him: “I’m only staying for two songs.”
So it came as a bit of a surprise recently when both my twenty-something children began to show an interest in the Catholic Church. It started last year with a visit to Paris, where my daughter, Paulina, was studying art during her junior year abroad. Before my husband and I arrived, we asked if there were any favorite restaurants or museums she wanted to visit with us.
“We need to go to the Cluny,” she said. “It’s my favorite museum in Paris.”
I had never heard of the Cluny and immediately googled it: A museum of medieval art housed in a 15th-century abbey. My daughter had never expressed any interest in religious art, but maybe our visits to the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan had had more of an impact than I’d realized. I had lived in Siena as a college student and had been touched by the sad Madonnas cradling their children. I loved studying the intricately carved ivory rosaries, the jewel-encrusted chalices, and illuminated gold manuscripts. But I had never really mentioned any of this to my daughter.
Dean, now twenty-five, is a fiction writer. His pieces have featured a forgotten medieval saint, an American teenager who self-harms in order to become a saint, and a tour guide who takes the sick and dying on religious pilgrimages in Italy. He told me recently that he had been going to Mass now and then at St. Augustine, an imposing church a few blocks from his Brooklyn apartment and across from his favorite bookstore. St. Augustine made the news two years ago when its $2 million bejeweled golden tabernacle was stolen. The crime was all I knew of the parish. So I decided to go with him to Mass to find out what was drawing him there.
The church—Gothic revival, high Victorian in style—was a larger version of OLC, with cream-colored walls and similar light fixtures hanging from its vaulted ceiling. But it’s more grand, with towering Corinthian columns and immense stained-glass windows depicting the Nativity and the parish’s patron saint. In a borough full of impressive churches, St. Augustine is often referred to as the Notre-Dame of Park Slope. When I asked Dean why he chose this particular church, he said simply that he liked the way it looked.
But later he told me that it wasn’t just the aesthetics that drew him in. “It’s comforting,” Dean said. “But it’s more than that. As a deeply disillusioned person, upset about consumerism and the rapacious accumulation of wealth, I see the Church as an alternative to all that.” (He actually used those words.) “But that doesn’t even totally explain it. It’s complicated.” He liked the Church’s concept of free will. “We make the choice whether to sin or not,” he said. “You take responsibility for your own actions. And Jesus is not a victim. He chose to die.”
When he started writing about Catholicism in his fiction, Dean said he felt he had hit on something deep and meaningful. He is interested, he said, “in guilt and suffering and pity and hatred and cruelty, those human things I struggle with which are articulated so clearly by the Catholic Church.” He’s still struggling with things like the Virgin birth and Jesus’ divine nature. “I feel like you’re either all in or all out. That’s what faith is, right?” He’s admitted he’s not all in just yet.
Apparently, many other people his age are. The Catholic Leader reported recently that there has been an increase in the number of young people attending Mass, perhaps out of the possible desire for social connection post-Covid. But Covid has faded, and young people are still turning out. More than one hundred worshippers showed up for Mass at St. Augustine that Sunday, not just the usual deep bench of seniors, but young couples and more than a smattering of single young hipsters in flannel shirts. I was shocked by the turnout and the demographics. Fr. Frank Tumino, clothed in purple Advent robes, delivered a lively, timely sermon, urging those gathered to be grateful for what they have and to share it with others. He instructed us to love God, and one another. Which, of course, is the basic point of Christianity—and the message that often gets lost.
Fr. Tumino gave a nod to the young newcomers just before Communion, explaining who was permitted to receive the sacrament. “When you receive,” he said, “the proper response is to bow your head and say ‘Amen,’ not thank you or right-o or any other phrase.” The worshippers laughed and up to Communion they went, heads bowed, “Amens” quietly mumbled.
When I spoke to Fr. Tumino on the phone the next day about his youthful congregation, he said there were so many young people coming to church that he’s considered putting up a sign that says, “Bring your parents to Mass for the holidays!” He says that some of them are initially drawn by the physical church itself. “The awesomeness of the building of St. Augustine teaches them we’re small in the world, but that God is with us,” he explained. There are those who are attracted by the ceremonial bells and whistles, the Latin Mass and the incense, or the music. “But they do want to belong, and their hearts are in the right place,” he said.
Some of his young parishioners have been brought up in faith, others are completely new to it. Some drift in and out, others come every week. “But they’re all searching in the face of so much uncertainty and anxiety,” he said. “They want peace. And the Church has to meet them. Anxiety is one thing, but being alone with the anxiety, that’s the terrifying thing. In coming here, they’re not alone.”
The pandemic was simply a preview to what was headed our way. Celebrity culture, superhero movies, and a steady stream of TikTok don’t come close to assuaging the looming existential horrors of climate change, AI, unjust wars, and unbridled cruelty against immigrants. We are anxious and growing ever more anxious by the day in a world that feels like it’s spinning out of control.
But community is only part of the draw, Fr. Tumino thinks. “So many people tell us what we should want. These young people are realizing what they need,” he said.
Like Augustine of Hippo himself, Dean and his contemporaries are not showing up out of habit or because of required worship, but have come to the Church freely, in search not just of the traditions or mystery of faith, but true meaning and an answer to so many questions—questions that as parents we haven’t been, and will never be, able to answer.
One member of Fr. Tumino’s congregation is a high-school student who started reading the Bible and came to him asking to be confirmed and to make his Communion. Because the student was still a minor, the priest had to get parental permission. Now the boy’s mother has started attending Mass. She came to Fr. Tumino and said, “Can you believe my child brought me back to the Church?”
Right before we hung up, Fr. Tumino said to me, “Maybe your son is the instrument that brings you back as well.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe he is.”
