I’m a Millennial living in an intentional community. Recently, when someone heard I shared a home with two women religious—both older than me—they remarked, “You must learn so much from them!” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. I replied: “Well, we learn from one another.”
Too often, Catholic communities—whether intentional or parish-based—often center the experiences and authority of older adults. This is both cultural and material: Older adults often hold more institutional power, resources, and influence, even in spaces that claim to be inclusive. Meanwhile, younger Catholics like me are seeking new forms of community beyond the parish model. But even these alternatives can lack the tools or imagination to truly share leadership across generations. This is more than a matter of fairness. If Catholic movements for justice and liberation are to survive and thrive, we must build egalitarian intergenerational communities.
Take, for example, two very different kinds of Catholic communities: year-of-service programs and Catholic Worker houses. Both attract young adults, but they offer very different experiences. And somewhere in between, a third model offers real promise: the housing cooperative.
Many Catholic religious orders engage young people through year-of-service programs. The Jesuit Volunteer Corps is the oldest and largest example. These programs recruit recent college graduates to volunteer full-time, live communally, and receive spiritual formation in the order’s charism.
Participation in such programs has declined for years. Much ink has been spilled about this, often suggesting that young adults are too selfish or apathetic to commit. But that take disregards our economic, political, and ethical priorities. To really understand what’s going on, we should analyze this dynamic through an intergenerational lens. How do age and power operate in these communities?
Religious orders don’t share their power with post-grad volunteers: That’s not part of the program. After a year, volunteers move on to jobs or grad school, and a new crop of young people joins. Plenty of young adults want and benefit from this model. Despite the decline, year-of-service programs are still the most mainstream, visible option available to young people who want an intense but temporary form of Catholic community.
If year-of-service programs are at one end of a spectrum, Catholic Worker communities are at the other. Rooted in an anarchist tradition, the Catholic Worker movement resists hierarchy, incorporation, and, often, internal structure. I’ve lived in two Worker houses and connected with many more—and I’ve seen the same pattern play out repeatedly. Young adults are drawn to the movement’s radical ideals, only to end up burned out or disillusioned.
Feminist writer Jo Freeman famously described this in her essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”: When communities reject formal leadership, informal power structures still emerge.
Freeman criticized the feminist movement’s preference for “leaderless, structureless groups” as unrealistic, deceptive, and limited in their utility. She writes:
A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.
A few years ago, I sat in a bar with a Catholic Worker friend. Over drinks, they talked about lugging food donations and confronting hostile guests. As a young adult among older Workers, physical labor often fell on their shoulders. But in house meetings, when they proposed changes to the food distribution or chore division, the older residents shut them down.
Even in movements that disavow hierarchy, it has a way of creeping back in. It might have to do with age and tenure in a movement. Sometimes authority is conferred by proximity to movement luminaries. Sometimes it has to do with who owns the house.
Intergenerational Catholic Worker houses often welcome young adults like me, but relations can sour when we bring different ideas and expectations. When I asked an older Catholic Worker about the departure of some young adults who’d felt undervalued, she said, sarcastically, “What young people don’t understand is that this life is hard. Seriously, what do they expect?” A friend recently moved to a Catholic Worker house to stay for the long-haul, but they left after a few months. It wasn’t the work or the living conditions that bothered them, but the condescension from their fellow Workers.
The Catholic Worker movement has a tradition of embracing young adults who pass through its doors. Dorothy Day understood that the movement could be a “school” for young people who would move on to other things. This parallels year-of-service programs. But the assumption that young adults will leave becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Is there any space for young adults to stay, grow, and lead?
Age is a critical lens of political analysis for many Catholic communities. We can’t ignore it. The Vatican II generation is passing away, parishes are dying out, religious orders are aging and closing, and young adults are either leaving the church altogether or drifting toward traditionalist movements.
When I first met older Catholics working for justice and liberation, I was inspired. I’ve built emotional, intellectual, and spiritual relationships across generations. These relationships have shaped my life and work. But I’ve realized that some of them were one-sided. I got tired of sitting passively through long conversations where no one asked for my opinion.
Our elders are human, with foibles and failures just like everyone else. The “wise old sage” archetype may seem respectful, but it can become a comfortable way to categorize, revere, and, contradictorily, dismiss or even dehumanize our elders: grandparents, movement elders, and religious leaders alike.
What if young adults stopped accepting passivity as the norm? What if our elders were willing to share power? In other words, what if we become equals? What if we—as equals—worked together to build a mutual, sustainable, and intergenerational community? Housing cooperatives provide an inspiring example of how this might look in practice.
In a cooperative, those who benefit from a program or organization also control it. In my community—the Fireplace Community on Chicago’s South Side—the residents serve as the board of the community and its nonprofit corporation. Legally, each resident has equal weight in decisions, irrespective of her age, tenure, or vowed religious status. And communally, we have explicit ways of exercising power: voting. Year-of-service programs also tend to operate through official nonprofits, but they don’t afford participants a role in the nonprofit’s governance. This is connected to the one-year participation cycle, but it’s not entirely inherent. Take the rental cooperative at the University of Michigan, for example. Most members, usually students, stay for only a couple years. Yet the co-op is still governed exclusively by its members.
Drawing on Dorothy Day’s writings and resistance to government interference, Catholic Worker houses often reject legal incorporation. But the alternative to incorporation is that houses are often owned by individuals, without legal means or communal discipline around shared power. Incorporation is imperfect, but I don’t see how it’s worse than private ownership.
Sharing power is hard, for everyone. It requires care and intentionality. If young people are to commit ourselves to long-term relationships with Catholic communities, we need elders to commit to that work too. This will help us build healthy, sustainable communities—beyond the parish context.
My community-mates at the Fireplace span decades, from their 20s to their 60s, and represent a range of races, sexualities, political views, and more. We’ve still got a lot to figure out. But because we’re a cooperative, we know who we must look to: one another.
This article also appears in the September 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 9, pages 17-19). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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