Get the Catholic New World eNewsletter

Advertisements ad

The InterVIEW

Popular author, host says chastity is vital to future

Pope Benedict XVI accepts a copy of “The New Faithful” from author Colleen Carroll Campbell earlier this year.Photo provided

A regular feature of The Catholic New World, The InterVIEW is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today's Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

In 2000, Colleen Carroll Campbell won a $50,000 Phillips Journalism Fellowship that allowed her to take a year’s leave from her newspaper job and travel the country, researching and writing about a little-noticed trend that had attracted her attention: the appeal of traditional religion and morality to a growing number of young Americans. The result of her research was “The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy.”

Now a fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, Campbell frequently discusses issues of religion, politics, and culture in the print and broadcast media. Print and broadcast journalists from the U.S. and abroad have interviewed her for their publications and television broadcasts.

Campbell hosts her own international television and radio show, “Faith & Culture,” which airs twice weekly on the Eternal Word Television Network and EWTN Global Radio Network and Sirius Satellite Channel 160.

She will be the keynote speaker at the sixth-annual benefit dinner for the archdiocese’s Chastity Education Initiative on Nov. 22. Campbell answered the following questions by e-mail.

Catholic New World: When you visit Chicago next month you will speak at a dinner that raises funds to support chastity education initiatives in the archdiocese. This is one of those countercultural issues the Catholic Church supports. Why do you feel chastity is a good practice for young people?

Colleen Carroll Campbell: Promotion of the virtue of chastity is vital to the future of the pro-life and pro-family movement. In our sex-saturated society, it’s easy for young people to get the idea that sex is just another contact sport, devoid of deeper meaning or moral implications. That attitude has led to devastating social consequences since the sexual revolution, including alarming rates of sexually transmitted diseases and abortion and a devaluation of marriage that has resulted in our 50 percent divorce rate and widespread confusion about the nature of marriage itself.

Abstinence education aims at addressing one piece of this puzzle, but it often falls short because it emphasizes the negative — what young people should not do — rather than offering them a holistic vision of the meaning and purposes of sex.

That’s where chastity education comes in. Faith-based chastity education introduces young people to a positive vision of human sexuality as a gift from God that must be treated with reverence. Young people who embrace chastity frequently describe it as a liberating, not confining, choice — a choice that frees them to experience love and life as God intended.

CNW: During Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States in April, you commentated for the New York Times. What do you think his first trip here accomplished?

Campbell: Pope Benedict’s trip was an extraordinary success, though I think we are only beginning to understand its full impact and it may take many more years to fully assess that.

Perhaps the most important thing the Holy Father offered the Catholic Church in America was hope — a reminder that despite our troubles and turbulent times, we can count on Jesus Christ to remain faithful to us and to watch over his Church.

CNW: You wrote several times about his effect on our young people. Would you share a little about that?

Campbell: Pope Benedict XVI, like Pope John Paul II before him, has an extraordinary and somewhat surprising rapport with the young. We have seen it in his World Youth Day appearances in Germany and Australia as well as his papal youth rally in Yonkers last spring.

Like his predecessor, Pope Benedict is unafraid to boldly proclaim the Gospel message and the fullness of Church teachings to the young. And the young respond with enthusiasm and gratitude. They’re hungry for genuine witnesses to Christian hope in an often dark and dispiriting world, and Benedict offers them that witness. He’s a father figure to them, an authentic man of God in an artificial age. He inspires them.

CNW: In 2002 you wrote the book “The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy.” Six years later, does this trend continue? What have you noticed in the last six years?

Campbell: In many ways, the trend I chronicled in “The New Faithful” is stronger today than when I conducted my initial research. I’ve continued to follow many of the young adults I profiled in my book. They are embracing impressive commitments to lives of service and sacrifice for the Gospel. They are forming faithful families, embracing vocations to the priesthood and religious life and working overtime to create a culture of life in America.

Many are putting their faith-based, prolife convictions into action in the political realm, academia, journalism, business, the entertainment industry and, of course, their own parishes and neighborhoods. As they age, they are moving into more leadership positions and exerting more influence within the Church and the wider culture. And they continue to evangelize their peers and speak powerfully to seekers in their own generation. These new faithful are creating a “domino effect” of sorts as they spread the Gospel peer-to-peer and friendto- friend. The existence and growth of their grassroots movement is a sign of hope for the future of our Church and our nation.

For more information about the Chastity Education Initiative and next month’s benefit dinner, call (312) 751-5355, visit www.respectlifechicago.org or e-mail [email protected]. For more information about Colleen Carroll Campbell visit www.colleen-campbell.com.