The abandonment of the Catholic Church by many young people is one of the most terrible current phenomena. Identifying the causes and remedies of such a situation is, without a doubt, the responsibility of all of us who have children and grandchildren. To this end, we must seek answers from masters of Catholic religious life close to our own times. One of them is Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard (1858–1935), the confessor of several generations of young French people.
Recently, following the publication of a survey regarding the American Catholic community, several reactions have been published concerning one of the most troubling issues: the increasing number of young Catholics leaving the Church.
Usually, I think it wise to treat survey figures with a certain caution (whatever their nature) – they may well be falsified to serve certain political or ideological agendas. However, the real numbers, even if we assume they are only half of those reported, would be just as devastating. Specifically, the survey states – among other things – that 9 out of 10 young Catholics are leaving the Church. As I said: even if it were only 5 out of 10, it would still be just as grave. Regardless of the exact scope of the phenomenon indicated by these numbers, the problem is one of the most serious that can be imagined.
Whatever I might eventually suggest or propose will not be a new diocesan catechetical program or any other similar initiative. For any such project, should it ever bear fruit, we need above all else holy families, parents and grandparents deeply motivated both for their own salvation and for that of their descendants.
Even if we try to counterbalance this data with more positive facts, as Mr. Eric Sammons did in an article in Crisis[i] where he mentioned the large number of converts to the Catholic Church, the phenomenon of young people abandoning religion is still a real tragedy that must be treated with the utmost seriousness. That is why, as Mr. Sammons himself did when he already put forward several working hypotheses, I ask myself – and others – what the causes of this apocalyptic situation might be. I must stress that by asking such a question, I am not interested in circumstantial, superficial, or hasty answers. Rather, I would truly like to know both the causes of this “illness” and the ways in which I might act to protect and strengthen my own children and grandchildren, as well as other Catholic families affected by the current crisis.
In searching for the most fitting answers, I rediscovered through my old reading notes, written more than twenty years ago, an author who, already at the end of the 19th century, had been violently confronted with this dramatic problem. And not only did he face it in his role as confessor to Catholic schools and high schools in France, but he also proposed the deepest response I have ever found to the question I raised above. This author is a French Trappist monk, whom many of you may have already heard of: Jean-Baptiste Chautard (1858–1935).
Unlike many well-known authors, Chautard’s work is relatively small, consisting of only three short writings: a brief history of the Trappist monks, a small commentary presenting the Rule of Saint Benedict as interpreted by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and finally, a booklet first titled Apostolat des catéchisme et vie intérieure: Thèse et exemple (Apostolate of catechism and interior life: Thesis and example), published in 1907. Later reprinted under the much shorter title L’âme de tout apostolat (translated in English as The Soul of the Apostolate), this last work quickly became a true bestseller in Catholic bookstores. By 1937, shortly after the author’s death, the book had already been printed in editions totaling over 250,000 copies – an enormous figure for that era. The only work that had surpassed it was, of course, the extraordinary biography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Histoire d’une âme (The Story of a Soul). In any case, warmly recommended by Popes Pius X and Benedict XV, Dom Chautard’s work is very likely the last great manual of Catholic spiritual theology.
The essence of the entire writing can be summed up by a single word of Our Lord Jesus Christ from the Gospel according to John, a word elevated by Dom Chautard to the rank of absolute axiom for his entire theological vision:
“Without me you can do nothing (Sine me nihil potestis facere – John 15:5)”.
But if that is the case, what does it mean to work together with Christ the Savior so as to truly bear the fruits of holiness? Dom Chautard’s answer, repeated from different angles and with many examples, points us to that essential reality, almost completely forgotten and neglected today, namely the “interior life.” Since I do not intend here to present Chautard’s book in detail, let me return to the terrible question raised before us by surveys that show a disturbing conclusion:
“We are losing nine out of ten cradle Catholics.”[ii]
What, then, is the cause of such a catastrophic phenomenon? Long before us, towards the end of the 19th century, Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard was confronted with the shipwreck of many young Catholic boys and girls. As befits a true shepherd burning with zeal for the salvation of souls, the problem could not leave him indifferent, even though, of course, it did not have the same scale as today. His response is absolutely extraordinary. Personally, I believe it is the deepest answer one could give to this matter. It is all the more precious for us since it comes from someone who had closely observed a number of young girls raised in orphanages until they reached adulthood. Here is Dom Chautard’s account in detail:
“For more than thirty years we have been able to observe, from afar, the progress of two orphanages for little girls, maintained by two separate congregations. Each one had to go through a period of evident decline. To be frank: out of sixteen orphans, all of whom had entered under the same conditions and had left upon coming of age, three from the first house and two from the second had passed, in from eight to fifteen months, from the practice of frequent Communion to the most degraded level of the social scale. Of the eleven others, one alone remained deeply Christian. And yet every one of them had been placed, on leaving, in a good situation.
In one of these orphanages, eleven years ago, there was a single change: a new Mother Superior was installed. Six months afterwards a radical transformation was apparent in the spirit of the house. The same transformation was observed three years later in the other orphanage because, while the same Superior and the same sisters remained, the chaplain had been changed.
Now since that time, not a single one of the poor girls who left, at the age of twenty-one, has been dragged down by Satan into the gutter. Every one, every single one of them without exception, has remained a good Christian.”[iii]
What could explain such incredible changes – true reversals of situation? The text of Dom Chautard that you will read below contains, in essence, the answer to the question regarding the departure of so many young people from the Church today:
“The reason for these results is very simple. At the head of the house, or in the confessional, the spiritual direction previously given had not been really supernatural. And this was enough to paralyze, or at least to cripple, the action of grace. The former superior in one case and the former chaplain in the other, although sincerely pious people, had had no deep interior life and, consequently, exercised no deep or lasting influence. Theirs was a piety of the feelings, produced by their upbringing and environment, made up exclusively of pious practices and habits, and giving them nothing but vague beliefs, a love without strength, and virtues without deep root. It was a flabby piety, all in the show-window, mawkish, mechanical. It was a fake piety, capable of forming good little girls who would not make a nuisance of themselves, affected little creatures, full of pretty curtsies but with no force of character, dragged this way and that by their feelings and imaginations. A piety powerless to open up the wide horizons of Christian life, and form valiant women, ready to face a struggle; all it was good for was to keep these wretched little girls locked up in their cages, sighing for the day when they would be let out. That was the poor excuse for a Christian life produced by Gospel-workers who knew almost nothing of the interior life.”
This is the key, the essence, the core, the crux of the matter, the keystone of any other possible answer: the interior life. For Dom Chautard this phrase is identical with another: supernatural life. And this is nothing more or less than the fulfillment of what Saint Paul the Apostle says in his Epistle to the Galatians:
“And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me (Vivo autem, jam non ego: vivit vero in me Christus – Galatians 2: 20).”
Of course, this supernatural interior life of the Christian contains elements that most people know: the Holy Sacraments, prayer, acts of piety and devotion, etc. But in Chautard’s case, alongside all these, there is a “barometer” that can tell us whether they are truly lived or not: the quality of prayer and of the practice of Christian meditation. In other words, without an intense life of prayer accompanied by continual reflection, also in a state of prayer, on the supernatural truths of the faith, real, profound, deeply rooted supernatural life cannot be attained. This, concretely, was the difference between those young girls – some of whom, after leaving the orphanage, were lost in the labyrinth of the world, and others who remained faithful to Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Church: the latter had been formed by persons with a profound life of prayer, while the former, on the contrary, had been formed in a cold and sterile manner, reduced to the minimum.
Through his experience and reflections, Dom Chautard has given us the essential answer to the question regarding the exodus of young people. What is needed, therefore, are parents profoundly imbued with the supernatural life of grace, just as much as bishops, priests and teachers who must also meet this requirement. Without deep prayer and continual meditation, however, this is impossible. Warmly recommending that you (re)read Dom Chautard’s book,[iv] I myself will explore more deeply, in future articles, his answers and proposals.
And do not worry: whatever I might eventually suggest or propose will not be a new diocesan catechetical program or any other similar initiative. For any such project, should it ever bear fruit, we need above all else holy families, parents and grandparents deeply motivated both for their own salvation and for that of their descendants. The older I grow, the more natural it seems to me that the most important thing, as a father and grandfather, that I must do is to pray for my children and grandchildren. For, as Dom Chautard reminds us, without God – whom we implore through our prayers – we can do nothing.
[i] “Is the Catholic Church Growing or Shrinking in America?” https://crisismagazine.com/editors-desk/is-the-catholic-church-growing-or-shrinking-in-america [Accessed: 05 September 2025].
[ii] Michael Rota and Stephen Bullivant, “Religious Transmission: A Solution to the Church’s Biggest Problem,” Church Life Journal: a Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-solution-to-the-churchs-biggest-problem/ [Accessed: 05 September 2025]; Phil Lawler: “The exodus of young Catholics. Nine out of ten ‘cradle Catholics’ leave:” https://pflawler.substack.com/p/the-exodus-of-young-catholics [Accessed: 05 September 2025].
[iii] I quote the English translation of Dom Chautard’s work available here: https://www.mountsaintbernard.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Dom-Chautard-The-Soul-of-the-Apostolate.pdf [Accessed: 05 September 2025].
[iv] There is available an edition printed by TAN Books: https://tanbooks.com/products/books/the-soul-of-the-apostolate/ [Accessed: 05 September 2025].
