“Guard Your Heart!”

This chapter examines missionaries’ romantic relationships and argues that the way these young adults date, marry, and procreate shapes their position in the US Catholic landscape. These emerging adults develop wide-ranging and gendered interpretations of chastity. They discipline themselves and their co-missionaries to follow Catholic dictums articulated in Humanae Vitae and Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body More than personal ethics, however, this chapter posits that missionaries’ practices of Catholic romance are part of their pro-life politics. How and why these Catholic millennials embody the transitions from singlehood to family life proclaims their proud, dynamically orthodox Catholic alternative to contemporary sexual ethics in the United States.

“ ‘Go, Set the World on Fire!’ ”

This concluding chapter describes how missionaries transition from on-campus evangelization to Catholic life after FOCUS and speculates about the impact of FOCUS on US Catholicism. A small percentage of former missionaries become priests and sisters. But, most FOCUS alumni get married, have children, join local parishes, and find work in positions ranging from corporate America to diocesan offices to service-oriented nonprofits. They join local moms’ groups and softball leagues and they start Bible studies and knitting clubs. These millennial-generation Catholics are trained and motivated to encourage Catholic identity in parishes across the country. US Catholicism is being reshaped by how these former missionaries integrate their years as missionaries into the Catholic pews.

“Hanging out with Jesus”

This chapter studies FOCUS missionaries’ daily Holy Hour and argues that this particular prayer discipline shapes how Catholic millennials become missionaries who are willing to evangelize college students every single day. Missionaries pray at the intersection of religious experience, religious practice, social context, bodily comportment, and interior processes. Daily Holy Hour involves Adoration, mental prayer, lectio divina, intercessory prayer, and spiritual reading. With each prayer form, millennials enact the mundane work of trying to become twenty-first century Catholic missionaries. These prayer practices—updated, remixed, and reclaimed for a new generation of Catholics—were the way these millennials articulated and embodied their Catholic identity.

The Making of Twenty-First-Century Catholic Evangelization

This chapter begins with a brief institutional history of FOCUS and then examines the longer historical trajectories behind the group. This pre-history of FOCUS traces twinned fears—a fear of “secular” US culture and a fear of “cultural” Catholicism—through five shifts in US Catholic history during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These shifts are postconciliar expansions of Catholic prayer, efforts to reclaim Catholic exceptionalism on Catholic college campuses, fears about Catholics on non-Catholic and public campuses, late-twentieth-century Catholics’ conflicted interactions with evangelical Protestants, and an increased strength and presence of a Catholic middle class. FOCUS and its evangelization methods were made possible by these trends.

#MishLife

This chapter introduces the socio-cultural milieu of millennial-generation Catholic missionaries in the United States. It describes the twenty-first century college culture that missionaries know well and the Catholic subculture that surrounds FOCUS. Missionaries are also situated on a US Catholic landscape still wrestling with interpretations of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II, 1962–65). Demographically, these missionaries are predominantly white millennials and from the middle class. They are also “emerging adults” in the midst of a transition-filled stage of life. This introduction previews how missionaries’ prayer practices shape their Catholicism and concludes with a survey of the research methods used and the book’s historically informed ethnographic approach to Catholicism in the United States.

“Party On”

Chapter 6 examines how FOCUS works at the intersection of religious experience, Catholic exceptionalism, and millennial-generation cultural expectations to cultivate a collective dynamically orthodox Catholicism. At their large, national conferences, FOCUS relies on Catholicism’s sacramental imagination to make contemporary US Catholicism attractive to thousands of twenty-first-century college students. Through prayers, speakers, and peer pressure, this conference develops a community of Catholic millennials. The conferences also strive to cultivate a shared identity among attendees. FOCUS trains young adult Catholics to become dynamically orthodox Catholics who are conversant in their millennial culture, committed to following a strict interpretation of Catholic teachings, and excited to tell others about it.

“Be Saints!”

This chapter analyzes the relationships FOCUS missionaries develop with Catholic saints. These missionaries’ intimate relationships with saints root their Catholic identity in Catholic history while also reworking Catholic identity for the twenty-first century. Their devotional practices range from reading saints’ diaries to getting tattoos of quotes from saints to imitating a saint’s specific prayer style. Missionaries are introduced to particular saints by FOCUS and their co-missionaries. These young adults try to live their lives alongside the saints and reinterpret saints’ lives as instructions for living in the twenty-first century. Millennials communicate with saints and follow saints’ examples for how to be Catholic. Missionaries also work to inhabit a theology of sainthood that expects millennials to “be saints!” Devotionalism shapes the texture of missionaries’ Catholic identity.

“Feminine Genius” and “Authentic Masculinity”

The question driving chapter 4 is how millennial missionaries embrace Catholicism’s strict gender complementarianism while also maintaining savvy among their peers with millennial-generation expectations of gender parity. Two interpretive frameworks illustrate why and how missionaries work to inhabit their “feminine genius” and become “authentically masculine.” “Complementary submissions” describes the many types of submission these missionaries enact—to one another and to God. “Gendering prayer” examines how, in particular, gendered prayer practices shape missionaries’ gender performances. The interwoven demands of complementary submissions and gendering prayer animate how these millennials enact alternative gender roles and how they flourish as Catholics in the contemporary United States.