Teach the apostolic faith full on\u201d\u00a6no compromises on basic doctrine or dogma. This generation of college students can smell an intellectual\/spiritual weasel a hundred miles away. They would rather hear the bald-faced Truth and struggle with it than listen to a priest\/minister try to sugar-coat a difficult teaching in the vain search for popularity or \u201chipness.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Preach the gospel full on\u201d\u00a6ditto. Tell it like it is and let the students grow in holiness. Yes, they will fail. Who doesn\u2019t? But let them fail knowing what Christ and his Church expects of them. Lowering the moral bar comes across as expecting too little from them. What does that say about the Church\u2019s view of our future ecclesial leaders? They can\u2019t cut it, so we have to shorten the race.<\/p>\n
Give them charitable work to do\u201d\u00a6present this work as a kind of \u201cchurchy social work\u201d\u009d and they will not stay away in droves. I regularly cite Matthew 25 as my scriptural backing for asking them to do volunteer work in the community. Frankly, They have been beaten with the Social Justice-Work stick all their lives and most of what they hear sounds like the socio-economic engineering agenda of a modernist, socialist political party. This is attractive to some, but my experience is that students yearn for a chance to do something Truly Good for their community. If their leaders loudly and proudly attach volunteer work to the Gospels as a an exercise in charity rather than an experiment in social engineering, they will come.<\/p>\n