The Shire and the Road: Cardinal Radcliffe on What Young People Are Longing For

On our last day in Rome, the Congress turned to life in a digital age. Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, the English Dominican, opened with a sentence I wrote down and underlined twice. Only in dead things are there no tensions. Only in life are there tensions and conflict.

He meant it as good news. Tension is not a sign that something is broken. It is a sign that something is alive. Jesus put it at the heart of the Gospel: whoever wishes to save his life must lose it.

If we want to reach the lives of the young, Radcliffe said, we have to understand the tensions they carry. Then he named the first one. Young people, and all of us, long for both security and adventure.

A safe home and a dangerous invitation

Radcliffe did not soften the reality. Drawing on Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, he reminded us that Gen Z is the first generation to go through adolescence with a smartphone in hand. Fewer face-to-face conversations. More anxiety, more depression, more fragility.

And yet, he insisted, the desire for adventure has not gone anywhere. It is written into the human heart. If you love, you will get hurt. If you do not love, you are already dead.

To show what he meant, he turned to The Hobbit. The Shire is a supremely safe home, untouched by evil. Then Gandalf arrives with a dangerous invitation to share an adventure, and he can hardly find anyone willing to go. Yet something in Bilbo's heart answers. Radcliffe called Tolkien's work a pre-Christian story for a post-Christian age, a story that holds together our longing to be safe and our desire to risk everything on the perilous adventure of love.

The Gospel offers both. Our ultimate security is the one St. Paul names: nothing, neither death nor life, nor things present nor things to come, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:38-39). But that same love asks us to walk with the Lord to Jerusalem.

Then came the line I will not forget. A religion that does not ask us to die is not worth living.

What this asks of us on the front lines

I heard three invitations for campus ministers in Radcliffe's talk.

Be both the Shire and the road. Our students need a home: a place where they are known, safe, and loved before they have proven anything. Radcliffe put it this way. Discovering that you are loved before anyone has swiped, checked your profile, or decided you are worth their time changes what freedom feels like from the inside. But a campus ministry that is only a safe harbor will not hold them. They are also waiting for someone to invite them on the adventure. Both/and. Never one without the other.

Hold the truth and keep asking. Many young people are drawn to the Church precisely because she is faithful to the Gospel and to tradition. They want something solid. Radcliffe honored that, then added a caution. We do not possess the truth. The truth possesses us. Certainty without a quest becomes fundamentalism, and a quest without the security of tradition easily becomes relativism. AI is better with data than we are, he said, but Christian truth is not data. It is meant to be lived. God's conversation with us in Scripture runs on questions: "Where are you?" to Adam, "Do you love me?" to Peter. Radcliffe pointed us to Rilke's counsel to live the questions now, and perhaps someday live our way into the answer. Our ministries should be places where a good question is treated as a gift.

Give the gift of attention. In a world of abundant products, Radcliffe said, the true scarcity is attention. Everyone is fighting for it, and our phones sit in our pockets like Gollum's ring. He reached for Simone Weil: attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Then he described the work AI can never replicate. The nurse, the priest, the social worker, the teacher. The substance of that work is presence, the same attention the farmer gives to soil, the carpenter to wood, the sailor to the wind and waves. That is campus ministry. Presence is not a means to the work. It is the work.

Attend to the Lord, to each other, to creation

Radcliffe closed where he began, with tension. At the center of the Christian life, he said, is a pull that draws us out of the narcissism of the self and into astonishment at everything God has made. Attend to the Lord. Attend to each other. Attend to creation. Then we will be free of the bubble of the self.

That is what we mean at CCMA when we say campus ministers are accompanied, equipped, and sent. Accompaniment is the Shire: a home where ministers, and the students they serve, know they are loved. Sending is the road: the invitation to set out on the perilous adventure of love. Equipping is what makes the journey possible.

So here is my invitation this week. Put the phone face down when a student walks into your office. Ask one good question and do not rush to answer it. Then invite someone on an adventure. A retreat, a service trip, a conversation they have been avoiding. Offer them home, and offer them the road.

Rosie Chinea Shawver, MDiv, is President & Executive Director of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association. She writes from Rome, where she attended the October 2026 Congress on School and University Pastoral Ministry.