Peter Steinfels on the crisis of attrition in the U.S. church
The October 22 issue just went live, so be sure to look at its table of contents, but before you do, you’re going to want to read “Further Adrift: The American Church’s Crisis of Attrition,” by Peter Steinfels. Here’s how it starts:
It is not often that someone at a New York dinner party calls for a count of religious affiliations, and I cannot recall exactly what led to it. But one guest suddenly said he had the impression that many of those present were Catholics. “Can we have a show of hands?” he asked.
Two of us raised our hands. A third person, who once wrote frequently in the Catholic press, said “no longer,” though as a conservative he continued to sympathize with the church. A fourth person, with whom my wife and I have sometimes worshiped on Easter, Christmas, and other occasions, chose not to make any declaration at all. Finally, the man who asked the question avowed that he had been raised Catholic, “and I hate everything about it.”
Bottom line? Two-and-a-half out of five, perhaps. Par, you might say, for a bunch of overeducated writer-types. Not at all. That’s roughly the proportion you would find at working-class family gatherings or suburban cookouts. In February 2008, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, based on interviews with a representative sample of thirty-five thousand adult Americans, reported that one out of every three adult Americans who were raised Catholic have left the church. If these ex-Catholics were to form a single church, they would constitute the second largest church in the nation.
One in three. Think about it. This record makes the percentage of bad loans and mortgages leading to the financial meltdown look absolutely stellar. It dwarfs the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler. Thomas Reese, SJ, the former editor of America, recently described this loss of one-third of those raised Catholic as “a disaster.” He added, “You wonder if the bishops have noticed.”
Read the rest right here.
To blame the bishops is to blame the pope! After all the pope, advised by people in whom he has confidence, chooses and assigns the bishops.
I think there is no quick fix. According to the article, the Catholic Church is losing members in all directions; they are losing liberals to the Episcopalian church and losing conservatives to the evangelical churches. Becoming more like the Episcopalian church isn’t the answer; as the article notes, that church is moribund. On the other hand, the conservative renaissance in Catholicism that many conservatives have predicted over the past few decades hasn’t really grown in that great of numbers. It is too easy to blame it on the bishops. What can they really do? Issue more documents? It is up to all of us.
At Confirmation, the Holy Spirit gives Catholics wisdom, knowledge, counsel, and understanding.
If so many people, equipped with those gifts, have left the Church, who’s to say it’s a crisis? Should they ignore the gifts, stifle the intellect, assent to what is intolerable?
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI wants a “smaller but purer” church.
He’s gettin’ it!
. As for the data , the 1990-2009, 50% plummeting in Catholic marriages is easily seen by looking at the Kennedy Directory, This 50% marriage decline points to a worse problem than the 33% walk aways.. .In business a 50% decline in same store sales would have the board demanding new management. RCC = No Board.
Imagine worrying about same sex marriages in the City Hall basement while you have a 50% decline in Church sacramental weddings?
And how about the more noisy bishops who launch initiatives on laity ‘push-back’..
latinized liturgies, no doing the ‘sacred vessels’ no lay euligies at funerals, and of couse the investigation of American religious sisters.
” …..nothing else is such a strong predictor of religious attitudes as attitudes toward premarital sex.”
Peter S quotes Putnam and Campbell uncritically it appears. he should be more critical or discerning. Evangelicals and Catholics who stay have increasingly accepted pre-marital sex. Peter may be better in describing the crisis than having any idea how to alleviate it. He further writes: “….a quantum leap in the quality of Sunday liturgies, including preaching; a massive, all-out mobilization of talent and treasure to catechize the young, bring adolescents into church life, and engage young adults in ongoing faith formation; and regular, systematic assessments of all these activities—as well as theologically more complex and controversial matters like expanding the pool of those eligible for ordination and revisiting some aspects of the church’s teaching on sexuality.”
These things may help but Peter avoids the most important aspect of renewal and reform which is the restructuring of the church. If Catholic leaders such as Peter embraced VOTF which already has a plan then the reform movement might have some teeth. Part of the problem of being adrift is that many of us will not support VOTF while still wondering why we cannot make headway with reform and renewal.
I think the issue goes deeper than the walk-aways; the people in the pews often don’t know what to believe either. In the Sixties, faith and reason got out of joint and remain that way. The whole shared memory of the institutional Church needs to be reconstructed in a way that makes faith and reason coherent and celebrates the goodness of creation-the two hallmarks of the Catholic intellectual tradition.
And it goes without saying that running the Church as an absolute monarchy continues to compromise intellectual freedom (the very thing we need to haul belief into the 21st Century) and continues to destroy what little credibility the institutional church has left.
The institutional Church has never given a respectable answer to the Enlightenment. That’s what we need to do. No small job but if we know the scope and nature of the problem we can go about solving it.
John O’Malley hit the nail on the head in his Vatican II book: 1) how does the church change 2) who authorizes that change 3) in what manner. Good questions. I wouldn’t wait on the bishops for the answer.
These things may help but Peter avoids the most important aspect of renewal and reform which is the restructuring of the church.
Bill,
I wonder how many people care about restructuring the Church. I doubt that people drift away from Catholicism because of the structure of the Church. People drift away, it seems to me, because they no longer believe what the Church teaches. Of course, some of the people who stay no longer believe what the Church teaches, either.
People are drifting away from “organized religion” in the developed countries all over the world. It seems to me the question is not why people are leaving the Catholic Church. It’s why people are becoming so secularized. I won’t bother to post it again, but I wrote a post in another thread about something I had read on Mirror of Justice — that religiosity declines when “existential security” increases.
Perhaps the highest existential insecurity is experienced in a foxhole, and that’s why there are no atheists in foxholes.
It seems to me that the Catholic Church and other churches need to develop — if they can — a message that engages people who don’t need “old time religion.”
Just yesterday my son, who will be confirmed next month, was saying that he probably would not stay Catholic. Why not, I asked? He doesn’t really agree with some of the teachings of the church, he said; also, he said, becoming more animated, he thinks that God exists, well, probably, and he supports some of the values the church teaches, like, being nice to other people and all that, but he doesn’t really like going to Mass. What about the community aspect, I asked? The parish is not really a community, he answered: we don’t really have a circle of friends there, only acquaintances. I said: as to me, sometimes — often — I find the prayer of the Mass uplifting. Not me, he said, never. It doesn’t do anything to him. It’s not as if he didn’t try: he has a lifetime of Sunday Masses under his belt. Then, I have to agree: in the absence of any internal desire to go to Mass, why should he continue? He has not found God there.
I want a restructuring of the church, and I want a more inclusive attitude, but that’s not the main problem. I hate to say that — it makes me sound like a Trad –, but my impression is that the “vertical” aspect of Mass, the transcendence, the connection with God, is what is missing from my children’s experience.
To react to David Nickol’s post, I would conjecture that existential insecurity makes people look for God, and then they are more likely to find Him.
David,
With all the faults of the church we do need leaders. So we need to make those leaders better. The way to do that is to make them take the gospels seriously whereby they are the servants of the people not the dominators.
One operative theory around here is that divorce and remarriage is the single biggest reason that adults leave the Catholic church. I can’t tell if Peter’s article supports that theory or not.
Regarding the young: without minimizing the church’s mistakes, which have been legion, I just think we need to conclude that the community parish model is the wrong model to minister to teens and young adults. There is nothing that attaches teens or young adults to parish life. It doesn’t meet them where they’re at. Three of four generations ago, it probably did: the teens might have been attending a parish school, and young adults probably were already married, living in the same local community as their parents, and starting a family. Now, teens live in their own culture that powerfully alienates them from their nuclear and extended families; a large plurality (majority?) of Catholic teens go off to college, thus decisively severing the parish bond; and young adults have invented a whole new stage of life that doesn’t end until the mid-to-late ’20′s (if not later).
I live in a relatively Catholic-intensive suburb of a still-pretty-Catholic-intensive archdioces (Chicago). The last dinner party I was at – which, admittedly, wasn’t up to Manhattan-writers-party standards: there was practically no marijuana or absinthe, and nobody ripped anyone’s book – was pretty suburban-themed (parents of some girls getting ready for the Homecoming dance), mostly Catholics, and we spent a fair amount of time talking about … well, some of the things discussed in the article: confirmation, and how to keep our children plugged in.
From the cited article:
[T]here is the good news about Latino Catholics, whose growing numbers both from immigration and higher birthrates have largely compensated for the losses and maintained the church’s proportion of the population at a more or less steady level. Latinos are much more likely than non-Latinos to say that their ethnicity is a very important part of who they are, and strong ethnic identity is associated with retaining religious identity and lower rates of intermarriage: 78 percent of Latinos raised Catholic remain in the church, compared to 57 percent of non-Latinos. Latino Catholics also express relatively greater agreement than non-Latinos with church teachings on divorce, premarital sex, abortion, gay marriage, ordination of women, opposition to the death penalty, and papal authority.
Although the immigrant Church is alive and well in these communities. it will inevitably dwindle as immigrants assimilate and communal ties weaken.
Great article!
“I want a restructuring of the church, and I want a more inclusive attitude, but that’s not the main problem. I hate to say that — it makes me sound like a Trad –, but my impression is that the “vertical” aspect of Mass, the transcendence, the connection with God, is what is missing from my children’s experience.”
Claire, I couldn’t agree more. I often feel that God has left the building, to be replaced by a faith community. Not quite the same thing. Conservatives conflate authority with faith (while doing a better job of evoking the transcendent) while Progressives conflate guitar Masses with reform (which hasn’t actually happened). What we’ve ended up with so far is an absolute monarchy and some really bad liturgies.
To react to David Nickol’s post, I would conjecture that existential insecurity makes people look for God, and then they are more likely to find Him.
Claire,
The question then becomes how you reverse the trend toward secularity. Would you want to support increasing income inequality and poverty to make more people look for God?
I share Peter Steinfels’ concerns about his grandchildren. For my part, I thank my lucky stars that I have been nurtured in the faith throughout my formative years. Whatever shortcomings there are in the present structure of the church, and they are deep, I have no sense of alienation from the church. But what happens with my grandchildren is a very different matter. Like Steinfels i see no indication that the powers that be–and yes the hierarchy does have the power–has any sense that there is a crisis that they might have to make some substantial changes to address. I have no illusions that any bishop is waiting to hear any words of wisdom from me. In truth, I have none. But I’m more than willing to engage in any sort of examination of this crisis. Unfortunately, I see no indication that any clergyman in our diocese is even close to calling on lay people to try to assess and address this problem. To the contrary, my impression is that the clergy are so overworked that they have no energy to look up and the bishop, though apparently well educated, shows no interest in hearing from the laity about anything that would bear on this crisis.
I do try to pray about all this. Happily I do not believe that salvation is so tied to the institutional Roman Catholic Church that my children and grandchildren are in terrible jeopardy. God will surely take into account the fact that they have had no better guidance from the institutional, clericalized church.
Obviously we need better hymns.
I agree with Pete that “there is no quick fix.” There almost never is. Can we start on a slow one?
I agree with Ed Gleason that the marriage statistics are even more alarming.
I agree with Bill Mazzella and others about the need for some significant restructuring, although having had the opportunity to observe relatively close-up all kinds of religious polities and styles of leadership, from the Friends to the Baptists, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Unitarians, etc., etc., by way of several flavors of Judaism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, I guarantee you that there are no silver bullets.
I agree with Claire about transcendence and with Jeanne Follman about the need for a reconstructed shared memory and a respectable response to the Enlightenment.
I agree with David Nickol about the challenge of secularity, though I’d frame the issue differently than the usual secularity = unbelief, and I’d point out that the source of that theory about “existential insecurity” — Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s Sacred and Secular (Cambridge, 2004) has not gone unchallenged by other sociologists and historians.
And I agree with Bernard Dauenhauer’s willingness to “engage in any sort of examination of this crisis.” For me, and I hope against hope for at least some bishops, that’s a real test: Do we consider these trends threatening enough that we would be willing even to reconsider our favorite ideas and current alignments in a fresh search for some (inevitably complicated, multi-faceted) answers?
David N: or, find other ways to turn people’s attention (and ours) towards God.
Yes, I agree with Kathy that we need better hymns, and with Jim Pauwels about other structures than the parish for reaching young people and about the emergence of a whole new young adult stage of life. And I suspect that Antonio Manetti is right about Latino assimilation, though it is politically incorrect to say so, and the evidence is still out. Anyone else I can agree with?
Why would anyone stay?
The out-flux of Catholics to the Evangelicals is mostly terribly catechized people who want to be entertained. The influx from them (and I work with a few) are usually the intellectual cream of the crop (masters degrees in theology, historians). Changing subtle teachings on predestination, justification or salvation (or heck, evolution, homosexuality and life issues) is not likely to convince people to stay when they can hardly describe the theological differences between Evangelicals and Catholics.
Claire, I would hazard to say that it isn’t that your son hasn’t found God at Mass, but as a high school teacher at a Catholic school, he likely hasn’t been entertained at Mass. Now, I for one don’t necessarily think it is necessary to go too traditional or modern to appeal to the youth, but rather the Mass is a rather barren and shallow aesthetic experience. The music is usually terrible, the churches are ugly, the homilies are moribund, and the place is packed with people more interested in gossip than community.
Now a quick liturgical fix won’t change anything. What the church needs is active and enthusiastic leaders to get the youth involved beyond themselves, in social justice, in life issues, in missionary work. Things that the people of God agree with when it comes to the Church. Maybe many youth cannot fully understand the Augustinian/Pelagian argument over free will or articulate and defend the Church’s nuanced views concerning homosexuality. But they can become passionate about building homes in Mexico, working at the soup kitchen, supporting pregnancy care centers, sending bikes to Africa.
I remember reading somewhere that teenagers (most people who leave the Church seem to do so as late teens, early college students) are mostly in a romantic stage of development where they are attracted to heros, justice, fighting one against many.
One should ask where are the role models? and how do we get advertise them? (Mother Theresa, John Paul II, and other inspirational figures)
Peter,
You know the saying that if you agree with everyone you agree with no one. But do you agree with me that you should be more actively involved with VOTF in restructuring the church? Or do you have an alternative?
Here’s at start at what to do… There are 18 thousand married deacona. fully ordain many of them, stop closing parishes and in 10 years the parish ”body language’ will change by having a family perspective church..
Some think the main problem the Church faces is secularism. But the secular is, I think, becoming less and less attractive itself. The optimism of the Enlightenment is dead, and the malaise of post-modernism has finally found its way into the popular culture. We need to remember that it is not just the churches that people have lost faith in and respect for. It’s the legislatures, courts and law enforcement, as well as education, and even medicine, not to mention business.
What do these institutions have in common? Greater and greater complexity. I’m convinced that their deterioration is at least partly caused by the self-amplifying complexity built into modern human life. Sadly, according to Nicholas Rescher’s work “Complexity: A Philosophical Overview”, complexity necessarily breeds on itself even as people remain stuck with our same old limitations. Even with the great new communications systems we are no match for the accelerating complexity of a world which more and more seems to tend towards chaos. Yes, some new scientific principles indicate that matter is slowly self-organizing, and the world might possibly not self-destruct as Newton’s Second Law predicts. But that is little solace if you’re out of a job and your kids are hungry and the politicians just wrangle.
There is just too much for our leaders to figure out, too much to know, too much to communicate, too much that needs to be wisely organized, and fewer and fewer resources to work with. Politics is in a terrible shape, education continues to weaken, law is being co-opted by the very rich, etc., etc., etc. And the Church must help the young to cope with more and more opportunities for mischief and sin.
There is also the grace of God operating in this frustrating and sometimes frightening world. But just as most Catholics have an inadequate picture of the Real Presence at Mass, I think that they have little understanding of the Church’s teachings on the grace of God. The beliefs that the Lord is actually with us and that He gives us whatever spiritual strength we need are what have sustained our hope in God in the past. Unless they’re reaffirmed in people’s hearts they will more and more be lost to the Church. More important than the Church losing them, they will lose the Church.
An only partly facetious suggestion: The Papal Nuncio or the Conference of Bishops should hire someone like Michelle Rhee, the Washington DC school reformer (who is now out of a job), to act as a catalyst to help the Bishops formulate a re-evangelizing plan. The job will require someone like her who is familiar with the similar education battles in which each constituency blames others for failures. And of course it will have to be someone who is a genuine catalyst, not a supervisor (or czar) of local Bishops.
” I have no illusions that any bishop is waiting to hear any words of wisdom from me.”
Bernard –
Have hope. The Times-Picayune reported this very day that our new archbishop Gregory Aymond
“. . . has said he will convene a series of grass-roots archdiocesan meetings — a rare synod, perhaps in 2012 — to solicit parishioners’ views on the archdiocese’s future.”
I’m not sure what this means. But at least he is starting to see the problem.
I read the piece by Putnam and Campbell in the L.A. Times on Sunday. It seems to be limited to making the case that the large and increasing fraction of under-30 Americans professing no adherence to organized religion is caused by the increasingly rightward politicization of American Christianity.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/17/opinion/la-oe-1017-putnam-religion-20101017
I think perhaps your article tries to deal with too many factors. How about pulling out Occam’s razor and reducing the thesis to the simple claim that banging the drum of conservative politics alienates a lot of people? Would that explain the phenomenon at hand?
Putnam and Campbell point out some correlations from survey results to argue for this. I have only anecdotal evidence, but I can hardly disagree with their thesis. Probably the first moment of disaffection with the Catholic church that I can remember was watching the Democratic national convention in August 2000 along with some other students at the start of my freshman year of college, and listening to the priest and rector of my dorm repeatedly boo at Hillary Clinton. While it may seem strange to some people, this was a moment of cognitive dissonance for me as a 17 year old. In my view, religion generally depends on a person’s unquestioning adherence to the beliefs they were raised with as children. If you were, like myself, both raised in a Democratic household and taught to respect priests as knowledgeable authority figures, this presented a dilemma. I later learned from my mother that one priest who was a very close friend of our family growing up was a strong Republican. But he had the good sense to never, ever discuss his political beliefs with us. The boorish outspokenness of my rector, which has become only more in vogue among priests over the past decade, brought the issue to the fore and started me on the process of deciding for myself what I wanted to believe. And after slightly less than seven years of a long and winding road of doubt, devotion, and deliberation I finally and unceremoniously threw Catholicism in the dumpster for good.
Not too long ago, a speaker addressed an audience comprised, for the most part, of university students.The topic was the contemporary crisis of U.S. Catholicism. At the end of the question period, a student, who identified himself as non-Catholic, asked what were the attractions of Catholicism? Though the speaker did not consign Catholicism to “the dumpster for good” (as a previous comment on this thread puts it) he gave, to my mind, a rather perfunctory and certainly not-energizing response.
Without denying the real challenges we — and other traditions — face, in our unsettled and constantly shifting culture, perhaps we need to remember (in the strong sense of “anamnesis”) the lure of beauty which brought us and still sustains us in Catholicism. Henri de Lubac’s classic “Catholicism” can be a powerful memory aid.
On another recent thread Peter Steinfels wrote, apropos some remarks of Pope Benedict: “God’s entry in this world and our entry into the Godhead, are powerful and almost overwhelming to meditate on.”
Could we do better than spend the next months so meditating and sharing with others, in whatever circumstances God places us, whether grandparents, music ministers, journalists, teachers, the overwhelming beauty of Incarnation and, yes, also the beauty of the holy and sinful Church which mediates that beauty to us? Is this not what Charles Taylor, at the end of his exhaustive study, “A Secular Age,” recommends?
Of course, the above suggestion is not incompatible with advocating for Ms Rhee.
Could we do better than spend the next months so meditating and sharing with others . . . the overwhelming beauty of Incarnation and, yes, also the beauty of the holy and sinful Church which mediates that beauty to us?
Fr. Imbelli,
It seems to me that if Catholics actually believe this, they will not leave no matter how uninspiring the hymns, how boring the homilies, how objectionable the structure of the Church, what language Mass is said in, and so on. And if they don’t believe the Church is exactly what it claims to be, then there are bound to be more attractive alternatives for a great many of them.
Based on the recent Pew survey, it appears a very large number of Catholics don’t even know what the Church claims to be, let alone believe it. And atheists and agnostics seem to know at least a few basic facts about what the Church teaches, and yet they remain atheists and agnostics.
So it seems to me the task is simple, though by no means easy: Teach Catholicism in such a way that people both understand it and believe in it.
David,
Part of the riddle of the Incarnation is the incarnate character of those who are invited to it. Of course preaching and hymns matter. The imagination matters.
Sebastian Flyte is more sensitive than most; he is extreme, but not abnormal:
‘Oh dear, it’s very difficult being a Catholic.’
‘Does it make much difference to you?’
‘Of course. All the time.’
‘Well, I can’t say I’ve noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don’t seem much more virtuous than me.’
‘I’m very, very much wickeder,’ said Sebastian indignantly….
‘I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?’
‘Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.’
‘But my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.’
‘Can’t I?’
‘I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.’
“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.’
‘But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.’
‘But I do. That’s how I believe.’
We live in the era of the image. How many pictures, how many times refined, do we see every day? And yet the Church of just these times fails to offer images.
As a last resort, Boccaccio’s argument for the Catholic faith should give those on the brink of leaving pause for thought.
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2010/05/boccaccio-argument-for-catholic-faith.html
In looking at the article, and all the responses—I believe we each have a good idea of what the problems might be. The BIG question is…How to correct the problems? Just as it took time for this crisis to come to impact upon us—so it will take drastic measures and a good amount of time (decades) to correct.
I do not believe that Pope Benedict will be able to make the correct move. He took the name “Benedict” because St. Benedict and the Western Monasticism system saved (as some scholars believe) Europe when the Western Roman Empire was collapsing. Pope Benedict believed (s) that his papacy may be Europe’s last chance to be re-evangelized.
Unfortunately, the perception of the problem from the Vatican, and the hierarchy’s point of view and the rest of us (the laity) are at opposite poles. To even begin with problem-solving—a consensus of what the problems are, must be reached. And that may be the first major hurtle. IF the Vatican and the hierarchy even recognize the problem—they are in denial. And every hour, every day that they delay, the Church dies a little more.
Secondly, if and when a consensus is reached—people—in as large a group as possible (who are capable of giving valuable advice and practical measures) need to be consulted. And I do not believe, given the current structure in the Church—that will ever happen (at least not in our life-times).
Peter Steinfels stated that many people are in a state of grief. I would agree with that assessment. I do believe that, at least in the First World countries, the Church has ‘entered a hospice’ and we, like anxious adult children around the bed of our dying Mother—have various thoughts and feeling in our minds and hearts, as we await the end.
Western Monasticism may have saved Europe but it was the single most destructive vehicle of the Christian Way. It was a call to elitism which did not include the ordinary Christian. One can understand the movement in a world in which it was fashionable to be a Christian in name while ingnoring the gospel. Vatican II attempted to restore the call of holiness and priesthood to all and clamored against the elite clergy and religious.
It is not an accident that the decline of the clergy and the religious life followed Vatican II. The People of God understood that the gospel did not center around these people anymore. The restorationist attitude of JPII and Benedict and those who irresponsibly pursue their anti-Vatican II objectives have contributed to the polarization and corruption in the church. The solution is not more priests and religious. The solution is for the entire people of God becoming more priestly and religious.
Vatican II did a world of good and we should look more clearly into how that occurred. Insisting on numbers in the Empire, read monarchical church, is misleading and does not look for the substance of the Gospel being lived. Timothy Dolan of New York was bewildered by the Pew study in which Catholics stated they were fine with Jesus and God but not with the bishops and priests.
Until we make these distinction we will continue to fail to see where Jesus remains with his church, the People of God, forever.
I recently read a book on the fall of the Roman Empire, and one part of the author’s thesis really stuck with me. Basically, the empire had always had an unstable model of choosing and maintaining leadership, with many times during the course of the empire when it took 20 or even 30 years to regain clear and decisive leadership. This was only an internal problem for 400 years — until barbarians began to combine forces and forge their own form of a more centralized leadership. Then it became catastrophic, when every power vacuum led to the loss of major pieces of revenue producing territory.
As Peter S. notes above, nearly every denominational model has significant weaknesses, and it seems to me that many elements of the hierarchical culture have been with us for at least my lifetime. So, we can say, “it was ever thus,” and be right, but when institutional stasis is met with culturally dynamic forces, the weaknesses stop being little flaws and start really interfering with the ability to preserve the institution. In our government, we can point to the Senate as a clear example of a “traditional” model that “was ever thus,” but that is now frighteningly unable to address national problems.
In my own view, the Church that we have known has exhibited extreme difficulty assimilating a more educated and independent membership on an institutional basis. The efforts to dictate people’s votes is both an embarrassing and insulting example of this phenomenon (not to mention that, at least as it would affect gays, counter to every message of equality the younger set has been receiving since the first grade). The priests I know personally like being around educated and talented people — but find it difficult to give them anything that approaches autonomy. I was involved in many parish activities but repeatedly ran into this dynamic in one form or another, and finally told people that I made a bigger difference through the “extras” I did at work, where I am actually trusted, than the church related activities.
And seriously incorporating the views of educated lay people into church governance, and horrors, theological debates, is unthinkable. (As the book on the Roman Empire I read noted, it was not ever thus — educated Roman citizens had a significant amount of influence in Church institutions, but lay influence atrophied as the educated Roman citizen model gave way to a much less educated lay citizenry relative to clerical counterparts.) The fact that a celibate hierarchy thinks it unremarkable that it should make pronouncements about married life without significant influence of married people is a clear example of this particular deficiency.
Maybe none of this would help with the younger set, but it does forge, in my view, a “take it or leave it” mentality that is difficult to love and very easy to leave, especially when you consider that parishes are getting larger, and priests fewer and less likely to identify with parish members culturally. The attitude of “I don’t need you” can only sow the response of “I don’t need you either,” without some clear sense of dependence — which, at least recently, has been in the form of immigrant communities. This is probably a long way of saying: The Enlightenment happened, lay people are now once more educated enough to second guess the hierarchy, and the Church needs to respond by doing something other than circling the clerical wagons.
When I was in college, 1971-75, in upstate NY, nearly all my friends — most were from Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island and Buffalo — were former Catholics. Most had stopped going to Mass at around the age of 14. Most also were educated in Catholic schools, k-12, and some of the brightest of them were grads of Regis High. Of all the Catholics I knew then, I was the only who made the effort to get to Mass. When I worked in DC in the years after college, almost all of my associates were also from Long Island, and all former Catholics.
When my wife and I were in Buffalo, raising 6 children, we attended a Ruthenian church, because a reasonably sensible RC liturgy was hard to find. When Bishop Head allowed the Tridentine Mass on a weekly basis, we joined the Latin Mass community, and the kids loved going to Mass, and the older boys loved serving it. When we moved to a rural parish in the Diocese of Rochester, the kids all stopped going to Mass about the time they turned 14. My son Gabriel summed it all up pretty well, when he said he wouldn’t go to Mass because it was “too cheesy.”
I think the bishops could reverse the attrition if they could become united on the liturgical front. I know people here aren’t too enthusiastic about the Benedictine reforms, but in my view it is only when the bishops get liturgy right, when the Mass of the Roman Rite is celebrated as it should be, people will return to Mass, and it is through the Mass they will learn to love the Church and how to be Catholic. Liturgy forms personality.
The first task should be to explain what the Mass is, and how it should be celebrated.
I find myself drifting!
Peter articulated a number of concepts at Fordham (about viewing VII) that help in understanding drift.
At bottom, there is a lack of balance im the Church and Rome/curia is way too much in control.
The instransigence and demand for absolute loyalty on a numbe rof divisive issues drive many away and many stay only for the community/Eucharist/social justice aspects they find there – bu ta perceived lack of tolerance turns off many youth.
The lovers of orthodoxy and Romanita are happy and not adrift but their numbers are not the answer.
My question is this: despite Peter’s long and distinguished service to the Church, will any policy makers take up his question?
More likely, more drift – including yours truly.
The bishops do not seem to think one in three is so bad. In fact, they think it’s basically good news.
The Pew Forum’s numbers are available in the PDF linked here. Retention rates are on pages 33 and 34. 69% isn’t stellar, but it’s not a disaster.
This crisis of Faith, Hope, and Love, was prophesied by Our Lady when she appeared in Fatima in 1917 and asked that we Pray for the conversion of hearts.
“The triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart is the triumph of His Church.”
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031987_redemptoris-mater_en.html
What is needed is a Miracle, and every Miracle requires an Act of Faith.
Regarding Latino Catholics:
The CARA Report (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown University) for Spring 2010 (Vol. 15, No. 4) presents two items relevant to the discussion thus far. The article “Organizations Call For Strengthening U.S. Hispanic Ministry” (pp. 1&11) considers issues facing The National and Regional Hispanic Ministry Project (NRHM) – a membership group commissioned by the USCCB Secretariat of Cultural Ministry in the Church.
“The primary organizational difficulty faced by NRHM groups is inadequate funding. Many perceive that financial commitment to Hispanic ministry in the Church today is insufficient and therefore organizationally debilitating. A disconnect exists between the rhetoric surrounding Hispanic ministry and the reality of programming efforts at the local, diocesan, and national levels (p.11).” Additional results speak of leadership challenges, programming etc. Important survey.
The second story “Proportion Catholic Among Latinos Declines from 1990″ reads in part: “Americanization is leading to de-Catholicization and religious polarization. U.S.-born Latinos and those most proficient in English are less likely to self-identify as Catholic and more likely to identify either as None (no religion) or with conservative Christian traditions.” Noteworthy! Why?
And from Albert Einstein: “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. We have to think (dare i also say feel – apologies Albert) with a new mind.”
Paul L,
Your son hit the age 14 syndrome rather than “missed the Latin Mass.” How you believe the Latin Mass will solve everything strains belief. It is not liturgy that solves everything. It is good example. The problems you detail all occurred before the Novus Ordo. The fact that the RCC is run like an Empire rather than a church is the issue. In general the thing Pastors still get most upset at is the amount in the collection. Not the lack of church or community in the parish.
“Had John Paul I not died prematurely, we would never have had John Paul II, who came into office with a clearly conceived plan to re-make the face of the hierarchy — a plan that involved the dismantling of much of what Paul VI tried to create, particularly a cadre of pastoral bishops committed to carrying out the reforms and renewal launched, under Paul VI’s direction, by Vatican II.
Thus, if there is any single reason why polarization exists in the Catholic Church today it is because of the type of bishops whom John Paul II appointed and promoted within the hierarchy over the course of his 26 and a half years in office.
Any other explanation of the polarization that now afflicts the Church is simply naive.”
http://ncronline.org/blogs/essays-theology/john-paul-ii-real-reason-church-polarization
Like some others here, I think at least some of the problem lies with our leadership. For me, they do not speak to the critical issues in my life and my community.
On a much more superficial level, I also don’t think they make very good “Face Persons” for our Church. So many of our bishops look like bank executives, and they have about as much charisma as a banker. I don’t wonder our young people aren’t drawn to them.
But why do the 2/3 stay exactly? I didn’t catch that in the posts, and I imagine that is as interesting as why people leave.
Some think the main problem the Church faces is secularism. But the secular is, I think, becoming less and less attractive itself. The optimism of the Enlightenment is dead, and the malaise of post-modernism has finally found its way into the popular culture.
That may be so and gives me even more reason to believe that the Church is failing in its mission and thus missing an opportunity. The disappointment with secularism doesn’t seem to be reflected in an increase in the traditional measures of religiosity.
Many teachers of the Catholic faith and preachers on the parish level have failed to move people through the developmental stages (“notional to the experiential) from “religion as systemic control” to “religion as idealization” to “religion as personal process” (Tad Guzie, Jesus and the Eucharist). His chapter on From Magic to Mystery has some tremendous insights that pertain to the attrition issue – how many Catholics are being introduced to this final stage and are then guided in their development? – is that not what interests our young students – below are three thoughts I find helpful from Guzie:
– - – - – In the first two stages above, “faith in Jesus is basically faith in an outsider”.
- – - – - -However, in the “personal process” stage he writes: “one comes to know the Jesus in whom one believes. Faith is now fully an assent to the presence of God in one’s own personal history … resurrected life is no longer some vague immortality or life after death, but the wholeness of life that comes out of death in any form. It is an integration of flesh and spirit, a type of life which we touch upon and discover in single experiences of death to self.”
- – - – - -”the fulfillment accomplished in Jesus involves continuity …” -
Robert.
Who is this speaker you speak of who failed to answer that student’s question to your satisfaction?
Please pardon the nostalgia.
With regard to the immigrant Church, the mid-size, rust-belt town I grew up in ( population under150,000) had at least one Catholic or Orthodox church for each ethnic group (German, Italian, Greek-Catholic, Orthodox Greek, Irish Polish, Slovenian, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, etc– but no Hispanic church back then). In some cases, such as the Poles and Croatians, the churches were right across the street from one another.
As in “the old country”, each church was within walking distance of the neighborhood whose parishioners it served — much like a village church would have been.
Over time, linquistic and cultural assimilation acted as solvents to dissolve the ties that held these ethnic communities together.
My last entry started me wondering if the issue is that the Church, in spite of the sincerity of its exhortations and soul-searching, simply cannot, by itself, engender a sense of communal cohesion. If communities are casualties of the centrifugal forces of the economy, is it any wonder that people drift away?
Antonio -I believe it is within the Church not without – the Eucharist is the very life of the Church – does it seem that way when you go – Jesus said “when you do this, remember me” – only a personal relationship with Christ can bring meaning to those words – we need more development of the spiritual lives of our Catholics
But the early Church was a community of believers. Alastair McIntyre has it right in that respect. We are shaped and sustained by communities and their loss diminishes us.
One’s personal relationship with Christ may be necessary but it is not sufficient.
People raised Catholic drift from the faith for many reasons, and any institutional response will require many initiatives. Still we have to have priorities. Mine are the Sunday liturgy, catechesis, and programs for adolescent and young adult formation. They all go together and they all require leadership.
Take Adam Marischuk’s observation: “The Mass is a rather barren and shallow aesthetic experience. The music is usually terrible, the churches are ugly, the homilies are moribund, and the place is packed with people more interested in gossip than community. Now a quick liturgical fix won’t change anything. What the church needs is active and enthusiastic leaders to get the youth involved beyond themselves, in social justice, in life issues, in missionary work. … they can become passionate about building homes in Mexico, working at the soup kitchen, supporting pregnancy care centers, sending bikes to Africa.”
His judgment about people more interested in gossip than community does not fit my experience; and in fact, there are many liturgies that are not “barren and shallow aesthetic experiences.” But too many are. On the other hand, even more were that way in my youth. I served Masses that in their rote, even slovenly, fashion bordered on blasphemy. But the “experience” was related to the catechesis: What I brought to those Masses as a kid and adolescent was a tremendous conviction about the world-shaking event taking place — and that did a lot to transform what even then I recognized as a mediocre to terrible celebration.
As for social justice activities, building homes in Africa, etc., those things are wonderful in themselves, and they do appeal to the passion and idealism of young people. Yet minus catechesis, prayer, and liturgy, sooner or later those young people realize that these activities can be carried out from humanist convictitons without all that religious “baggage.” As Herbert McCabe is quoted in the recent Commonweal, “I’m not a socialist because I’m a Christian. I’m a socialist because I’m a socialist.” Students going off on urban plunges and Global Outreach often enough conclude, “I am not a humanitarian because I am a Christian (let alone a Catholic). I am a humanitarian because I am a humanitarian.
The Sunday liturgy is central because (a) it IS central and (b) it is also the only occasion when 20 million or so American Catholics come together to hear the Word, to be catechized, to be mobilized for social justice, to be recruited for communal activities. I do not want to enter the liturgy wars. I too can get passionate about what is right and wrong, and some things are definitely in one category or the other. Still, the reality is that there is no one way of celebration that meets the needs of all or perfectly fulfills a heavenly template. Even small congregations can offer a few different manners of worship — and should.
Of course, all of that poses issues of leadership. The leadership to preside and preach. The leadership to educate and facilitate and inspire. The leadership to raise the necessary material resources involved in all of this. The leadership to both consult and oversee and assess the quality of other leaders, for example, in regard to presiding, preaching, and pastoring, and to take action when it is unsatisfactory.
And that gets to the question of selecting and forming leaders, of ordination, of the role of women, of what happens when a single pope and close associates pick bishops, archbishops, and cardinals over a 25 year period, and so on. I am actually in favor of hierarchy, not only as a characteristic of the church, but as a characteristic of almost all functioning human collectivities, from wilderness teams to newspapers to university to orchestras. I do not think that hierarchy is in and of itself incompatible with equality. But there are many dysfunctional forms of hierarchy, lacking checks and balances, and currently the church suffers from some of them.
I appreciate the personal experience of MEP in encountering conservative clerical bullies (and no doubt others have encountered liberal or radical clerical bullies); but I resist the idea of pulling out Occam’s razor and reducing the current losses to recent political interventions, even though I agree with Putnam and Campbell about of their destructive impact.
On a few specific points: the Catholic retention rate looks ok, as Felapton reports, until you realize that the lower retention rates of most other Christian groups simply reflect people moving from denomination to denomination in an age when most denominational differences have diminished if not entirely disappeared. I stubbornly resist the idea that migrating from Catholicism to a non-denominational community church, for instance, is the same kind of shift as moving from a Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian church to that community church.
The CARA reports cited by John Calhoun on Hispanic Catholics are certainly ominous.
Bill Mazzella asks why I don’t promote VOTF as a solution. Because I don’t think it is. I could be wrong and I don’t want to discourage anyone who finds otherwise. But my own conclusion is that by not moving more rapidly from a dogmatic, even ritualistic, focus on the sex abuse crisis to a measured program for reforming church structures, VOTF lost its moment.
Robert Imbelli mentions a speaker at Boston College on the crisis of contemporary U.S. Catholicism. When asked by a non-Catholic about the attractions of Catholicism, this speaker could only give what Father Imbelli found “a perfunctory and certainly not-energizing response.”
A year and a half ago, I spoke at BC on the crisis of contemporary U.S. Catholicism and Father Imbelli chaired the session. So it is not impossible that I was this unnamed speaker. If so, I am sorry to have disappointed Father Imbelli.
I notice that he refers to a statement I made on another thread about the power of remarks by Pope Benedict. He does not mention my unhappiness, also expressed on that thread, with a major aspect of these remarks or my observation that the cloud of distrust now surrounding the papacy makes it hard for many of us even to appreciate most papal statements.
Perhaps Father Imbelli’s constant flow of exhortation and examples aimed at keeping our eyes single-mindedly focused on the beauty and depths of the church and its mysteries, and simultaneously averted from the church’s manifest failures, may work to prevent some of us from being discouraged or distracted in our lives of faith. This doesn’t work for me. It merely makes me feel dishonest.
Irene Baldwin’s question about why the 2/3 stay is indeed as interesting as the question why people leave. Again, I don’t think there is any one or simple reason. But that, too, would be an important part of any serious examination of the current exodus.
As ‘would-be disciples’ we must in the end acknowledge our personal and our species’ rivalries which drive us all and the role they play in making the Old Creation go round and us with it.
Can we bring ourselves to take our stand with the One we worship – ‘who is cast out’ – the scapegoat, the common enemy Old Creation individuals and groups (Pilates, Herods, Peters, high priests, crowds, onlookers) need to set upon so as to distract themselves from their own fears and insatiable desires for ‘being or belonging to dominance’ – taking their stand on ‘doing and being important.’
Do we believe the anthropology of the cross? As revelation of what we do to one another and to God when God tries to engage us as in Christ? Do we provide our young with a capacity for ongoing diagnosis and recognition of the human plight – theirs too – against which they must struggle in pursuit of their integrity as God knows it.
We are ‘thrust into it’ at birth and ‘cast out of it’ at death. In the meantime we are gifted in Christ to belong to a community of the Catholic Tradition that bids us make signs of ‘a hope that is within us.’ We are baptized into His birth into the Old Creation and death into the New Creation so that we can come to be fully who we are meant to be.
Jesus snatched nothing; He came in silence and was cast out in violence. Isn’t that the way it is with us humans? A welcoming community?
“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”
If the young are going to reject, let it be the Gospel that they reject – not a lot of trivia.
As a last resort, Boccaccio’s argument for the Catholic faith should give those on the brink of leaving pause for thought.
Be careful. One could make an argument similar to Bocaccio’s to account for the persistence and rise of criminal syndicates or any other malignant enterprise.
Once I took a group of second graders to a room with a sloped roof at the top of my house. We sat on the floor in a circle, and lit a candle in the center. After some muffled laughs, they settled down. There was a moment of expectant silence. Then I said the “Our Father” a couple of times, the children carefully repeating each line after me, attentive, mesmerized by the flame in the dark. For a few moments, everyone was focused, straining to hear the still, small voice. Maybe it sounds cheap, but it was still something special. In later (usually mildly chaotic) meetings, I was never able to recapture that state of focused listening.
There was once a raffle at my daughter’s preschool. She went into a quiet corner, got on her knees and fervently prayed to win the big prize. And, lo and behold, she did! I’ve always wondered if one of the staff saw that toddler praying and helped luck go her way… She spent the next ten years absolutely convinced of God’s presence in her life.
My niece says a “Hail Mary” before going to sleep every evening. Half asleep, in a state of semi-consciousness, she speaks to Mary very simply and directly. It’s a wonder to behold (until she notices I’m listening, and then it becomes theatrical.)
Children can and do pray, but we don’t know how to nurture that ability, and by the time they hit 14 years old, the connection is lost and forgotten. I wish we knew better how to pray and how to foster prayer, particularly at Mass.
So I’m not sure that a “personal process” is the “third stage” of a development of faith. It may be the natural first stage!
Peter,
Thank you for your response not only to my question but to others who expressed other concerns. It is constructive when we not only share our insights but also when we show that we are listening to others. That is dialogue and what makes you special.
If I may continute on the point I made. You wrote: “Bill Mazzella asks why I don’t promote VOTF as a solution. Because I don’t think it is. I could be wrong and I don’t want to discourage anyone who finds otherwise. But my own conclusion is that by not moving more rapidly from a dogmatic, even ritualistic, focus on the sex abuse crisis to a measured program for reforming church structures, VOTF lost its moment.”
You have a point but I would like you to consider that the sex abuse crisis was arguably the only issue in which the bishops have admitted mistakes while they have stonewalled all others. VOTF has the perceptual problem in that when they move to a “measured program for reforming church structures” they are discredited for using the sex abuse crisis as a ploy for their own agenda. Notice that Bishop Gregroy stressed that at the 2002 conference blaming reform groups for using the crisis as a suberfuge for reform. So while the sex abuse accusation is incontestable, the demand for reform is met with the old stonewalling. I maintain that if other voices come in to join with VOTF the effectiveness could be greater. On that note have you made your concerns known to VOTF. Or what is your alternative to VOTF?
Which brings me to the other large issue with reference to reform and renewal. There is no real unitive force driving all the reform organizations in the church whereby they can act as one. Certainly there is the nesting instinct that prevents a unified drive for reform.
Somehow, the prophetic voices within the church have to unite so a more effective people of God can reign.
Peter,
For the record (as newspaper folk are wont to say), there is no mention of Boston College in my comment — though, of course, I remember with pleasure the visit to which you refer.
Also, for the record, I endorse all of your (as usual) measured points above — from liturgy to catechesis to consultation. You will recall my review of “A People Adrift” (in “America”) upon which I bestowed merited praise — to the surprise of some.
The one reservation I mentioned then is the book’s neglect in probing the needed Christological grounding of all efforts at authentic reform. Now not everyone can do everything. So be it. But I demur when you characterize my concern in your comment above in this way: “Perhaps Father Imbelli’s constant flow of exhortation and examples aimed at keeping our eyes single-mindedly focused on the beauty and depths of the church and its mysteries, and simultaneously averted from the church’s manifest failures, may work to prevent some of us from being discouraged or distracted in our lives of faith.”
What I am seeking to do in my quotes of Pope Benedict, Archbishop Gregory, Charles Taylor, and others (what you delightfully call “Father Imbelli’s constant flow of exhortation and examples”) is to urge us to keep our eyes single-mindedly focused on the beauty and depths of Christ and his mysteries.
Others on this blog do more than their share in keeping our eyes single-mindedly focused “on the church’s manifest failures.”
For what it’s worth, I found Barbara’s comment at 10:18 today to mesh pretty well with my experience.
Also for what it’s worth, what little experience I have had with recently ordained diocesan priests and seminarians (a total of three), all of whom attended the Philadelphia seminary is that they are poorly educated in at least one respect. Even though each of them is convinced that he has lots of answers to substantive moral or theological questions, they don’t seem to have much intellectual curiosity. They seem to be most comfortable with pat answers a la the old apologetics school. They don’t seem to know that intellectual inquiry involves give and take about most topics. So they’re not prepared to entertain the possibility that things could be better in the church if more voices were heard, really heard.
Someone above suggested just ordaining lots of deacons. I know nothing about the formation programs for deacons, but if my very small sample is even a clue, then one would have to wonder about their preparation to engage in genuine discussion..
One of the un-quantified (although perhaps not unquantifiable) elements in the drift we have been discussing relates to the decline in numbers of women religious and religious brothers who, in many cases, once provided some of the social glue that helped the Church to stick together. The rise of lay ecclesial ministry, a good development which might have alleviated this situation, has occurred in the teeth of a strong resistance, resistence which has succeeded in driving numerous talented, gifted and willing servants out of the field altogether or into other Christian Churches where they might hope to be treated justly or paid a living wage.
Consequently, the things that might be done to strengthen ties within communities of faith or to build bridges toward people who find their connections to the Church waning, simply aren’t done. There are now not enough people to do them. I do not believe that all the initiatives that are already known have been found wanting and people will leave anyway. Rather, effective means just haven’t been pursued with the human resources we’ve been given. Instead, those human resources have been systematically squandered. The situation Barbara described above is typical.
Even now, when the need is so great for such work as will build up and sustain the Church from within, lay ministry is not embraced fully or supported by the clergy or bishops to the degree necessary to make much of a difference. Instead, we hear of more quixotic plans to raise the numbers of men attracted to the celibate priesthood by suppressing the development of anything which might threaten their sensitive egos, or deprive them of their (inflated) sense of their own importance by suggesting that anyone else’s gifts are as needed as their own. There are more than 30,000 lay ecclesial ministers working in the US Church today. There would be twice that many, I would guess, if Church leaders would let it happen. And it would make a difference.
We Catholics have a big Church. There are a lot of people. We have the resources to make it work. The Church is failing to use those resources. We need to claim them and honor them with just treatment. I am not talking about presiding at Eucharist. I am talking about all the work that goes into supporting community life and liturgy and outreach to the wider world.
Rita,
I think you have hit on the issues, but there is something more to it. Religious provided a glue for the community that was based in their own lifelong commitment to the Church. There formation meant that they were the recognized as representing the Church in a way that laity cannot.
What is needed is a laity that cannot drift away. There are some who are committed, but that commitment is not institutionalized so it cannot serve the institution the way religious did. They seerve ad hoc in this ministry or that, or do nothing some years. That will not provide the glue that comes from a solemn lifelong commitment that is recognized by the Church.
When a religious leaves the Church or a religious community, it is a dramatic rupture because of the strength of the glue. When a layperson leaves the Church, few people notice. The glue is not there, and because of that it cannot be extended to others.
What about secular orders such as what used to be called Third Order Franciscans? Developing them might be a way to institutionalize laity commitment.
John Calhoun gives us a wonderful statement of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. It is a statement cast in relatively abstract terms that each of us have to fill in with the concrete challenges of believing and living that way in our daily lives, in marriage, family, work, neighborhood, citizenship.
I cannot help but put that clarion call next to the homey, familiar examples Claire provides of how children and then young people embark and grow into this extraordinary and ultimately lifelong business of discipleship. Much of what we would be examining if there were really were an examination of the attrition my article was spotlighting would probably move between these planes of radical call to discipleship and the People of God’s everyday nudging and nurturing (maybe occasionally shoving) us throughout different stages of our lives into the mind and actions of disciples of Christ.
And as we move between these planes, we would recognize, with Rita Ferrone, the crucial role of people like communities of religious women and men in the past and lay ecclesial ministers in the present and future.
In regard to Peter Steinfel’s comment (at 5:14 pm):
“Robert Imbelli mentions a speaker at Boston College on the crisis of contemporary U.S. Catholicism. When asked by a non-Catholic about the attractions of Catholicism, this speaker could only give what Father Imbelli found “a perfunctory and certainly not-energizing response.”
“A year and a half ago, I spoke at BC on the crisis of contemporary U.S. Catholicism and Father Imbelli chaired the session. So it is not impossible that I was this unnamed speaker. If so, I am sorry to have disappointed Father Imbelli.
“I notice that he refers to a statement I made on another thread about the power of remarks by Pope Benedict. He does not mention my unhappiness, also expressed on that thread, with a major aspect of these remarks or my observation that the cloud of distrust now surrounding the papacy makes it hard for many of us even to appreciate most papal statements.
“Perhaps Father Imbelli’s constant flow of exhortation and examples aimed at keeping our eyes single-mindedly focused on the beauty and depths of the church and its mysteries, and simultaneously averted from the church’s manifest failures, may work to prevent some of us from being discouraged or distracted in our lives of faith. This doesn’t work for me. It merely makes me feel dishonest.”
See “Confident Catholicism” by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. at The Catholic Thing, 10/191/10
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/confident-catholicism.html
Excerpt:
“George Weigel, in his wonderful new book on John Paul II, remarks, as others have, that ironically, today, the leading defender of reason in the modern world is nothing other than the papacy. Thus, Brague: “We should endeavor to get a clearer picture of the reasons why Christians – and not only the pope – have to speak up from time to time. They don’t preach their own stuff, pro domo. They warn of dangers that menace mankind at large, and they have to do so when they think that some behavior, be it individual or collective, is lethal for mankind. The supreme rule in those matters is some sort of duty to rescue.” The duty to “rescue” the mind of man is indeed a great mission of Catholicism. In saving souls, minds too are saved.
“I have been long of the opinion that the great aberrations of the world first begin in the turmoil in the minds of the intellectual and clerical dons. They have little to do initially with the condition of the world such aberrations seek to change in the name of a higher humanist good. In 1 Timothy 4, we read: “The Spirit distinctly says that in latter times some will turn away from the faith and will heed deceitful spirits and things taught by demons through plausible liars – men with seared consciences….” Our world often seems full of “plausible liars.” “Seared consciences” are in the daily news.
“The fact is, though, Catholicism is confident. It knows about sin and its effects, so it is not overly surprised to meet them, especially among its own. That is the whole point of redemption. But there is an order in things; they do fit together. Almost every day this becomes clearer. The suspicion that it might just be true is the real root of hatred for Catholicism in the modern world.”
I think the paragraph in the Schall piece that is more to the point is this:
“The late Father Richard Neuhaus used to speak of the “Catholic moment,” or at least the missing of it. Somehow, in the back of our minds, we think that finally the scholarly world will come to see the enormous sense and intelligence in Catholicism, “the range of reason,” as Maritain called it. It probably won’t happen, not because this intelligence and good sense are not there, but because of the humility it would take to think modernity through in terms of Catholic orthodoxy, the delicate compatibility of reason and revelation.”
If we want the world “to see the enormous sense and intelligence in Catholicism,” we first have to make it plain to ourselves. Then we might be able to preach it. This gets to the task of reconstructing the whole shared memory of the institutional Church in a way that makes faith and reason coherent.
But this will never happen while the institution itself continues to act in irrational ways. How can an institution preach that faith and reason are coherent if it is incapable of rational behavior itself? As it goes about maintaining the last absolute monarchy in the West? As it goes about preaching that birth control is “intrinsically evil” because its been saying it’s “intrinsically evil” for a really really really long time? As it closes parishes in diocese funded by the faithful without the input of the faithful? This is rational? Can’t be done. If you want to talk about the coherence of faith and reason, you have to behave reasonably yourself. It’s the institution that needs the humility, not the “scholarly world,” and it’s the Church that needs to take on the task “to think modernity through in terms of Catholic orthodoxy, the delicate compatibility of reason and revelation.”
So, two things need to happen at the same time.
We need to reform the structures of authority. “… it cannot succeed as a church while failing as an institution.” (Peter Steinfels, A People Adrift) This is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient.
We need to restore the shared memory in a way that recovers the riches of the past, stands up to reason, and repairs the break in the lineage of belief. “The Catholic Church can succeed as an institution while failing as a church.” (Peter Steinfels, A People Adrift) Structures of authority need to be reformed but it will only matter if we recover the fullness of the shared memory, the link to the past, and the identity to move ourselves in to the future.
A big job, but that’s the nub of it.
The following is taken from a description of corporate pathologies at http://www.soxfirst.com/50226711/six_organizational_pathologies.php
1. Myopic organizations: These are the kinds of places where the leadership is in the grip of a protective stupidity, where they can’t see the bleeding obvious. Different parts of the organization stop talking to each other or garble each others’ messages and people asking hard questions or pointing out the truth are swept aside, passed over or eliminated. The organization is caught up in group think. One of the best examples is Enron.
2. Bureaucratic organizations: Rigid and inflexible places. Not welcoming of ideas or creative people. Too heavy a focus on rules and process.
As with any human organization, I suppose one could easily find such pathologies at work in the Church. However, while corporations have metrics like profitability and market share as indicators of health, I’m puzzled by the yardstick one might use to evaluate the well-being of the Church. According to the Schall article, mere attendance headcount is irrelevant. One can always avoid introspection and reform by insisting that the Church is right and it’s the world that’s gone to the devil. In which case, any hand wringing seems like a waste of time. Apparently, to paraphrase Garbo in “Ninotchka”, there will be no choice but to accept the likelyhood that there fill be fewer but better Catholics.
When I read things like the excerpt above I feel like I showed up for a production of King Lear only to find that the actors thought they were performing Star Wars. If someone really thinks that when I left I was motivated by “plausible liars” or that I stopped believing in redemption or that I was so determined to overcome my suspicion that Catholic thought might be true that I formed a deep seated hatred for Catholicism . . . well, that person must be traveling through a different galaxy. But then, it’s just so much easier to master the dramatic essence of Star Wars than King Lear.
So smug triumphalism is the order of the day in the face of any real evidence that it is warranted. You hate us only because you’re afraid we might be right! (which then serves as a highly convenient excuse for not considering the ways in which you might actually, you know, be wrong). You know what that reminds me most of? My drug enthused sister telling me that the only reason I was so resistant to taking drugs was because I was afraid of the power and change that drug induced euphoria might have in my life. Yeah, that was it! That was the argument of a “true believer” who was committed to not considering other arguments because she had already decided on a course of action, and arguments in support of a preconceived result are frequently illogical.
Yes, I am sure that, unlike my teenaged sister, Benedict has and JPII had a great mind, as the author says, but theirs are not the only great minds, and the tradition they represent actively gets in the way of them seriously considering that other great minds at work both inside and outside of their tradition might have different and, often enough, compelling insights to offer. So they go merrily along with their outcome determinative pronouncements about life in the modern world that, to some of us, seem increasingly jarring and beside the point. Because it’s 2010 and not 1610 or even 1810, we are now all allowed to look at arguments objectively and find failure of reasoning and act on it when it becomes too much to bear.
“Smug triumphalism is the order of the day” when individuals whom Rome favors propagate a Catholic Christian faith which is more empire than gospel. Paradoxically, focusing on the mysteries of the church is more Donatist than Augustinian. Augustine knew the Catholic church was not spotless. He just insisted that everyone had to be in it to have a chance of salvation. It is clear that the RCC cannot prevail in a world in which the secular powers no longer enforce its rules. The attempt to flood the world with loyal and incompetent bishops has been a massive failure which long suffering Catholics have been willing to overlook for the sake of peace. No more. Now that the Vatican continually chooses power over the gospel the deficiences become more glaring by the day.
Nobody want anarchy nor chaos. Most want inspired leadership. Propagating Empire is self defeating. Those leaders who are willing to wash the feet of the People of God do the will of God.
Fr. Tom Reese’s words — “a disaster. You wonder if the bishops have noticed” — are very true and very disturbing. I belong to a parish that was in the not too distant past — 15 to 20 years ago — a thriving community of faith. Today it is a shadow of that: a “good crowd” at a weekend Eucharist is one-fifth to one quarter of the church filled! When I have brought this to the attention of members of our Pastoral Council, the response is “it’s happening everywhere!”
Why are we not “leaving the 99 in search of the one who is lost”? Our Church — in the US and throughout the world — has become a multinational corporation and operates very much like a business … with pope and bishops as CEOs and CFOs. The difference is that “the children of darkness” (secular businesses) are wiser than “the children of light”: they would not, and could not, tolerate a one-third loss of their business.
When the universal Church, and our local churches, cannot not any longer pay their bills
… may be then, and only then, will they get the picture. The secular world “gets it”! We are the ones who don’t get it … and our leaders get the impression that they don’t get it and they don’t care.
“Perhaps Father Imbelli’s constant flow of exhortation and examples aimed at keeping our eyes single-mindedly focused on the beauty and depths of the church and its mysteries, and simultaneously averted from the church’s manifest failures, may work to prevent some of us from being discouraged or distracted in our lives of faith.”
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that that’s a fair statement. Isn’t the following statement just as fair?
“Perhaps [insert name of any one of a number of Commonweal bloggers]’s constant flow of exhortation and examples aimed at keeping our eyes single-mindedly focused on the church’s manifest failures, and simultaneously averted from the beauty and depths of the church and its mysteries, may work to prevent some of us from being encouraged or focused in our lives of faith.”
Which statement would you rather have associated with you?
Mark, I think the answer is this: We have to keep our eyes focused on the church’s manifest failures AND focused the beauty and depths of the church and its mysteries. The failures get in the way of the beauty. Failure has to be addressed; beauty has to be recognized and shared. It’s not an either/or.
Thank you , Mark – Peter, it is unfair to have made that characterization of Fr. Imbelli – I am sure that you appreciate the beauty and wonder of some traditions of the Church – I would like to see that side of you.
Can we focus on the subject of this post instead of another bloody tally of the naughty and nice?
In the spirit of Fr. Imbelli’s salutary exhortations, I’d like to take this excellent paragraph of Jeanne Follman’s in an entirely different direction:
If we want the world “to see the enormous sense and intelligence in Catholicism,” we first have to make it plain to ourselves. Then we might be able to preach it. This gets to the task of reconstructing the whole shared memory of the institutional Church in a way that makes faith and reason coherent.
It doesn’t seem to me that “making Catholicism plain to ourselves” has been the highest priority in Catholic academia over the last 45 years. Of course there are many exceptions, both on the right and by the left. Rahner, who is currently considered “left,” had this priority, I think. So did de Lubac, who is now claimed by the “right.” And there are historical reasons for the necessity for renewing the dialogue, even with a certain deference, with the rest of the world: we have had to catch up with the times and with our fellow, non-Catholic Christians, whom we ignored to our detriment for too long.
But I think the time is right for an unapologetically self-reflective Catholic academia. Why don’t we navel-gaze for a decade and see what we might actually have to offer the world.
The problem isn’t beauty–it’s the other two transcendentals–goodness and truth.
I think you left out Unity.
Comparisons may limp but to understand Robert Imbelli’s words one can compare them to the Russian aristocrat weeping at the opera while her chaffeur is freezing to death in the carriage outside. Jesus Christ crucified is not a thing of beauty. It only becomes beautiful because it is the quintessential expression of God’s love for us. Our journey is through the crucified Lord which Paul trumpets not the rhetoric of Augustine and other grandiose personages of the fourth century. However elegant the music it must be channeled through the ignominy of the cross. The followers of Jesus Crucified are not elitists. They are like the Apostles many of whom could not read or write.
Jesus continually took a critical stance towards the religious leaders of his day. We do no good service to him when we glorify those who have little idea of the little ones suffering all over the world.
Kathy, I couldn’t agree more: “I think the time is right for an unapologetically self-reflective Catholic academia. Why don’t we navel-gaze for a decade and see what we might actually have to offer the world.” But I would add the regular old faithful to the academics — we don’t labor under oaths of “fidelity” or mandatums or have to worry about being publicly excoriated for exercising the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Then we could better understand the dogma the underpins the beauty of the liturgy (and thus stop fighting about it), to Cathleen Kaveny’s point about those other two troublesome transcendentals.
Kathy, the problem is, from my perspective, that the navel gazing is unlikely to be all that productive because there is too much off the table that Catholic academics are prohibited from even discussing. I get that maybe even most people are not sidelined by the church’s position on hot button issues — for one thing, they feel free within their private lives to ignore them. Nonetheless, I also feel that this prohibition on free examination contributes to an erosion of institutional integrity, making it relatively common to run into people who, like a woman I overheard in a mom and me class, say things such as, “yeah, we’re Catholic, but we’re not crazy. We use birth control.”
Sorry for the long post, but for some reason, the phrase “bare, ruined choirs” came to mind, which triggerred a number of thoughts.
A Goolge search turned up an Eamon Duffy’s Commonweal review of Gary Wills’s book of that title. In his otherwise critical assessment, Duffy concedes that Wills makes some valid criticisms of the Church. Specifically,
Those who maintain that the church’s teaching…has never changed, [Wills] argues, are compelled to subvert tradition, by inventing new arguments and justifications for their chosen positions as the old reasons become indefensible. So, he suggests, the real reason for the exclusion of women from the priesthood was that they were believed to be inferior or at any rate naturally subordinate to men. Now that this can no longer be acknowledged as a justification, it is claimed that the sex of the officiant at the altar is iconic, without which the priest would not be perceived to act in persona Christi. Similarly, according to Wills, clerical celibacy was imposed on the church at large because even married sexual activity was believed to defile the purity of the ministers of the sanctuary. Now that this denigration of the dignity of the marriage bed is no longer acceptable, the rule of celibacy is justified by the allegedly greater availability of the celibate for universal love. Such “jerry-built contrivances” are “shoved under” tottering doctrines and practices to keep them in place, and the result is “the quiet corruption of intellectual betrayal.” Whatever one thinks of Wills’s particular examples, he is certainly right in his claim that what passes for “traditionalism” in the church is often in fact an authoritarian insistence on the status quo, liable to be subverted or at any rate troubled by proper attentiveness to the complex reality of the tradition.
In that regard, I was reminded of last night’s Nova, on PBS, which discussed Gothic catherdrals, some of which, such as the one at Beauvais, are in danger of collapsing.
While Amiens Cathedral is under construction, just 35 miles away, the townspeople of Beauvais want to build their own stone skyscraper, bigger and more beautiful than their neighbor.
STEPHEN MURRAY: We’re seeing the most beautiful cathedral of Gothic. This building takes off, like a rocket ship.
NARRATOR: But Beauvais’ height comes at a cost.
High above these churchgoers are modern braces that may be the only thing keeping the cathedral from collapsing; an unsettling reminder of a medieval disaster.
STEPHEN MURRAY: On Ascension Day in 1573, there was a service being celebrated in the church. Stones began to fall. There was a solemn procession taking place. The clergy slowly began to speed up their pace. They ended up rushing out of the cathedral in a cloud of dust.
NARRATOR: Miraculously, the only injury was a broken arm. But, this wasn’t the first time the church collapsed. During construction, in 1284, part of the ribbed vaulted ceiling, twelve stories high, came crashing down.
The building’s columns, or piers, continue to be plagued by structural problems to this day.
Ah, Humanae Vitae, the elephant in the room. I can’t imagine any authentic reform going on in the Church until that bit of sophistry is superceded. It was never “received” by the faithful or the clergy, it continues to affect any Catholic teaching related to sex and marriage (e.g., the USCCB on the Creighton theologians), it continues to seriously compromise what’s left of the intellectual credibility and thus the moral authority of the Church, agreement with it continues to be a litmus test for the selection of bishops, it continues to generate a culture of timidity and hypocrisy and it gives Catholic moral thought a bad name. It can’t be ignored because it won’t go away. We can’t be “not crazy” while it still stands.
(Agree about the fabulous Nova program.)
“But I would add the regular old faithful to the academics — we don’t labor under oaths of “fidelity” or mandatums or have to worry about being publicly excoriated for exercising the Catholic intellectual tradition.”
Sounds like we’re starting a new Church. Do we call ourselves Follmanerans, Follmanists, Follmanaterians, or ana-Follmans?
Does “Commonweal” plan to address the arguments Geoffrey Robertson, QC, proffers in his “The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse,” Penguin Books (paperback), 2010?
Reviews from the British Press are Web available.
Mark: How about Follmeranians? Seriously, I don’t really think you need a PhD to understand Catholicism or contribute to the Church. The apostles only held Masters of Divinity degrees, no?
Jeanne—
I do not doubt that smart people, even if they have a PhD, can contribute to the Church. But what happens when the smart people disagree on important matters? How do we determine who is “smarter”?
I’m trying to stay out of this, but, I think Mark is basically in the loyalty camp in the Rigali mode.
So anyone who disagrees has their own Church – how clever.
No wonde ra umber of dedicated and smart people who post here have walked way.
Did someone say drift?
A hierarchy adrift: the crisis of the Roman Catholic Church.
Barbara,
What if we took a few months off from speculating about what is wrong with the magisterium, and used the same time and energy to marvel about whatever is true and beautiful and good in the Catholic Church? We could step back from the edges for a while, and try to find the solid center.
I suspect that we might all suddenly find that we feel at home.
“I suspect that we might all suddenly find that we feel at home.”
I suspect that some of us might not feel that in the least, Kathy.
Kathy,
Despite what you write many of us see the good in the church. We refuse to be blinded by the acutely terrible things done by the hierarchy. Like
1. Tacid agreement with the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.
2. Absolute preference for the bishop’s reputation over victims of sex abuse.
3. Blatant siding with one political party.
4. The use of force to torture or kill heretical Christians.
ETC.
Would you say the same to Jesus who lambasted the Scribes and Pharisees? Your navel gazing relates more to narcississm than fruits of the gospel.
Agree Barbara.
Attended a parish staff convocation at Fordham University last week sponsored by the Graduate School of Religion with Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM. Just about filled (not too many young folks) but still an impressive group. Richard’s talks, reflecting the thrust and text of his “The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See,” (Crossroads, 2009), were instructive, humorous and wise. (See his Center for Action and Contemplation website).
Lay to lay mentoring is very important here. It’s really crucial for lay people to hand on the traditions and practices of mystical Christianity conjoined with Gospel-inspired action to young Catholics (others too). Mystic-leavened liturgy need not only be hoped for at Mass but can be often best experienced in a range of group and at-home/on the street settings. Noteworthy too is the need to recognize that mystic traditions are not spiritual commodities or fads generated primarily by the American entrepreneurial gift for such. The Great Catholic Tradition is steeped in them and for me Catholic means Presence – ‘being found by God in Christ through the Holy Spirit’ to the end of joining with others in acting out that ‘being found’; so living in the world at large becomes a sacramental of God’s Kingdom. Catholics are mystics almost by nature but that potential needs to be nurtured. It has not been adequately so for far too long.
Aside: Check out Leigh Eric Schmidt’s (Harvard Divinity School) “Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality: From Emerson to Oprah’: Harper: San Francisco, 2005 for interesting connections among liberalism, progressivism, and spirituality among Protestants.
Suggestion: The Fordham Center for Religion and Culture might chat with the Graduate School of Religion about a collaboration on the practicalities of a School of Spiritual Nurture.
I suspect that public liturgies will in the end improve if through prayer and practice young Catholics become more whole in their experience of the Presence day in and day out. They’ll bring that to Mass.
Nothing like personal ‘unknowing’!
And by the way it’s the laity now.
Kathy, beauty is as beauty does.
Bill M.,
I understand the link you feel between truth and justice, and I agree with you. But I don’t think that even the worst ecclesial disorder should keep us from resting in the gifts of God, which, according to Vatican II–sometimes perplexingly–are most fully given through this one Church.
Agreed kathy. This is why we stay. We have to make our church better.
Kathy, you share a vision of the church as “true and beautiful and good,” and you ask us to rest a while in that vision.
But is it beautiful and good to treat other people as if they are simply not in the room? As if they are not worthy of a response — even or particularly when they contribute to a discussion asking why people are leaving the church, and are not finding its behavior true and beautiful and good?
Imagine a family in which a brother who has been away for years enters the room, and a sister’s first remark to that brother — since he happens to be a gay man — is a taunt about how gay men don’t understand female body parts and how they function.
Imagine that he then chooses to ignore and move beyond that taunt of “welcome,” which cruelly (and stupidly) reads his way of being in the world as a gay man as some inability to understand and respect women and their bodies and viewpoints. When most of the people with whom he chooses to associate and have meaningful conversations just happen to be women . . . .
And he persists in claiming his right — as a brother in a family — to talk, to explain his own experience of life, and to ask that this experience have a hearing and not be reduced to crude and totally inaccurate stereotypes.
And then his sister’s next response to him, since he won’t stop talking and her initial rebuff didn’t give him the message that he doesn’t belong and is not welcome, is to freeze him out. To pretend he’s not there. That he’s a nuisance when he tries to talk. That all his efforts to communicate only demonstrate how defective he is — they’re just rhetoric, etc. His witness is not worth hearing, since it arises out of disorder.
As she keeps on talking about how true and beautiful and good the family to which she belongs happens to be.
Personally, I’ve learned to treat these dynamics from members of any group claiming to exemplify truth, beauty, and goodness as indicators that that group might need to work a bit more on understanding truth, beauty, and goodness. Perhaps first and foremost by listening to perspectives that may critique what it thinks it knows, and who it thinks it is.
And personally, I find it hard to see truth, beauty, and goodness in groups whose members don’t exhibit basic human decency in their interactions with folks who happen to be new, different, or even disordered.
William,
While I am truly sorry that you feel this sad and bitter feelings, I cannot take responsibility for them. I have tried to be patient with you and I will definitely keep you in my prayers. I hope you find a happier road moving forward.
Thanks, Kathy. I’m sorry you don’t wish to take responsibility for your statements to me one of the very first times I logged onto Commonweal threads.
Refusing to take responsibility for one’s actions, and then trying to shift that responsibility to someone you’ve mistreated, doesn’t seem exceptionally mature to me.
And sadness is, I suspect, an understandable reaction of anyone who experiences such treatment by a person who continues to speak about the beauty and goodness of a religious tradition that’s sacramental, and calls on us to embody in our lives the love and welcome we claim to be all about as a community.
I wish you well on your road forward, too.
This discussion, apart from some typical bloviating, has been of intense interest to me. I have many times given a popular lecture under the title “Who Leaves the Catholic Church and Why.” Many of the sentiments expressed in these comments echo what I have heard over the years. I would love to say that I have a strategy to bring people back to the practice of the faith but I do not. However it is interesting to note that many of those who return do so because someone asked them to do so. I do think that this is a topic that requires serious reflection – a good start to such a reflection would be this: how do we REALLY become a hospitable community (in the biblical sense of hospitality)?
Keep those comments coming and try to resist pecksniffery.
“Keep those comments coming and try to resist pecksniffery.”
Absolutely. Also, we don’t want any “nattering nobs of negativism.”
“nattering nabobs of negativism”
I didn’t know what “pecksniffery” meant, so I looked it up on Google (I learn all sorts of things reading dotcommonweal). The first thing that came up was the urban dictionary link. Well!!…
“However it is interesting to note that many of those who return do so because someone asked them to do so.”
Very interesting. I guess it’s not surprising that a lapsed Catholic would trust another person in the everyday more than the most compelling apology for the faith. Makes me wonder if we could make more progress over a few cold ones in the corner pub rather than through commenting on a blog.
The words of Jesus that the Scribes and Pharisees traverse land and sea for converts and then make them more wicked that themselves is a true that I have found unnerving in many who evangelize. Conversion should begin with healing and cement a relationship which should build for life.