Rare is the Catholic teenager who doesn't feel that, sometimes, there's nothing less cool than being a Catholic teenager.

At a time when most of your peers are promiscuous and proud of it, the Church pleads with you to save yourself for marriage.

In a world that glorifies pleasure, experience and permissiveness, the Church preaches self-restraint, modesty and the value of suffering.

Not that Catholic teens are alone in these struggles. Today, young people from all backgrounds and belief systems must navigate a cultural landscape teeming with moral minefields and emotional booby traps. Not to mention spiritual black holes.

For generations, most American teens have felt the need to test limits, question authority figures, rebel against adults and experiment with risky activities.

Still, there's something about being Catholic in particular that, to many, feels like an extra layer of baggage they have to carry around for reasons they don't understand.

The good news is that perception, as is so often the case, is often at odds with reality. Catholic teens who can be taught to see their faith as an indispensable tool rather than an unnecessary weight are well-equipped to successfully transition from childhood into young adulthood — and enjoy the trip.

Then, too, there will always be those who insist on learning the wisdom of the faith the hard way.

Catholic Courage

“I have been Catholic my whole life,” says Sarah Lehman of LaGrange, Ga. “I have always loved church. When I was little, I even wanted to be a nun. But when I was a teenager, I rebelled.”

Her failure to take her faith seriously eventually led to Lehman's involvement in a number of immoral activities. She avoided the sacraments. She drank. She smoked. She skipped school. She hung out with questionable friends and succumbed to the worldliness of peer pressure in a variety of ways.

“I really didn't think about dying or being responsible at all,” she admits. “I was invincible. I must have one very strong guardian angel because I honestly don't know how I am alive today.”

The first wakeup call for Lehman was a surprise, out-of-wedlock pregnancy followed by a hurried marriage to the baby's father outside of the Church. As it turned out, with her newfound responsibility came a newfound interest in her spiritual life. She read more about the Catholic faith and wound up going to confession and then becoming what she calls “a pretty normal Catholic.”

Though she knew that her sins had been forgiven, Lehman says, she continued to suffer feelings of guilt and unworthiness. After a couple of years, though, her renewed faith finally did bring her peace and joy.

“I started helping with the youth group at our church and went with them to a Steubenville youth conference. When I was there I heard Jesus say, ‘It's okay. I forgive you.’ It was a very moving experience. I just broke down and started crying.”

At last, Lehman fully embraced the religion of her childhood that she had rejected so soundly as a teenager, and she and her husband decided to live chastely until arrangements could be made for their marriage in the Church.

“It felt great to finally obey God,” she says. “It felt great to not be a disappointment to anyone, especially God. I am still on my journey, learning as much as I can.”

Seeds of Faith

Julie (not her real name) shares a similarly sorrowful story of her own teenaged rebellion against the Catholic faith. Though she was raised in a church-attending Catholic family, she had a rocky relationship with her father. Eventually, faith and family became less important than peers and partying during her teenaged years.

“The ‘bad’ boys held great attraction for me, and I went with it,” says Julie. She sneaked around, lied to her parents, experimented with alcohol and, after one long night of partying, she was raped by a “bad boy” boyfriend.

“Now my world had ended,” she says. “Why did God let this happen? I hated God. Something was taken from me that night and I was now worthless. I couldn't even look at myself in the mirror for a long time.”

Julie hid her misery from her parents, began to smoke marijuana, and went from one abusive relationship to another over a period of several years. She suffered from such low self-esteem and deep depression that eventually she even considered suicide.

Though there was much about the faith that she rejected, some parts of her Catholic upbringing stuck with the struggling teen. Julie never truly doubted that God was real.

“I was constantly recalling the plaque my mom had hanging up in her bathroom at home,” she told the Register. “I looked at it and read it every morning: ‘God, help me to remember that nothing is going to happen today that you and I can't handle together.’

“I also recalled the one Bible verse I was made to remember as a young girl,” she continues, citing Philippians 4:13. “‘I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. These are the two things that kept me going. I knew that God was real. I knew I’d turned away from him and I knew that I was lost.”

As it turns out, recognizing that she was lost was a first step in Julie's long journey home. In time, a friend opened Julie's eyes to the fact that her life was a valuable gift. Through a return to her faith, she came to recognize that she was a precious child of God and rejected her abusive personal relationships.

Today, the mother of five is a joyful Catholic who has full confidence in the goodness of God and hopes to inspire a deep love of the faith in her own children.

“Looking back, I can see that the seeds my parents planted in me when I was younger were my saving grace,” says Julie. “There were certain things I would not do and certain places I would not go because of it. I can see how God was still there with me all along. I didn't know it then, but I was still being gently guided by him.”

It's Okay to Ask

Catholic author Amy Welborn has a wealth of experience with teenagers who struggle with their Catholic faith. In fact, she was inspired to write her popular Prove It! series of apologetics books, aimed at Catholic teenagers, after spending nine years teaching theology in a Catholic school.

Welborn explains that questioning one's faith during adolescence is a natural and even a good thing for most people — but she is quick to draw a distinction between questioning and rebelling.

“The only way we grow in knowledge is through questions,” she points out. “Not rebellion, but questions. Rebellion is problematic because it results in closed-mindedness. But questioning is not to be feared.”

Welborn cautions that, although teens might struggle with the big questions of good versus evil and relativism versus absolute truth, for many young Catholics one of the greatest sources of spiritual struggle is making sense of the hypocrisy they see in the Catholic adults around them.

“Teens have a keen hypocrisy-radar,” she says. “They have a difficult time understanding that faith is real and powerful and joyful when they are surrounded by adults who say they have faith but don't.”

Welborn offers words of advice for despairing parents of wayward teens: “Keep praying and modeling faith. Eventually, most children come back, not because someone gave them satisfactory answers, but because they saw the truth of God's love lived out.”

That kind of lived love is something Julie's children are likely to find in her example.

“I am trying to teach them all I know and all that I am learning [about the faith],” she says. “I have much more to learn and am excited to do so — but I want my kids to learn it with me.”

Danielle Bean writes from Belknap, New Hampshire.