Ah, Horton, so we do fundamentally disagree about what’s best. You simply fail to see that, for the vast majority of young people, there are profound barriers to precisely the things you are talking about. They have latent or explicit doubts that prevent them from seeking such things.You say that your experience is different, and that’s fine, but my experience is different, and the statistics that even you acknowledge tell of a dire situation in the aggregate.
Let’s take “having a relationship with” or “encountering” Jesus. This, first of all, is exactly the kind of Protestanty “God-talk” for which young people have acquired a distaste - it does not do justice to Catholic belief and practice (you won’t find this kind of language in the Bible, the Fathers, the Saints, or in Church documents), and it puts off young males, in particular, because of its saccharine and effeminate language. More importantly, it does them no good to insist upon an “encounter” with a person about which they may doubt his identity or even existence. Not confronting these barriers with reason and continuing merrily on is foolish. You ask why I say its dangerous to teach faith without reason? Well, because that leads to a loss of faith and the scorn and scandal of unbelievers.
I want you to run this thought experiment in your head. Suppose you have a group of kids in Confirmation, and 20% are more-or-less believers and the other 80% are nominal. Among the 80%, some buy into a modernist conception of religion - i.e., no sense of objective revelation, reducing religion to just its archetypal and spiritual benefits. They are syncretists of one stripe or another and believe that all religions are a path to “God,” and they view any “exclusionary” doctrines with incredible suspicion and scorn. Another chuck of that 80% are Progressives - they are the children of Progressive parents who see in the Church’s teaching an agreement with their economic and social justice polices, but they disregard everything else. They may like Jesus, but they have extreme reservations about the moral injunctions, especially the ones about sexuality. And then you have another chunk that are in full-blown rebellion, agnosticism or even atheism, and are only there because of their culturally Catholic parents.
Now, how are you supposed to get them to “encounter” Jesus? Read passages from the Bible that they distrust? Say prayers that they untruthfully utter because they do not believe in God or, indeed, the efficacy of prayer? Show them clips of people saying “God died for you!!! He wants you!!! He loves you!”
I tell you, you have it precisely backwards. And the Church backs me up on this. “Man would not believe unless he saw that he must.” It is only first by having rational basis that faith can lead us to the supernatural life of God.
