I was recently asked on short notice to give a public lecture for the Newman Center at the University of California, Davis on the topic of "The Religion of Young Americans." Being a sociologist, I quickly reread what I take to be the best, state-of the art data on the topic. Let me list the works and then make a quick observation about the scandal of the lethargy and inaction of the Catholic Church in its ministry and outreach to young adults.

Christian Smith and Melinda Denton's Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers ( Oxford Press, 2005) is our best current data set on the topic of young adolescents' (age 13-17) religion. Religious illiteracy is high and young Americans, while they say religion is important to them, have a difficult time articulating what their religion is. Catholic teenagers seem less devout, less likely to belong to a religious teen group than their Protestant peers (surely because fewer Catholic parishes have them and, compared to Protestant congregations, fewer Catholic parishes have a full-time youth minister!). As the authors note, "One finds little evidence that the agents of religious socialization in this country are being highly effective and successful with the majority of their young people."

Jumping ahead to the current population of young adults, ages 21-40, I turned to Robert Wuthnow's study, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty and Thirty Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion ( Princeton University Press, 2007). Wuthnow's careful data shows that in the period between 1972-76 (when the baby boomers were 21-40) and now, when the millennial generation is, the biggest net gainer religiously has been in the category "non-religious." Young adults who are unmarried do not go to church very often. More disturbing, there are few religious institutional supports for young people as they make core decisions about marriage, childrearing and careers. Young adulthood is the prime time for religious switching or dropout. As Berkeley sociologist Michael Hout has argued, the main difference between religious families which are declining and those holding their own lies in differential retention rates for their young adults.

A third study I worked over, The Pew Religious Landscape Survey of 2008, retells a melancholy story of massive losses in Catholicism. While 24 percent of those surveyed currently say they are Catholic, 31 percent claim they were born and raised Catholics. Two studies specifically looking at the Catholic sample, William D'Antonio et al., American Catholics Today ( Rowen and Littlefield, 2007) and Dean Hoge et al., Young Adult Catholics: Religion in a Culture of Choice ( University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) did little to assuage my anxieties about the church's effectiveness with young adults.

Hoge ended his book with a strong plea for a "preferential option for young adult Catholics." For such an option to be real and not just empty rhetoric, it needs to be translated into diocesan and parish budgets, ministerial personnel, imaginative programs. Resources and energies should be directed toward helping young adult Catholics feel wanted, welcomed and actively involved. Being welcoming to young adults must mean more than hospitality at the parish level (they are not there, anyway!) but entail a vigorous outreach beyond the parish.. In the Hoge sample, young adult Catholics complained of the absence of programs and activities for single young adults.. Perhaps any given parish may lack resources for imaginative outreach programs, but a consortium of neighboring parishes or a diocese could pay for and sponsor them.

I am deeply disturbed by what seems the sheer complacency I see around me in dioceses on this issue.

John Coleman, S.J.

I was musing about the day, now almost five years ago, the War in Iraq began. I had already determined that it was not--as a pre-emptive war and a war where the inspection of the UN inspectors was not uncovering any evidence of weapons of mass destruction--a just war. No war which ended up being called "a war of choice" ever is. So, I decided the day after the war was declared, to join a group of non-violent religious protestors and to stop traffic near the Federal Building in Los Angeles. I was arrested to protest the war (the judge threw the case out a month later).

I was recently worrying about the slide from a national debate about the war to a shifted emphasis on the economy (health care costs; the sub-prime mortgage crisis; lost jobs due to globalization). Would that take off the agenda the need to confront the still morally flawed war (lacking justification according to jus ad bellum criteria of just cause, being purely defensive and a last resort? The "fog of war" has also raised some serious jus in bello arguments about torture and systematic care to protect non-combatants. Now Joseph Stigletz, the Nobel economist and Linda Bilmes have written a new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, which might help connect the dots between the horrendous cost of the war and the economy. Daily military operations in Iraq (prescinding from the added costs of future care of the war wounded) have now cost more than our 12 years in Vietnam and twice the cost of the Korean War. Stiglitz and Bilmes dispel the myth that "wars always benefit the economy." Money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain.

By carefully trying to calculate the real costs of the war in Iraq, Stiglitz and Bilmes suggest that it has already cost the United States 3 trillion dollars (the authors estimate the rest of the world will need to pay out about the same amount). Monthly running costs of the war (at $16 billion) equal the entire annual budget of the United Nations. And the costs will continue to rose: with continuing real and large costs for veterans, the wounded, and aid to Iraq, Stiglitz estimates that a two year continuance would cost half a trillion dollars. To get a context for what this cost entails, it is worth calculating what one of those trillions might have bought instead: 8 million housing units; 15 million public school teachers; healthcare for 530 million children for a year. Those three trillion would have stabilized the U.S. social security fund for half a century.

In this interview in the British newspaper, The Guardian, Stiglitz helps us make the connections between the war and the economy. He notes the reaction to his data on the real costs of the war from US Administration officials: "We don't go to war on the calculations of green eye-shaded accountants or economists." To which Stiglitz responds: " No you don't decide to fight a response to Pearl Harbor on the basis of that, but when there's a war of choice, you at least use it to make sure your timing is right, that you've done the preparation. And you really ought to do the calculations to see if there are alternative ways that are more effective at getting at your objectives".

As Stiglitz notes in the interview, any idea that war can be divorced from the economy is naïve. "A lot of people didn't expect the economy to take over the war as the major issue in the American election, because people did not expect the economy to be as weak as it is. I sort of did. So one of the points in this book is that we don't have two issues in this campaign--we have one issue. Or at least, the two are very, very closely linked together.

Linking the two issues together just might allow American citizens both to get a fresh perspective on a bungled (by everyone's account) and unjust (by the account of Jimmy Carter and Pope John Paul II) war and to help see through how we can now, with all deliberate speed, disengage with some honor and humanity.

John Coleman, S.J.

It is widely assumed in Jesuit circles that, when the Jesuit electors meet in Rome for their thirty-fifth general congregation, they will issue a document treating globalization and environmental issues. The major first focus of GC35 will be, of course, to elect a new superior general of the Jesuits, to replace Peter Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., who is retiring.

Religious groups discussing globalization have not always avoided pitfalls. The British sociologist, Roland Robertson, a specialist on issues of globalization, faults the Christian churches for focusing too uniquely on economic globalization and not enough on its concomitant cultural, religious, political and social faces. In an essay, widely read by sociologists of religion, Robertson accuses the churches of being one-sidedly anti-globalizers. By any account, globalization is a complex, even often paradoxical,

There is, at present, no one full ranging Catholic overview document on globalization. Some rumors suggest that Pope Benedict may issue a social encyclical on the topic. His predecessor, John Paul II, addressed globalization on a number of occasions during his World Day of Peace addresses and mandated the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences to hold two plenary sessions on the topic. In famous throw away lines, John Paul II said : "Globalization, in itself, is neither good nor bad. It will be what people make of it"; "For all its risks, it offers exceptional and promising opportunities precisely with a view to enabling humanity to become a single human family but on the values of justice, equality and solidarity", John Paul II also averred: "We need a globalization of solidarity, too."

Those who fear a one-sided, even caricature, view of globalization could do worse than read a 2006 document of the World Council of Churches, Agape: Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth. The World Council document equates all economic globalization with the Neo-Liberal project (how the World Council would reckon with the support for globalization of people such as Amatyr Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, two Nobel laureates in economics yet critics of the present incomplete phase of globalization, eludes me). It also takes highly controversial stands (opposing all genetically modified food; calling for the Tobin Tax on international currency flows) without presenting ethical or theological arguments for them. Economists might easily scoff at such easy moralizing.

As it turns out, the Jesuits have already produced an excellent and balanced interpretation of globalization, Globalization and Marginalization: Our Global Apostolic Response. An international task force drawn up by the Social Justice Secretariat of the Jesuits, issued a 55 page booklet, Globalization and Marginalization, in February 2006. Alas, it strikes me that way too few Jesuits or their apostolic partners have paid much attention to it. The task force which included social scientists, economists and theologians found it difficult to come to any easy agreement on globalization. For some, its risks and shadow side predominate. For others, the opportunities ingredient in globalization (to become truly a global community; to raise large numbers of people from poverty; to further information and democratic flows) became paramount. Clearly, people see globalization differently from where they stand.

Globalization and Marginalization notes that "inter-connectedness today embraces the areas of economic, cultural, political, social, legal and religious life. All these aspects are affected, interact with each other and exhibit various feedback loops, provoking unexpected and contradictory effects." It wisely rejects " a common but limited understanding of globalization which interprets the phenomenon in purely economic terms and links it to the development of neo-liberal capitalism". Nor, it asserts, is "the relationship between the 'global' and the 'local' unidirectional." Naturally enough, the document does strongly raise up the concern for those who have been marginalized from the globalizing process (the digital divide, the most highly indebted poor nations) but even here, refuses to make globalization the unique culprit for the poor nations' enduring poverty. Globalization and Marginalization presents a sophisticated view of the market as an efficient allocation of resources but fears a 'logic of the market' gone astray from its appropriate economic sphere and the failure to recognize enough the institutional contexts which alone guarantee that the market provides just distributions.

I hope and trust that the delegates to GC35 will take their lead in writing a document on globalization from this previous task force's excellent work. They might also especially focus on two acute, but undeveloped, observations in Globalization and Marginalization: ( 1) "The need for Jesuits to develop a critical global outlook in the people we educate and in our educational institutions". Despite some success stories, few would argue that Jesuit education, as a whole, is conspicuous, at present, in developing such a critical global outlook and ( 2) " The lack of synergy among our educational institutions renders them unable to respond to the issues raised by inter-connectedness" Successful non-governmental organizations in global civil society ( such as, for example, Greenpeace), know how to network in a global world and engage in the building of globalization from below in global civil society.

The paradox is that the Jesuits sit on a stunning global network of schools, parishes, retreat centers, social institutes but seem unable to connect them together or parlay their resources into effective global initiatives. They need to reflect much more on the global organizational logic of networking ( how it is done and what it can achieve). Perhaps, the delegates at GC 35 might focus strongly on this issue and, as well, on something already noted by General Congregation 34: " The relationship between the global and the local within the Society of Jesus may be biased in favor of the local and demand, in order to achieve balance, greater attention to the global". In the end, as Globalization and Marginalization puts it: " Only justice for all, including the marginalized, can assure peace and security for all who depend on a sustainable universe and social stability for life in the

John A. Coleman S.J.