Four types of younger Catholics? Isch don’t think so

Over on the Commonweal blog, Fr Joseph Komonchak has posted an interesting excerpt from an article in the magazine featuring a conversation between former and current Commonweal editors.

In the excerpt Peter Steinfels, who spent many years at the magazine, muses about the Commonweal readers of the future.

He identifies four groups: the fundamentalists “who want something, whether it’s the Pope or particular texts opr certain forms of ritual, that can be relied upon to provide their identity” for whom “things are not to be challenged; they are to be taken literally”, the neo-conservatives, a group which is “much more questioning and intellectually adventurous but whose identity is very much defined over against the secular liberal culture”.

Steinfels juxtaposes these first two groups with two subsequent groups to which he assigns no handle. They consist of “a very large liberal group that has a Christian and Catholic commitment but are not willing to isolate themselves” who want “to be engaged with the culture in conversation with it, not just in battle with it” and the fourth group “is a more radical and political group that forms an identity largely around very personal, radical social justice commitments.”