Readers may remember that I wasn’t the biggest fan of The Catcher in the Rye when I read it in high school. But J. D. Salinger’s passing last week brought the book to mind for Father Dwight Longenecker, who says that its message may be even more important for adults than for teens:
Holden’s problem is that he can’t learn how to live in the adult world with it’s implicit compromise, hypocrisy, cant and corruption. His ideals are being challenged. His peers seem to capitulate to the adult world without a struggle and everyone he trusts lets him down except his little sister.
If only Holden had grown up in a home or gone to a school where people understood that the adolescent isn’t a malformed adult, but a child who is facing the terror of adult life with the only armory he has: questions. The adolescent is, above all, one who has questions; important questions; vital questions; absolutely essential questions, and any family or educational system that quenches the questions rather than enabling them and empowering the questioner will either produce adolescents in rebellion or adolescents who have learned that a facade of polite conformity is all that is required in order to succeed. . . .
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Tough questions are especially dangerous in the realm of religion, and yet this is the very realm where the questions are most vital and most important. Too often Catholic catechists have suppressed the questions or been unable to answer them. The adolescent must be able to question his religion or he will never make it his own.
Suddenly I’m feeling much more sympathetic toward poor Holden.
Father Longenecker expanded his thoughts on teaching teens in an article for Crisis Magazine, which we reprinted last month; do read the whole thing.
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