ABSTRACT
The border between being in and being out of the Church was becoming increasingly blurred. Twenty years before, one could feel safe in saying that those in the Catholic Church believed X, Y, and Z, and that those who had left the Church rejected X, Y, and Z. The line of demarcation, if there was one, was quite ill-defined. Yet that line seemed to involve young adult Catholics at rather deep levels of their personality. Being raised a “good Catholic” in the United States meant that one received sixteen full years of Catholic education. One does not go through such a program without becoming deeply influenced by it, and when one reaches the point at which he examines where he has been, he is often plummeted into a profound intellectual-emotional crisis. The result of the crisis may be leaving the Church, or it may, on the other hand, be redefining what membership in the Church means.
