Obedience a tough sell to a generation of choosers

c. 1996 Religion News Service Eds: Check RSN Online for a photo of Andrew Greeley (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ At the conclusion […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

Eds: Check RSN Online for a photo of Andrew Greeley

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)


UNDATED _ At the conclusion of”His Holiness,”a new book on the papacy by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, the authors describe Pope John Paul II as frustrated and saddened because people are not willing to obey his orders and commands.

They describe him as dismayed that his native Poland has turned to the evils of American consumerism. He is further discouraged that his attempt to close firmly and forever the issue of the ordination of women has silenced neither theologians nor Catholic laity.

One can understand the pope’s frustration. How can people _ especially young people _ dare to ignore what he says?

The answer to that question requires an examination of the complex changes that have occurred in Western society since the end of World War II and in Poland since the end of the Cold War. For the first time in human history, large numbers of us routinely make choices, often from a wide variety of options. This phenomenon has a profound effect on the human personality that religious leaders have not taken into account.

This new phenomenon of choice has several dimensions. First, there are more choices to be made because we live much longer, on the average, than did our grandparents and great-grandparents. In a marriage relationship, for example, the number of choices expand, perhaps geometrically, when the average union lasts almost a half-century instead of a mere 15 years, as was the case for most of our ancestors.

There is, however, a much more crucial transformation in the phenomenon of choice. For most families 100 years ago, there were relatively few choices to be made.

There were upper limits to the amount of education we could hope to achieve _ eight years, 10 years at the most. We worked at the same or similar jobs our fathers did. We married the same kind of people our parents married, often from the relatively small pool of community or parish members. We lived in the same place our ancestors lived _ unless, of course, we were immigrants. Even then, we often exchanged a small, peasant community for a somewhat larger immigrant parish.

By the middle of this century, most of us chose our marriage partners from a group of peers living nearby. In Chicago, for example, marriages between the South Side Irish and the West Side Irish were infrequent because of the distance separating the two groups and the hours needed to travel that distance on public transportation. (It’s hard to believe, but there once was a time when every teenager did not have access to a car. Many families did not have a car at all.)


The situation was not all bad. When you chose your mate locally, there was no need for much of the nation to engage in arduous travels at Christmas time. Now that so many young people attend college far from home, the marriage pool is much bigger. Families once living in different corners of the neighborhood now live in different parts of the country or the world. Togetherness is difficult to achieve.

Human freedom has expanded and that is good. Yet freedom can be a terrible burden.

Young people must make constant choices _ what to be, where to go to school, who to marry, where to live, what political party to join, what religion to follow.

To young people, making choices has become as natural as breathing. Choice creates a psychological environment that reshapes the dimensions of their lives.

And to tell young men and women who have matured in an environment of choice that they must obey simply because someone has told them so, without either listening to them or offering persuasive arguments, is to violate all their experience.

It is not so much that young people refuse the guidance of people they respect, but that they cannot comprehend why anyone would want them to be blindly obedient. The are choosing agents. They know of no other way to be.


Those who believe that free acts are what make us human must find this enhanced freedom problematic but also good. But those Catholic reactionaries who expect the church to teach its values by decree utterly miss the point.

Such tactics might have worked in the good old days. But in an age of choice, they will not work any more.

JC END GREELEY

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!