When teenagers don’t need preaching, they need to listen and be disturbed by questions.

Dictated answers to teenagers will not work. They need a relationship and stimuli that will work in them.

This week, we launched a new website with an improved design, faster, clearer navigation, and many other innovations that will make it easier for you to read Postoj. Thanks to our supporters, it’s a big thing that we’ve only been able to do. The 2023 documentary Pope: The Answers offers a picture that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.

In the film available on Disney+, Holy Father Francis is surrounded by young people, which the director mixes very cleverly. An atheist DJ, a non-binary person, a former religious sister who now lives with a girlfriend and no longer considers herself a believer, a Catholic feminist, a woman who sells her erotic photos, or a young man abused by a priest as a child. 

Only one girl is Catholic, who defends the church’s teachings in the debate, perhaps more vehemently than the Pope himself.

There is no protocol, no napkin. The young people meet the head of the Catholic Church in a space outside the Vatican, greet him as if they were an old acquaintance, and are dressed in shorts, caps, and crop tops. They talk openly with the head of the Catholic Church about topics that interest or worry them.

More than what the Pope answered or did not answer the questions, it is surprising that he was willing to follow such a format at all and endured it. He emerges from the debate in an uneasy composition, like a pope who does not raise an eyebrow because he is not surprised by reality. He knows her. And besides, it doesn’t convince.

Even if he speaks his mind, he accepts young people with what they bring before him, and he can bear it. Many cry in front of him when they talk about their difficulties. He encourages them, and sometimes, he looks like he is about to cry.

No doubt

Teenagers have always been critical of authorities and the system. Unlike its predecessors, today’s generation has experienced a more democratic upbringing. Plus, it grows up in the Internet age, so it is confronted from a young age with opinions contrary to those instilled in it from an early age. It is all the more difficult for him to accept the views of authorities just because they are official teachings or rules. In addition, young people today do not hide their views; many are willing to present them publicly.

Kaja Kováčová, the mother of a first-year student at the church gymnasium, was angry when her son got a bad grade in religion because he asked. According to the religious sister who teaches him, there is no doubt about religion. “It is very surprising if, in religion class, instead of dialogue or thought-provoking questions, the student receives the answer that there is nothing to question in religion class,” he tells Postoj about his experience.

According to Kováčová, the teenage age is perfect for accompanying children and thus helping them pass through a particular developmental stage of faith.

“Sometimes we adults may be restrained by fear in order to pass on the faith to children as well as possible, but we unknowingly put pressure on them because we would like them to understand things right away. However, that is not possible, there is a lack of personal experience and steps along one’s path… That is why there are often shortcuts in communication: things are this way and that way, end of debate, full stop,” thinks the teenager’s mother.

According to her, the transmission of faith is impossible if we close our eyes to the reality in which young people live. “On the contrary, accepting children with their problems means bringing faith to where they are right now. After all, even God himself desires to be a part of every area of ​​our lives,” he concludes.

Salesian Marián Husár considers it essential that young people experience that someone listens to them and understands their opinions. When a teenager speaks his mind honestly or even with “youthful impudence” and encounters rejection or condemnation, he shuts down and warns the priest.

Young people must be guided and taught to critically distinguish where the information that influences them comes from. “They must be taught to explore the palette of all attitudes and opinions that surround us. To discover and distinguish, I can honestly search,” he adds.

Teenagers need to justify why the church teaches the way it does, according to the experience of Ľubica Nogová, who lectures in schools on topics from relationship and sex education. “I feel that for a child to accept the teaching of the church just because it is the teaching of the church, he must have grace from God,” she tells Postoj, adding that she prefers to argue with facts and experience.“My perception is that they are not open to seeking the truth. They are mostly satisfied that they have ‘their truth’, their value system, which works for them and brings them comfort.”

Like Husár, she points out that young people must be listened to. “Accept them even with ‘hair’ and give them good questions that can disturb them properly, but point to the truth,” describes her approach to Nogová from the catechetical office of the Bratislava Archdiocese. 

“The basis of our program is that we want to show the students what beauty, what pearls they have inside. And the whole approach follows from that. They have good in them and are naturally drawn to it, but not all of their resources are accessible in an attractive form ,” he adds.

Teacher Štefan Murárik from the Piarist Grammar School in Nitra has set three values ​​when teaching religion. “I will tell the students: The first dimension is your world, the second dimension is my world, and the third dimension is the teachings of the Catholic Church. 

I will respect your opinions or attitudes; I expect that you will respect mine and that we will respect the church’s teachings. So we don’t have to agree with him; the important thing is that we understand him and know his implications,” Murárik describes his model, which he believes provides a good space for discussion.

He mentioned a recent teaching example when students argued that masturbation is healthy because it prevents cancer. “They read it somewhere, accepted it, and acted accordingly. When you open up relevant categories for them to think about masturbation, like self-esteem, sexuality, and relationships, they can suddenly discover what they think about the subject. Their conscience usually works correctly,” says the high school teacher.

Based on his experience, he claims that young people generally do not know how to debate very well, and their arguments are based on one or two opinions that they heard somewhere and liked. 

“My perception is that they are not open to seeking the truth. They are mostly satisfied that they have ‘their truth’, their value system, which works and brings them comfort. So they don’t often enter into confrontation, because they have an internalized idea of ​​the world – you have your truth, I have mine, so it’s good if we tolerate each other,” he said.

However, he adds that he does not want anyone to change his opinion. “In my opinion, changing values ​​or attitudes is an internal process and cannot be forced. It happens in a dialogue with one’s inner self. When someone recognizes some ‘truth’, it should happen freely in the intimacy of inner discernment. All debates are only impulses, stimuli,” explains Murárik.

What shapes attitudes

According to the people we spoke to about the topic, social networks, movies, music, and the environment of the family from which they come have the greatest influence on young people’s attitudes. “Somewhere under the opinions taken from peer groups, from social networks or culture, there are still attitudes and opinions that they take from their family—they return to them later in life,” says Murárik. 

According to Noga, young people are influenced by the patterns of behavior they have experienced at home in the formation of opinions in the field of relationships and sexuality.

In her book Mama Bear Apologetics, American author Hillary Morgan Ferrer offers parents arguments against the views that prevail in society and conflict with Christianity, the so-called cultural lies. Our children today are exposed to them much more than was the case for generations before them and at a significantly younger age.

As proof of the growing pressure of a society that is not inclined to Christianity, Ferrer cites the statistics of the ever-increasing “exodus” of young people from Christian churches during high school or college. Parents should, therefore, be ready for these questions to come and prepare themselves and their children for their encounters with different points of view. How? 

Ferrer guides parents in teaching children from an early age to apply biblical truths to ordinary life situations, thus preparing the soil of their hearts so that ideas that they will encounter daily among classmates, in culture, or on the Internet are not easily sown in it.

“We don’t want our children to live in fear but to be able to distinguish. We want them to be able to see Christ in art, movies, science, history, and music because he is the Lord of everything. But we don’t want them to assume that everything they encounter in art, movies, science, history, or music tells the truth,” the author explains in the book.

When debating with teenagers and young people about questions of faith, according to Salesian Marian Husár, we must focus on the beauty it offers us, which comes from the relationship.

“The beauty lies in meeting the one who loves us and wants to accompany us through life. And he is not primarily morality or dogma but a relationship,” says the priest. Teenagers will only let us into their world if they feel confident we will be accepted without judgment or criticism.

The Holy Father Francis in the documentary Pope: Answers on this topic inspires with his approach – to accept young people, listen to them, try to understand them, and not be afraid of their questions. Only then does the space for shaping attitudes open up.