In 2010, as more and more millennials left college and began striking out on their own, a meme phrase gained popularity: adulting. These new adults saw doing the basic responsibilities of an adult in the modern world as kind of a play act. They didn’t quite see themselves as adults. So doing things like eating healthily, cooking one’s own food, opening a bank account, applying for a mortgage, paying taxes – these things were novel and remarkable. And so people remarked on social media, as was the custom.
The phrase has largely died out. It’s seen by this new crop of young adults as passé. It’s no longer cool to admit that you can’t do the things that an adult can do. That does not change the fact that many young adult Americans still cannot do the basic things that adults can do. So adulting has died, but the problem that caused it still remains.
A parallel trend came about at the same time as adulting: a tendency of new adults to look back on their education with resentment, insisting that they were underprepared for this new life that adulthood demanded. For instance: “Why didn’t my school teach me how to do my taxes?” New adults felt their own inability and wanted someone to blame, so they looked at the only institutions that had ever formed them: their schools.
Modern young adults increasingly look to higher-order institutions to give them their formation. The internet is rife with Catholic blogs lamenting that the Catholic Church failed to teach them certain aspects of marriage and people lamenting that the government doesn’t provide certain basic necessities. We expect the Church and the government to reach us. But this is not how it works.
Society is a hierarchy of institutions. At the bottom is the individual. Just above him is the family. Above the family are the middle institutions: the extended family, the neighbourhood, the parish. Above those are the higher-order institutions: the state, the nation and, increasingly, the global order.
The Catholic principle of subsidiarity insists that these middle institutions are the proper place for human formation. Pius XI said in Quadragesimo Anno:
“It is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and a disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organisations can do.”
The reality is that many aspects of adult life – marriage, taxes, cooking, etc – are properly mediated to us by smaller institutions of society: our family, extended family and our community. The orders of society we experience on a daily basis are supposed to be lower and middle institutions.
Liberalism, the dominant ideology of our modern world, hates middle institutions. It seeks to continuously draw power up from these middle institutions into the higher-order institutions like the nation and, increasingly, the global world order. The only two strata of society that liberalism recognises as legitimate are the individual and the nation-state. These middle institutions are a threat to it.
Catholic liberals might include the family as important, but it’s still difficult for these Catholic liberals to imagine or support middle-level institutions as having any kind of legitimacy outside of being bureaucratic outposts of the larger institution. The diocese is a subsidiary of the Vatican, the parish a subsidiary of the diocese and so on. These middle institutions have been co-opted by the nation and, increasingly, the global order.
The Catholic principle of subsidiarity is not a suggestion that we ought to give the family more autonomy because that’s the nicer thing to do. It’s the principle that only with its autonomy can the family do what it is called to do, which is form the children in its care. Only when the parish has its autonomy can it be the place where families are brought together into the body of Christ.
Subsidiarity is not an ought to be. It’s a description of where this kind of formation does happen. And without these institutions, this kind of formation does not happen, which we have seen with the phenomenon of adulting.
The solution, then, for Catholics, is to focus on these middle-level institutions: the family, including the extended family, and the parish – which is the most overlooked by Catholics.
The best parishes I have seen operate as a “family of families”. My own parish is a complicated network of families, family friend groups, grandparents, and so on. Different families get together practically two or three times a week outside of Sunday. The kids all play together, and the adults help form the kids, and the older ones have conversations with the different parents.
Among this intergenerational community, young people are able to ask tough questions and transition from childhood into adulthood with ease, knowing the things that they need to know. And if they don’t know how to do something, they have someone to tell them how to do it.
Both the family and the parish are being hollowed out by liberalism, and the job is almost complete, unfortunately.
Catholics ought to focus on empowering the parish. It is the largest middle institution most of us can influence effectively. We should also focus on the family as the primary method to rebuild the institution of the parish.
