"Some Seed Fell on Good Ground" is Archbishop Dolan's personal communication to those with whom he shares ministry in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

As Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan celebrates Mass in the Chapel of O'Hare airport for the World Youth Day pligrims, a traveler from Marquette University, wearing a T-shirt with a drawing of Pope Benedict XVI, prays. (Catholic Herald photod by Sam Lucero)

“The Church is alive! The Church is young!” How we needed to hear those words of promise and confidence expressed by Pope Benedict XVI in the homily at his installation last spring.

Not that I had any doubts, but the vitality and youth of the Church was so visibly on display in Germany last week when I had the privilege of accompanying close to 275 of our young pilgrims from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to World Youth Day.

Last May, I hosted a wonderful brother bishop from Nigeria, Africa, as a guest. At our Clergy Assembly, he was awestruck when I introduced him to our jubiliarian celebrating his sixty-fifth anniversary of priestly ordination. “You have been ordained three years longer than my oldest priest has even been alive!” exclaimed Archbishop Ignatius. He is blessed with an abundance of vocations, he told us, and his oldest priest is sixty-three! Yes, the Church in Africa, among so many other places, is alive and young.

One of the attractive features of our youth - - here I speak mainly of those in college and in their twenties - - is their freedom from the contagion of ideology. Those of us raised in the days now given chapter headings of “pre-” or “post-” conciliar Catholicism - - I’m thinking mainly of those of us forty-five or older - - so naturally think in terms of “liberal” and “conservative,” or “progressive” and “traditional,” or “pre-” and “post-” Vatican II. I don’t know about you, but I find that our young people are not so tidily categorized, nor do they even understand such labels.

I learned that first hand during my seven happy years as rector at the North American College. Twice each year - - in September and in February - - I would welcome thirty-five priests, mostly my age or older, who would come for the College’s acclaimed three-month sabbatical program. After a week or so, these priests would observe, “Boy, the seminarians here are so conservative!” By that they usually meant that the students had no problem with such matters as clerical garb, a daily Eucharistic holy hour, enjoyed Augustine, Bonaventure, and Thomas as much as Rahner and Lonnerghan, and cheered John Paul II. I would always bet the priests a Birra Peroni, a fine Italian malt beverage, that if they kept an open mind, by the end of their three months they would come to appreciate their future brothers as healthy, wholesome, sincere, open-minded young men. Twice a year I would gladly collect on my wager!

What the priests would usually come to conclude is that these young guys were refreshingly un-ideological, and that we “older” priests err when we try to pigeonhole them into our own rigid categories.

That lesson I learned in Rome has only been affirmed as I enjoy young people here in the archdiocese, whether at Marquette, Alverno, Cardinal Stritch, Marian, Mount Mary, our campus ministry centers, our own St. Francis de Sales Seminary, “Theology on Tap” sessions, our high schools, our confirmation candidates, or just getting to know them around town. They aren’t “conservative” or “liberal.” They are fresh, trusting, spiritually hungry young men and women who want Jesus: Jesus in prayer, in the Bible, in friendships, in the Church, in the Eucharist, in service to those in need. They crave sincerity and a simplicity of life. They are thirsty for the teachings of Jesus, as cherished, believed, and taught by His Church, as clearly and as cogently as possible; even when they admit they have trouble living up to them. They don’t know what “pre-Vatican II” even means, and get confused when we try to explain it to them, warning them about the dangers of “simple answers” and “seeing things always as black and white.”

I started believing it in Rome, as rector, and have only fortified it here in Milwaukee - - and certainly marveled at it last week in Cologne as half-a-million young people gathered: our youth are not ideologues because, for them, truth is not an idea; no, Truth is a Person, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, to be exact. Truth is a person to be loved and embraced, not an ideology to be branded with or argued about. And in this regard our young people have the wisdom of an elder.

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan

"Some Seed Fell on Good Ground" is Archbishop Dolan's personal communication to those with whom he shares ministry in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. For this reason, it is not to be printed in bulletins or newsletters without the prior permission of the Department for Communication.