Let’s Talk Salvation

You can’t talk to young people about salvation. What’s salvation? What does salvation mean? My eternal soul? You can only talk to young people in young people’s language, really. And if you’re going to talk to them about salvation, the first thing they will understand is saving the planet. You’re talking about being saved and they will say: ‘What about saving the planet?’
Irish Bishop Kiernan Conroy in an interview.

Christ, give me souls. Let anything you like happen to me, but give me souls in return. I want the salvation of souls. I want souls to know your mercy. Diary of Saint Faustina

Bishop Conroy is SO wrong! Saint Faustina is SO right!

The purpose of evangelization and catechesis is precisely to introduce a new language, a novel vocabulary. Language and vocabulary have the power to unveil and reveal realities that had been hidden and obscure. And so the purpose of religious education is to equip our young with this language that unveils the hidden drama underlying all human existence: the drama of good and evil, the spiritual conflict in every soul between the Kingdom of Darkness and the Kingdom of Light.

And so we need to think and speak constantly of salvation as the Presence of the Great Lover who created us out of love, destined us for an eternity of love, and sent his Son to suffer and die to deliver us from sin back to love. We need to talk relentlessly about sin as disbelief, isolation and loneliness, death, guilt, and shame. What young person does not know loneliness, shame, fear, guilt and death? It is the very air we breath: the pervasive threats to all that we so desperately long for.

I suspect that Bishop Conroy is projecting his own loss of faith, his own incomprehension, his own alienation from our tradition. I find young people to be fascinated with the last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. These we can return to time and again as they orient us in our pilgrimage through life. They also respond with great interest to:

- Spiritual combat with Satan: the reality that he is constantly on the attack, pulling us away from our deepest longings and our true destination. Who is not interested in possession, seduction, opression, obsession, temptation, and deception?
- Sin in all its variety: mortal and venial, omission, near occasions of sin, the objective and subjective dimensions, primacy of conscience, erroneous consciences as culpable and inculpable.
- The supernatual economy of the Communion of Saints: Mary and all our saint/angel friends in heaven; prayer for the souls in purgatory; indulgences; the question of a populated hell (crowded or empty?); and the very mind-boggling idea of an eternity of joy or sadness.
- The mysterious efficacy of the sacraments, including: the seal of confession, transubstantiation in the Eucharist, the permanent character infused into the soul by baptism, confirmation and holy orders.
- Moral categories that are so illuminating but rarely spoken of: rash judgement, calumny, detraction. How would we be able to make sense of complex moral issues (war, amputation, police actions) without the principle of double effect?
- The language of sexuality as gift, fidelity, chastity, waiting in patience, promise and fecundity. This language is largely unknown and opens up a breathtaking panorama of joy and generosity. (On a street corner here in Jersey City, I once mentioned to two men that a friend, Dave O’Brien comes every year to speak to our youth about “being chaste.” One of them, a street-wise character, was interested. “Oh yeah? Being chased by who…the cops?”)

The list is endless. As a catechist for over 40 years, I find myself more and more enthralled with these spiritual realities as time passes. My grasp of them becomes more lucid and my interest more inflamed. Students respond to this clarity and passion. The ideas may not be entirely intelligible to them, especially if they live in non-observant homes and are not even minimally immersed in a worshipping, believing, obedient community. But at the very least they sense that this strange man is very excited about something.

May we steep ourselves in the thought patterns of saints like Faustina… and pray for Bishop Conroy and so many others who are confused and misled.