Friends, I am grateful to share a recent interview I had with Julianne Stanz. Her work in promoting evangelical catechesis and discipleship at the parish level, diocesan level, and beyond is well known. Some of you know her through her written works, Start with Jesus: How Everyday Disciples Will Renew the Church, Braving the Thin Places: Celtic Wisdom to Create a Space for Grace, and The Catholic Parents’ Survival Guide: Straight Answers to Your Kids’ Toughest Questions. She is a nationally known speaker, retreat leader, storyteller, and the Director of Outreach for Evangelization and Discipleship for Loyola Press and a consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Let’s dive in, and thank you, Julianne, for your life, work, and 15 (20 really) minutes with us.

Susan Windley-Daoust (SWD): Julianne, welcome to our 15 minutes series! You are so much a part of everything that pointed towards this Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. I know you were there; you were speaking! I’d love to know where you really saw the Spirit most clearly at work in those days of the Congress, because people said it was a truly inspired event. What did you see?

Julianne Stanz (JS): Yes, it was incredible. I’ve been part of the executive team for the National Eucharistic Revival since the beginning, so it was incredible to see what we had dreamed and planned and prayed for and what actually happened. I think as wonderful as our own plans are, the plans that the Holy Spirit has and makes are far better and far more deep and creative and exactly what people need.

I actually was talking with some of the bishops also on the executive team recently, and I could tell that one of them was having kind of a moment on the last night of Congress because his face was very moved. And so I went up to him and I said, Bishop, what’s going on? What are you seeing? And he said, I’m having a moment of repentance. And I said, repentance?

And he said, yes, repenting because what the Lord had in store for us was far better than what we could have planned and dreamed. Repenting of my own unbelief that this event could have come together in the way that it did.

[…] I think it was a moment of renewal, of hope for people. Probably my favorite moment from the event was the family room, the parents exhausted with six children in tow, or, you know, whatever their family composition was, together in adoration, and being present in front of the Lord. And I just had this moment of, Lord, we give you that kind of mess of our lives, and you bless us anyway.

And so to me, it was those moments, those spaces where families were present before the Lord. That was, I think, unique and beautiful.

SWD: Yeah, that’s interesting. My husband was there actually helping with some of the family events. They asked him to volunteer at the last moment, and so he jumped at it, and he said the same thing.

He said it was just such a renewing moment to see families come before the Lord in such a wholehearted way. And yes, it’s messy, but that’s family life, isn’t it?

JS: It’s also holiness. I get tempted to think holiness sometimes is very neat and cut and dry, but it isn’t. True holiness is kind of embracing the wild adventure of what God has in store for us, not what we want. And so I think I saw a lot of that, actually, families embracing the messiness of what their lives look like and allowing their encounter to bring them to new heights of holiness and greatness in the small moments of taking care of each other in the midst of 60,000 people.

It was unbelievable. It was really incredible.

SWD: That is incredible. And also, I think, incredibly consoling, actually, that to talk about holiness does not mean “no mess.” Because if that’s the measure, I’m never going to get there, right? But the Lord gives us the path to holiness through the messiness, and no piece is wasted. 

JS: I love that. Yes, no piece is ever wasted. That’s beautiful.

SWD: So what do you think still needs to happen in the Eucharistic revival? I mean, it’s not like it ended in July. My sense was actually that it just began.

JS: Yes. So this is something that I think your readers probably don’t realize. A lot of people thought that the culmination of the event was the Eucharistic Revival Congress, but actually it was the centerpiece.

I describe it as like a wheel. The hub in the middle is the Congress, and then all of the folks that radiate out are the various initiatives, like small faith sharing groups in the parishes, encounter and adoration nights, which have been, there are so many resources I don’t think people realize on the National Eucharistic Revival website for parishes. One of them is on how to have an Encounter night, which I think we need to get better at as a church, and providing spaces for people who maybe are a little afraid, or unsure about a mass experience, but they want to get their toe in the water. So these encounter nights are great. 

There’s the Walk with One initiative, which prepares and helps people to evangelize one-on-one. And that’s where I have been really reflecting on, you know, for this movement to really grow, it has to be carried in the feet, and in the hands, and in the voices of people who were there, but also a lot of people who weren’t there, but were inspired by that. We won’t just talk about evangelization, but people will experience evangelization. 

But to get to the heart of your question, I was really praying about this last night: mature discipleship is always expressed in acts of charity and deeds of great love. And I think we will see the Eucharistic Revival reach its fullest expression when it becomes evident that we as an organization, that we as an institution, that we as the Catholic Church, as the body of Christ, take care of people, that we love differently. And that will be visible to all.

I really feel like a lot of the conversation around the Eucharistic Revival has centered on renewal of devotional and liturgical life, which it should, but that should also lead us out onto the streets. And there’s a beautiful quote from Pope Benedict that says, may our holy hour with the Lord lead us out to make a holy hour with the poor.

And so I feel like that is where we’ll see that groundswell of they will know “they’re Christians by their love,” that we will see that in the coming years, because that’s where mature discipleship always goes. It’s always rooted in concrete acts of love and service, particularly to those on the margins.

SWD: I absolutely adore that, Julianne. You know, in so much of the work that I do with parishes, I find parishes really struggle with trying to hold together the social mission and the evangelical mission of the church. And there is a connection here that is so much deeper than the quid pro quo that you want to rightly avoid, right? We never want the price of our material support of the poor to be a forced conversion. We don’t want that. We want people to have an honest and completely free decision for Christ.

But on the other hand, I feel parishes have this struggle to live the social mission and the evangelical mission together. It seems to feel to some of them like they need to support one or the other, but not both. And you just articulated so beautifully, how they are both necessary: they are joined together in the mind of God and in our call through our baptism, right?

JS: And in the witness of the saints. I mean, the best saints honor the Lord, spend time with Him, listen to Him, but then we’re out and about–you know, you look at Saint Francis of Assisi, “Rebuild my church.” Yes, he started with physically building the church, but faithfulness to that command led him out to identifying more closely with the poor.

I think of, you know, even Carlo Acutis, one of our up-and-coming saints…the word on the street, he’s going to be canonized during the Jubilee year. You know, I think his great act of service was the poverty of people who did not know anything about Eucharistic miracles. And his mother talked about his great identification with those who are actually materially poor.

This is something Mother Teresa talked a lot about. There are materially poor, those who do not have enough food to eat, but then there are those who are spiritually poor. And I feel like we, our parishes don’t spend as much time reflecting on the material and the spiritual poor that are in the midst, and really having a conversation around how to do, like you said, how to bring greater integration in our evangelization efforts so that it isn’t this false dichotomy, which it was never meant to be.

SWD: Right. Very good. You know, I’m going to jump into another question, which may be related or maybe is not, you tell me. But I know another issue that I’ve heard you speak on, it’s clearly on your heart. We have a lot of statistics coming out that young women are disaffiliating from the Christian faith, from any religious identification at all, at greater numbers than men, which goes against a lot of the narrative that we’ve been hearing for many years. Could you unpack that a little bit? What do you think is going on there?

JS: Yes, so this is something that’s been on my radar, as a woman in the church, but also I think it’s of concern to everybody. We’re concerned about everybody, men and women. I have a daughter, but I have sons as well, right?

So I feel like you need to qualify the conversation so that people who are listening are like, oh, you know, where is this conversation going to go? I wanted to look at the data on this. I was at a USCCB meeting about 10 years ago, and we were having a very robust conversation about the need to engage young men in faith–which I absolutely believe is critical.

And we haven’t always at the church really looked at how to do that well. And a particular bishop said to me, what are your thoughts on this? I said, I believe in John Paul II’s great insight on the complementarity of sexes means that we need to talk about young men and women. Because there was very early research that suggested that women were disassociating quicker than men. And this particular bishop did not believe it. And he actually sort of said, I need to talk to you about this, because I’m very skeptical.

And afterwards, I pulled up the trend line. And we started to look at them together. And women are, young women between, at the time, it was the ages of like 19 and 34, were starting to disassociate at alarmingly quicker rates than men. 

What we had seen was women had, in the trend lines, had always kind of been steady, there had been a slight decline, and then it had evened out. Men had like this dramatic decline from the 60s and 70s, and was continuing that decline…. But there was a national study compiled with more than 50,000 people. So this is all Christian people since 2012. And the share of young women who identify as agnostic, atheists, or nothing, has overtaken that of young men. Researchers say this trend cannot be written off as an anomaly. It’s a massive concern for us.

And then recently, there was a new study, the Survey Center on American Life, their 2023 survey, the most recent survey. And it found that amongst Generation Z–this is the newest generation of Catholics– 54% of those who left the church are female. So for the first time, more women are leaving the church than men.

Here’s the second part of it. Meanwhile, nearly four in 10 Generation Z women identify as religiously unaffiliated compared to a third of Gen Z males. So what we’re actually finding is Generation Z males are actually more interested in church than young women.

So the second part of this question is, what’s behind the numbers? And this is where if you had a dollar for every theory, you’d be a millionaire here. But I think that there’s a couple of things to consider.

I feel like one of the reasons young women are drifting from the Church is that we often treat the women as help in the church. They’re going to do the funeral lunches, and they’re going to be our catechists. And, you know, whenever we need someone to step up and help, the women are there! But I don’t know if we often treat them as leaders of change and renewal in the church. And so a lot of young women–they’ve looked at every area of influence in the world that they can work in. As you know, emerging leaders are often identified and are often grown. And I’m not sure that we in the church do that. We don’t look at young women and say, there’s a potential leader. How can we form them to that challenge? But I think sometimes our attitude is, we just expect that they’re going to show up. And then we’re just going to hand them a book, and they’re going to be a master catechist. And so I think that’s one of the reasons, though I don’t think it’s the sole reason.

I think there’s a lot of different reasons for the disaffiliation. But also, there’s quite a bit of distrust of institutions among young women. For sure with men too, but particularly with women. And I think part of the movements like Me Too, and looking at the sex abuse crisis, and how deeply relational women are, the seeds of what we’re seeing now, were not just sown with Gen Z, but with their mothers, with female Gen Xers, right? And so I think we miss this. We never talk about the Gen Xers.

SWD: That’s so true.

JS: And so I am on the cusp of that, right? I’m caught between that Gen X/Millennial demographic. But a lot of Gen X women say to me, you know, we grew up at a time where we were given scant attention in the church.

And so I’d love to hear what you think too, Susan, you’re such a bright, brilliant woman. What are some of the reasons you think that you’ve heard from young women?

SWD: I think you’re onto something, Julianne. I mean, I think that there is a great deal of work outside of the church focusing on raising young women up. And many of these young women  are working with each other, to raise each other up. They’re taking leadership as a normative. And there are absolutely positions for leadership within the Church, if you are a woman. They do exist. But I think the pathway to those realities are very fuzzy at best, right?

So I think that’s absolutely one piece where we could spend a great deal more attention. And I think it really also links back to we still have work to do in terms of implementing our great theology of the laity of the church. 

The laity have an honor, a privilege, a call that is distinct: to sacralize the world. And yet, enormous numbers just do not know that and it’s not communicated very well. But we’ve come a long way, to be perfectly candid, since the Second Vatican Council, and we still have a long way to go. We just need to keep doing what we’re doing and not shy away from where we’re lacking, right? 

To look at statistics like these regarding young women disaffiliating and saying, this is happening. We simply can’t ignore this. Let’s dig into this. Let’s ask the people who are involved as to what’s going on in their hearts and in their minds. And let’s address it because Jesus Christ wants every single one of these human beings, male and female, for a glorious life and has a marvelous plan for each of them. Young women are part of that incredible call too, but we’ve not been communicating that to them as well as we should. 

So that’s my brief thought, but yes, I’m all on board with more attention here, because I think the biggest thing that we need to be doing with our Gen Z population is that we need to give them voice. We need to be talking with them, not about them. We need to be listening to them. I think there’s way too much presumption going on about what they are thinking. And nobody likes that. Nobody likes to be “presumed.” We need to open those lanes of communication more widely than they are now.

JS: I think that’s so true. And one of the reasons I’m grateful that we’re having this conversation is I feel like when you even broach this conversation in Church, people start to get very nervous…like it’s going to become oppositional or you’re going to go into uncharted territory. You’re going to be talking about, you know, just to throw it out there, ordination or the diaconate or all of those hot button issues.

And to me, this is the conversation, the real conversation is about how do we uphold and listen to the newest generations of Catholics and hear of their experiences. And I do think that there’s a more unique style of relational ministry that’s pertinent for men and for women, and that those nuances are not often taken into account when we plan and work for evangelization. There are some pieces that are very universal, but there are ways that people evangelize differently, uniquely, not just with their charisms and state, but, you know, from the God-given gift.

And to me, the fact that we always seem to go in that direction of the more hot button issues actually does a disservice to the conversation that you and I are having here today, which is how do we become a church that listens well, that walks with people, that uplifts the dignity of both men and women, but also listens to the unique needs of women that may feel they’ve been passed over or stereotyped as “the help” or that there isn’t a clear pathway to leadership.

You know, the one thing I came back to this bishop about after I presented him with the data about women disaffiliating–and I said, “This isn’t about choosing sides, you know, this is about evangelization for all. It’s Jesus for all.” But I continued, “The very fact that you stopped and asked and questioned your own assumption as to whether these premises are true or not, to me, that’s a great sign that you want to engage with the issues at hand.” And he said, “Oh, absolutely- we need to reach our youngest generations and we need the gift, not just of what women have but who women are.” And so I think it’s a great conversation. And I think it’s one that we need to be having more often, particularly with younger women, too.

SWD: Thank you. I appreciate putting it in that kind of context.

And I think you’re absolutely right. I think there are too many people who are afraid to have the conversation because they’re afraid of where it will go. And that’s unfortunate. Because look, there are a lot of us who want to have this conversation, about why women are disaffiliating from a Catholic identity, and it may not be going where you think it’s going. We’re not interested, actually, in what’s considered to be “the hot button issue.” We’re interested in actually sharing Jesus Christ effectively with people who need to hear his good news. We all need that good news. 

JS: Amen, sister.

SWD: We could go on about this a long time. But to be candid, I call this “15 minutes” and we’ve gone more than a little over. So I think we’re going to have to end it there. People know where Julianne can be found on the internet. And you could ask her more about it. And you could also ask me more about it. And let’s have the great conversation together. Amen?

Thank you, Julianne.

JS: You’re welcome. Great conversation, Susan. I enjoyed chatting with you. Your readers can catch up with me at www.juliannestanz.com