A couple of Substack articles and extended social media posts have caught my attention in the past few days. One was from a priest of the Baby Boom generation; another was from a prominent Catholic voice who is a Millennial. Both were lamenting the same thing: their generations seem to be talking past each other. Their experiences of Catholicism, their instincts about the Church, even their visions of what vibrant faith looks like can sometimes seem like oil and water.
I’m not going to name them, because they could be hundreds of people. This is a common refrain. As a former director in a chancery, I saw this generational mystification up close and personal on a daily basis.
Furthermore, anyone who has spent much time in a Catholic parish knows the division is real. The liturgical, devotional, and communal practices embraced by many Boomers can be quite different from those embraced by many Millennials. And it isn’t always “live and let live.” Sometimes the disagreement becomes downright hostile. It shouldn’t; better listening and greater empathy would help. But here we are, one body in Christ, where the limbs are uncoordinated (at best).
I have a solution: hire a Gen Xer.
Don’t make age the primary qualification on the job description–it’s not legal, for one. But I am serious about this: one reason these two generations can have so much difficulty understanding one another is that there is a small and often overlooked generation standing between them—Generation X. The practical generation. The latchkey generation. The Baby Bust. The missing link. And, in full disclosure, I am one of them myself.
Gen X has had a surprisingly small leadership footprint in American Catholicism. There are several reasons for that—and one very important reason Gen X may be unusually well positioned to help alleviate some of our current Church divisions.
Where Did Gen X Go?
First, there simply aren’t that many of us. Gen X is substantially smaller than the Baby Boom generation and smaller than the Millennial generation that followed it. We are, after all, the generation born during the steep decline in American birth rates after the Baby Boom.
Fewer people altogether means fewer people available to move into leadership vacancies. And because the generations on either side of us are larger, leadership succession does not necessarily move neatly from Boomers to Gen X. When a Boomer steps down, the next leader may be a Gen Xer—or may quite reasonably be a Millennial.
Second, Gen X has faced an unusual leadership bottleneck. The oldest Gen Xers are now around 60 years old. Some are approaching Social Security eligibility—and many are still waiting for leaders from the previous generation to retire.
This is not simply a Church phenomenon. Boomers are healthier than many previous generations were at comparable ages, many have remained professionally engaged, and many genuinely enjoy their work. That is not a criticism. Why retire if you love what you are doing and still have something to contribute? But it has led to fewer natural openings for Gen Xers to move into leadership.
The same dynamic exists in parishes. Even after retirement, Boomers form an enormous share of the volunteer workforce in Catholic life. God bless them for it. Many parishes would lose half their ministries tomorrow without retired Baby Boomers showing up to make them happen. But longer careers and involvement also mean fewer natural moments of leadership transition. And when the generation behind you is substantially smaller, it becomes easier for that generation to be skipped.
There is a third reason, and it is more subtle: Catholic pastoral formation changed. Today there is enormous and deserved respect for apostolic formation organizations such as FOCUS, Saint Paul’s Outreach, and similar ministries. Some Catholic colleges have also intentionally built strong cultures of discipleship and evangelization. These experiences have formed generations of young Catholic leaders through an unusually powerful combination of formation, mentorship, mission, community, and hands-on ministry.
Most Gen X Catholics never had anything quite like that. If we felt called to work for the Church, many of us pursued academic formation: an MTS, an MA in theology, pastoral ministry, religious education, or a related field. We went to Notre Dame, Boston College, Catholic Theological Union, and dozens of other Catholic institutions. We learned theology and pastoral practice, and then entered parish, diocesan, educational, or nonprofit work.
In the early 2000s, some of the very programs that prepared people for parish ministry disappeared. I taught at two Catholic universities that once offered youth ministry or pastoral ministry degrees or concentrations. Both were eventually dropped by administrators who considered them insufficiently marketable. (Despite the fact that we had 100% placement post-graduation…but I digress.)
Millennials and Gen Z, however, increasingly had access to something different: robust apostolic networks that combined spiritual formation with leadership development and actual missionary practice. There is extraordinary value in learning ministry by actually doing ministry, under the guidance of people who know how to form missionary disciples.
But those networks also created something Gen X generally did not have: relationships, recognizable formation pipelines, and communities of leaders who could recommend one another for positions. So when a Baby Boomer Catholic leader retires today, the instinct may quite naturally be to look toward someone formed through one of these newer evangelization-forward ecosystems. Again, that is not bad. But it can mean that Gen X quietly disappears from the succession line, caught in a generational timing gap they did not create and could not control.
A Missing Hermeneutic of Continuity
You could think, this is unfortunate…but is this really accelerating division in the Church? I argue: possibly, yes.
In nearly every era, one generation succeeds another. The succeeding generation does not merely replace the previous one. It absorbs something from it, rejects some things, reinterprets others, and eventually hands something on. Occasionally that succession is disrupted by war, disease, or some other enormous social upheaval.
For Gen X, the disruption was demographic and cultural. We were born during a dramatic collapse in fertility (we are more than anything else the post-Pill generation), and amid sweeping social change. And in the Catholic Church, that cultural change coincided with the implementation and reception of the Second Vatican Council. That created an unprecedented ecclesial situation.
Borrowing a theological phrase, we have something of a missing “hermeneutic of continuity” at the parish level. Catholic theologians use that language when talking about how the Church receives and interprets her tradition: development does not require rupture. One era builds upon another. Popes have different emphases, personalities, and pastoral priorities, but Catholic teaching remains rooted in the revelation of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Something analogous should happen between generations in the life of the Church, but sometimes it hasn’t. This is one of those times. Many Baby Boomers were the first generation to experience the enormous liturgical, devotional, institutional, and cultural changes that followed Vatican II. Indeed, they helped craft it. Many Millennials encountered a very different Catholic landscape: a Church consciously rediscovering traditional practices, intentional discipleship, evangelization, and a stronger sense of Catholic identity amid an increasingly post-Christian culture. Those two generations can look at each other and think, *How can you possibly believe that is what the Church needs?*
Enter Gen X: the missing bridge
Just to be clear: Gen Xers are not necessarily moderates, whatever that means anymore. We are not automatically neutral. A Gen Xer may love Gregorian chant or the St. Louis Jesuits, the rosary or charismatic prayer, social-justice Catholicism or the Dead Theologians Society—or some combination no generational stereotype can predict.
That is not the point. The point is that Gen X is unusually capable of “ecclesial bilingualism.” We came of age in the Church shaped by Boomers. Many of us learned ministry from them, studied under them, worked beside them, and absorbed their hopes for the postconciliar Church.
Then we taught, ministered to, worked alongside, parented, and worshiped with Millennials and Gen Z. We watched the New Evangelization emerge. We saw the rise of FOCUS, SPO, Eucharistic revival, intentional discipleship, Catholic identity movements, and renewed interest in devotional practices that many Boomers had consciously set aside.
We may sympathize more with one generation than another. But we usually understand where both sides came from.
Gen X is the missing bridge.
And right now, in some corners of the Church, it feels as though there is a chasm instead, with people standing on opposite sides shouting at one another.
So What Do We Do?
First: yes, I am actually serious about inviting Gen X into Church leadership. Age should obviously never be the primary qualification for hiring or appointment. But if your leadership team is heavily weighted toward one generation, there is value in asking who is missing from the room.
A capable Gen X leader may bring something more than experience or competence. He or she may bring twenty or thirty years of lived experience translating between significantly different Catholic cultures.
And if hiring a Gen Xer is not an option, greater awareness of what is driving these divisions is still a beginning. Because usually the argument is not really about incense, guitar music, Eucharistic adoration, social justice, Latin, or small groups. Those things matter. Theology and liturgy matter. But beneath many of our battles is something more basic: we do not understand why the other generation sees the world the way it does.
Baby Boom Catholics who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and Millennial Catholics who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s experienced profoundly different childhoods, different cultures, different crises, and very different versions of Catholic parish life. Of course they do not always instinctively understand one another.
The answer, however, cannot be for one generation to defeat the other. The Body of Christ is not supposed to journey toward the Father in competing generational camps. We need to listen. We need to talk. We need to presume good intentions. We need to become curious about why our brothers and sisters love what they love and fear what they fear. That is called community.
Perhaps the generation that has spent much of its life overlooked—standing quietly between two much larger generations—has something particular to offer at this moment. We remember enough of both worlds to help them hear one another.
So: got Church division? Hire a Gen Xer. Or at least…recruit them for parish council.
