Is the church finished?
In A People Adrift, I warned that the Catholic church in the U.S. faced “thoroughgoing transformation or irreversible decline.” Yes, the gates of hell will not prevail but that did not guarantee the church’s flourishing or even existence in any given time or place.
In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Ross Douthat has raised the question even more bluntly: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/21010/07/the-catholic-church-is-finished/8159.
“For millions in Europe and America,” he writes, Catholicism is “finished” — “permanently associated with sexual scandal, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Perhaps the sexual scandal is not the chief culprit, but church leadership’s inability to respond adequately is certainly a symptom of something deep seated. More and more I contemplate the possibility that Douthat may be right. What do others think?
Let me stay away from the big question here. All I have to say is that I live in fear that my children and their spouses will find out about the deep clericalism that afflicts us. Thus far their very busy lives have given them little or no time for paying attention to the “church stuff.” They practice their faith and are rearing their children in the church. May they stay in the dark about the assorted messes.
What does it say about the condition of the Church’s clerical leadership when the most that can be said is that I hope the people I dearly love don’t notice.
I think the church is going through a profound change comparable to the shift from Temple centered Judaism to rabbinical Judaism. The Vatican is going down. I don’t believe that the ministry of Peter is
over but it will be in the context of being the bishop of Rome, not in the context of being the head
of a little city state with an overblown bureaucracy. For those who view the Vatican as the heart of the
Church, the church will be over. But it will not be over, it will be changed.
I think Douthat it correct in that the church has faced much darker times than these and has survived and become reinvigorated.
Also, fwiw – we discuss the various sexual abuse crises a lot on dotCom, but it would surely be bad history to draw a straight line from the sex abuse crises in European countries to the decline of Christianity (not just Catholicism) in Europe. The churches in Beligum and seminaries in Irleand were already empty for many years before these crises erupted. Whatever it is that brought about the decline of Christianity, it wasn’t clerical sexual abuse. To be sure, the overall lack of religious fervor in Europe helps to enable these recent crises.
And I suspect there is a certain cohort in Europe, as there certainly is in the US, that has wanted to ‘reform’ the Catholic church for many years, and this crisis energizes them, as it does various posters and commenters on dotCom. But there is another cohort – probably many times larger – that is not particularly energized by the crises.
If I’m not mistaken, surveys for a number of years in the US have indicated that Catholics are mostly focused on their local parish community. For parishioners that have had abusive clergy assigned to their parish, the crisis may (or may not) have affected them in a deep and personal way. But Catholics as a whole tend to be a pretty resilient bunch.
Of those I know, including those in my family, that practice regular or semi-regular attendance at mass, they are clear on their reasons. Everyone is well aware of the issues facing the church, but most go to be close to God, be part of a community and be nourished by their partipation in it. I discuss this with some and their response is generally that “I am not interested in all the politics, I am here to listen to the Bible readings, participate in teh community and so on”.
I think God wants to reach people, to heal and restore them. I also think there is a deep yearning in the heart and the community of faith, for all of its flaws, does carry important spiritual traditions and remains an important (essential?) means of mediating God’s grace and goodness in a particular framework.
I am as disappointed as the next person but, detaching from my own emotions, I understand that any human organization, including families, are going to have these issues in them. We just need to handle them better, more openly, more maturely.
I think that there is no question that we are witness the collapse of a particular form of religious organization but that is far different than saying Catholicism is finished. I was never a huge fan of the pomp and cermony of Rome anyway. Pretty tacky aesthetically (just my opinion sorry if some like it). But it is a big church and there are places of simpl;icity. I have an idea of where I belong and that is enough. I am confident that this is the case for many others too.
Yes.
I think it’s bigger than the sex abuse crisis. I think there’s been a Kuhnian paradigm shift –rather than something which protects vulnerable people, the institutional Church has become something that one has to protect vulnerable people from. At least imperfect, messy, sinful vulnerable people–everyone other than the unborn.
And that creates a hermeneutic of suspicion — rather than a hermeneutic of charity– on a number of other fronts. I know more than a few people trained in theology who are now saying, “You know –I used to make excuses for them. But the church really is anti-women. ” Or, anti-democratic and anti-intellectual. I know more than a few people, after Phoenix and the Schiavo case, who say: “Whatever you do, don’t take me to a Catholic hospital.” And I know more than a few people who said, “My God, the Protestants were right–the whole thing is corrupt.” And I know more than a few people, who said, after Chaput endorsed expelling the children of gay parents from Catholic school–”These people aren’t holy–they’re just MEAN.”
And since very few people believe that God really wants them to stay and suffer in a corrupt church, they walk away. And try to stop it from harming other people.
In my view, it’s not the sex scandal per se that is “finishing” the church in North America and Europe.
It’s the malignant clericalism that is at the root of the sex scandal. It’s the choice of the church’s pastoral leaders to act far more like heads of big corporations than of a church founded by Jesus Christ. This is what is “finishing” the church.
The Vatican’s decision to re-evangelize the West is, in my view, far more about continuing a church politics centered on clerical power and privilege, in the face of massive, damning evidence that the choice to hinge the church’s future on maintaining the clerical system as it’s presently configured is driving many people away from the church.
Not away from spirituality or gospel values. Away from the church. There is no need to re-evangelize the West.
There is a profound need to admit that the choice to hinge everything on maintaining the clerical system has been antithetical to the gospels. There’s a pressing need to abolish the clerical system, down to its foundations, and then rebuild on a better foundation.
If the church has a future, its future lies in that direction, I believe. And I suspect that if the church ever chose to go down that path, it would find many of us who are now disaffected would then rediscover our connections to the church.
I think Douthat it correct in that the church has faced much darker times than these and has survived and become reinvigorated.
I think the Church in previous eras always had something going for it that is slipping away — mystery. I was looking at some statistics the other day that were of particular interest to me because I went to a Christian Brothers high school and seriously (but briefly) considered joining the order in 1964. (What a disaster that would have been!) In 1965, there were 12,271 religious brothers in the United States. By 1975, that number had diminished to 8,625, and today it is 4,690. A friend of the family who was a Christian Brother, and who was among the first from my high school to leave, said that their lives had been very regimented and heavily scheduled with things like communal prayer, and when the regimentation diminished and what was mandatory became optional, people had the time to realize they were lonely and wanted out. Whether or not that is accurate, it strikes me that with aggiornamento and Vatican II (which I wholeheartedly approved of and would not suggest be undone) awakened a lot of people to the fact that their Catholicism had many of the elements of superstitions that promise arcane knowledge and “magical powers.” (I am not saying that authentic Catholicism is a superstition.)
Now, there is no shortcut in Catholicism to “mystical” feelings. But on the other hand, when easily achieved mystical feeling is gone from religious experience, you have to get it back by some kind of real understanding that makes you — at least a little bit — an authentic mystic. I don’t think that is easy to achieve. And I think because so much of the awe of priests and nuns and bishops was already gone, the abuse crisis was particularly devastating. The aura of mystery was already gone, but priests and bishops were at least good men who, although they didn’t possess “magical powers,” had dedicated their lives to doing good. When priests were revealed to be abusers, and bishops were revealed to be their protectors and in some cases practical facilitators, that was a major blow.
I think in the “old days,” it was a lot easier to accept the idea of evil in the Church, because the Church was still seen as a mysterious and divine institution. But today, the Church is a lot less mysterious, and although many may believe it is a divine institution, it doesn’t feel divine. So the question is, how can the Church make itself, once again, an institution that people really feel represents God, or Christ on earth? It would seem to me to be a very difficult task.
(Of course, what do I know?)
In recent months I’ve been struck by how many people I respect have told me that they’ve pretty much “had it” with the church, whether they’re staying or not. These are life-long workers for Catholic publishers, Catholic theologians and theology professors, life-long parish workers in liturgy and music and other areas, board members of our grad theology school – a pretty broad cross-section of engaged Catholics. Many of them say that they don’t blame their children for walking away. Some of the rage over the sex abuse/hierarchy mismanagement scandal will fade. But overall, I think the situation is pretty bad. The Church authorities don’t have much credibility, and I’m not convinced that they realize that.
Fr. Anthony Ruff, OSB
Fr. Ruff, that is a good insight – it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the “layer” of professional and pastoral workers, so critical to the functioning of the church, is among the most disaffected.
David N, as your comment (reflection) focused on the prayer and worship aspect of belief. it caused me to consider that this is the environment in which the church is introducing a new English translation?(!)
I’m not the right person to be answering Peter’s Big Question.
But I think that working with the sex scandals is a rise in sin-and-rules uber-Catholics who want a smaller, more faithful Church, i.e., one in which everybody goes to anti-abortion rallies and doesn’t vote for Democrats.
I’m nourished by the larger Catholic world of thinkers, writers, artists, and saints. But life at the parish level here is arid, cold and boring. Not much nourishment there for me. Certainly not for my kid.
Jean, I think you’re right. And if you’re not that type of Catholic–if you think the tradition is broader, you can anti-evangelize yourself by visiting certain sites on the blogosphere. You can then convince yourself a) that whatever you thought the Catholic Church was, that merely a fantasy–that was the Catholic Church in your head; and b) that the real Catholic church in the U.S. at this time is these nasty folk [insert your list], and c) you want nothing to do with them, because [insert your reason]
In general and more broadly, I really think its possible to use the blogosphere to talk oneself out of something. You can find real-live voices who confirm your worst stereotype about anything–including religion.
Can’t add much to others – Dom Anthony, Prof. Kaveny, the personal/family experiences of Wm. Lindsey and David Nickol. Mr. Steinfels – it would take another book such as A People Adrift to adequately respond to your post.
Allow me to reaffirm the comments from others – I actually forward information almost daily to my extended family across Texas, Chicago and my classmates (some clerics/some not) who are scattered across the world – the questions, doubts, reactions to episcopal shenanigans, theology/morality questions when all of us are facing dying parents, children who are leaving home and starting to set up their own families, etc. I spent/spending roughly $100,000 on catholic high school education – what my two have learned is embarrassing at best and they are well aware of the clericalism, ambition, two faced moral statements, etc. Whether one of them remains active in the church – we will see. She just returned from a mission trip to Honduras.
My last comment – my hope/faith is that the church will endure; will be re-invogarated after a period of depressing dying to clericalism, old/dead power structures. Will it take another Vatican III; will it wait until the church is majority southern hemisphere that will force changes?
My dream is one of the final works of Rahner at Vatican II – brief paper about the future church – basically, his belief that we must go through another Jerusalem Council and expasion to Rome – this will end the second period of the catholic church (let’s call it Roman); and introduce us to a new world wide catholic church (yet to be determined).
(BTW – sex abuse is a symptom; the roots are deeper and have been growing long before Vatican II)
I’m not sure the church has changed all that much (was there really a time when the institutional church hierarchy was primarily engaged in protecting the vulnerable, Cathleen?), but there has a been a massive cultural paradigm shift. We just don’t like or trust big, secretive hierarchies anymore. My father’s generation put on their suits and went to offices where they called their boss “sir” and rarely met their boss’s boss. Now we’re all in shirt sleeves and it’s “call me John” from the CEO. Members of Congress cat-call the President during the State of the Union and nobody really cares. The idea of an outfit where the head guy tells his subordinates they’re not allowed to criticize their betters (without regard to whether they’re right or wrong on the substance of the issue) because it’s unseemly is just unthinkable in the present age, laughable.
Of course, things change. Maybe the paradigm will shift back. But, if not, and pretty soon, I’m with Molly (“I don’t believe that the ministry of Peter is over but it will be in the context of being the bishop of Rome, not in the context of being the headof a little city state with an overblown bureaucracy. “)
The rumors of the Church’s demise are, imo, wrong. Historically we go into cycles of expansion and decline. During such decline, both those inside and outside, make light of the decline and assume “this is the end.” However, it is a consistent claim which is proven false again and again. Yes, there are challenges, but those challenges are worse outside the Church. What happens is people leave, and then a generation or two later, what is outside is shown to be worse, the charm is gone, and people come back to the faith. Crisis, of course, helps cause this to happen quicker. But I think there is much nostalgia and misunderstanding of the commitment of the people of the past which also helps make this decline look more than it is. I think the best example of this is the secularization thesis which we find Stark declared dead in 1999. This is just another version of that secularization thesis, and it suffers from the same problems which Stark detailed in his article (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SOR/is_3_60/ai_57533381/ ).
The Catholic Church is a fertility cult, a development that is quite ironic given the origins and initial attraction of Christianity.
The feudal hierarchy is obsessed with fecundity and denounces societies with lower birth rates as having “lost the faith” while praising societies with higher birth rates as being a part of “the new springtime”. The issues obsessed over by the hierarchy are precisely those that would horrify any other cult of fertility: abortion, homosexuality, birth control, and gender equality.
People have lost interest in the Church because it does not offer any longer the emancipatory message that we don’t have to think like that anymore and that the walls that separate us are illusions.
Instead, today’s Church suggests that the world is a dark place in which a particular code of sexual behavior, which are the real rites and mysteries of a fertility cult, must be practiced so that the Nile floods its banks in springtime and fecundity is ensured for another year.
The result is that we’re told that Africa, full of civil war, dictators, genocide-carried-out-by-machetes, transactional sex, AIDS, and general economic exploitation is a wonderful continent that hasn’t “lost the faith” like some others have.
I’d like to think that Henry Karlson is correct, but I don’t think so. It’s not the same old – same old, and history will not repeat itself. There are massive cultural shifts happening (one element among many is the rapid communication of the blogosphere), and these shifts are making clear, like never before, that corrupt absolute monarchies have no credibility.
awr
” Whatever it is that brought about the decline of Christianity, it wasn’t clerical sexual abuse. ”
Jim P. — Quite right. As I see it the scandal is one among many events caused by an overwhelming impulse in clerical culture to shut its eyes to what is unpleasant, such as bad clerical behavior and intellectual challenges from the outside. (See the cartoon with the Douthat article of the bishop with his mitre over his eyes.) I think this self-caused blindness began with Trent. The Index of forbidden books became the great historical symbol of it. It is almost as if the clerical motto is “If you ignore problems, they will go away”.
The result is that progressively the Church has withdrawn from the wider culture and its fundamental concerns. Close to home and perhaps most disasterously, beginning in the 50s when the pill appeared, it did not meet the sociological, personal, and ethical problems presented by the sexual revolution. So the Church is now sclerotic, with faint memories of its basic teachings which de facto no longer inspire leadership.
This is the type of discussion that will make for good reading in 50-100 years.
Anthony,
Every time there are different issues, every time it is “different” and “unique.” But still every time, after every “death knell” experience, something happens, reformation from within (which is always needed), bringing new life. Indeed, the cycle is in a way a cyclical repetition of the death and resurrection of Christ – we experience it annually in the liturgical calendar, but I also think there is a participation in this as well due to the events of history, and that death brings us new new life each time. Of course there is the idea that “right before the eschaton” there will be a final collapse of the church, not one which destroys it, but nonetheless significantly levels it, leading to those few who remain suffering the suffering of the cross. I don’t think we are there yet and I really thing history has a long way to go — I find John Paul II was right in this instance with his “do not be afraid.”
Yes, it’s finished.
In the old days (pre-20th century), it was a continuation of the old folk ways reaching waaaay back before Christianity, monotheism, etc. People accepted the Church’s new names for the Old Ones, but on the local level, where priests were just the least illiterate of the bunch, nothing really changed.
One of my favorite NCR articles ever was Gary Macy’s “Confused Consecration”:
http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/1999d/102299/102299p.htm
He quotes an 11th-c. law: “. . . if any bishop or priest outside the command of the Lord offers something else in sacrifice upon the altar, that is, either honey or milk or raisins instead of wine, or some other concoction, or a bird, or some other animal, or beans, thus working against the constitution of the Lord, he is to be deposed.”
Whatever corruption was going on in Rome, or in bishops’ palaces, at the parish level, things went along as they had for ten-thousand years. Seasonal celebrations.
Even in the early 20th-c., when my parents were young, the parish was the place where they acted in plays, attended sodality meetings and novenas at night, etc. These were great places to meet people.
For anyone unfamiliar with the church of roughly the 1890s through 1950, Catholic Authors by Matthew Hoehn, OSB, provides a visit to the past.
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=matthew+hoehn&sts=t&x=63&y=11
With the Internet, everything has changed. No one is ignorant anymore.
“I think there’s been a Kuhnian paradigm shift –rather than something which protects vulnerable people, the institutional Church has become something that one has to protect vulnerable people from. ”
Cathleen – forgive me, but is it possible you’re overstating things here? (Perhaps even being prophetic? :-) – but judging by a number of comments posted here, this is the type of topic that draws forth the prophet in many of us).
I presume our everday milieus are quite different, as I’m not in academia, but I don’t sense any sort of popular consensus or even plurality that the Catholic church is “something that one has to protect vulnerable people from.”
As this is being written and read, the Catholic church – the institutional church and members who don’t comprise the instituation – is feeding hungry people at soup kitchens and food pantries, is providing free legal advice to undocumented immigrants, is caring for residents in nursing homes, is giving urban teens an excellent education, is praying with inmates at detention facilities, is proclaiming the Good News of Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension, and providing hungry and sinful people with the bread of life. And, yes, is also lobbying at all levels of government on behalf of the unborn.
These are the vulnerable in our world. The church, including the institutional church, is protecting them, nurturing them, giving them food for their journey through and beyond life. This work is what the church is really all about. The awful tragedies we discuss here are poisonous, and the poison must be extricated. But the patient will survive and, God willing, thrive.
I don’t know, Jim. I think that something has changed. I’m trying to explain what it is. The numbers from Pew on Catholics in Vermont show a mass exodus. People aren’t going to stay and fight for reform. . . . they’re going to walk away.
Maybe you don’t–but something’s snapped for a lot of people in the way Anthony Ruff is describing. I tried to get at it myself in my last column for Commonweal. I do think it’s a framing issue. Does one see the institutional church, here and now, as something that is helping build a better society or something that is impeding it? Either way, you need to explain contrary facts. The question is: What big story explains reality better?
Now, you’re arguing that the usual big story still holds. What I’m suggesting is that many people don’t buy that big story any more. That’s what’s different.
And that’s why we’re on the verge of something. .. one of my historian friends says Part II of the Reformation.
I agree that the decline was not caused by the abuse cover-up. But the abuse cover-uphas accelerated the decline. Did not John XXIII see the Church’s problem was not letting in fresh air? he was stymied and died and all else followed. Old stale men who were taught/ thought they were still fighting the French revolution have been in charge ever since. Professor BXVI watched a student riot thought he saw the pending end of Christian civilization and flipped 180 degrees. The question of ‘finished’ awaits the next and soon to be conclave. The more rapid the present decline the more hope that fresh air will be allowed in. It maybe counter-intuitive but pray for more visible signs of the Church/Vatican’s rapid decline. watch the ‘signs of the times’ it may be in the ‘biased’ NYT (:
The faith will survive, and that’s what matters. But the quicker the current model of church leadership implodes, the better. I think humorously, “Dig, baby, dig that hole” with every disheartening move out of curia and chancery.
The struggle is to focus my eyes more keenly on Christ, on the faith; keep that inviolate, alive in my heart, mind, and soul, no matter what. Perhaps, monasteries will again play a vital role in offering respite and renewal.
Where else to go? There is hope on the ground, in the goodness around us, at a time when the future of the church is “more open than it has ever been. After two thousand years, the adventure of Catholicism is beginning anew” as David Gibson notes in closing “The Coming Catholic Church”.
The change will come slowly and unevenly from the bottom long after I’m gone, but we need to access enough fresh air to sustain our spirits.
Romano Guardini is helpful: “The church is the cross on which Christ is crucified today.” The sign of the church is not a happy face after all, and it is unrealistic to think the laity will not have its own divisions and cross-purposes. Still, we need an ability to have some say, and power to effect reform, as opposed to a hopeless stone wall of opposition and arrogance.
Part II of the Reformation is right. At the same time the Reformation did make some mistakes and serious abuses still exist in Protestant land. Vatican II gave us hope. The restorationists put a damper on that and turned the renewal into a desert of death, where preservation of the hiearchy was and is the main goal. The abuse crisis revealed the tyranny and corruption of the hierarchy. It did not create it.
As long as the hierarchy has money, real estate, pilgrimages, shrines and other facades it will not change.
We have to remember that the Western Church is not the whole Church. The Church is flourishing in Africa. (Perhaps because it is a fertility cult as Brian suggests?) There is also the East where the Church does not have much of a presence, but neither does it have a recent history tending to discredit it. It might prove fertile ground.
Another thing that the institutional Church has largely ignored are the Eastern religions, in spite of the fact that Buddhism has made definite inroads in the West if not in numbers then culturally. (See the “Californian syncretism” as Habermas calls it.) Perhaps the Church will flourish in the East when Rome is again a little outpost of Christian belief. There is always the East — and the Holy Spirit.
Many interesting thoughts in the posts above.
The Pope is 83, and he seems to be in good health for someone his age. It’s possible, therefore, that his papacy could last another decade or more. I’m one of those who audibly groaned after Joseph Ratzinger stepped forward onto the balcony of St. Peter’s at the conclusion of the last conclave, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by several of the things he’s done (e.g., his encyclicals, especially the last one). Still, his papacy, if not a replay of the papacy of JPII, is an extension of his predecessor’s.
While I don’t think Catholicism is in danger of extinction or even of drastic upheaval, I do think the next papal conclave could be a touchstone for the future direction of the Church. The gap between the world’s haves and have-nots is growing more rapidly and more deeply. Catholic social teaching is the Church’s “secret weapon,” and the sooner it is brought to the fore and visibly deployed on a world-wide basis, the better for the physical and spiritual health of the Church. CST may not be a complete cure for clericalism and the Church’s sclerotic curial administration, but IMO it will be the Church as Social Conscience that will reinstill faith in disaffected Catholics and that will attract new believers. Even if it means that the Church becomes financially poorer and that fewer basilicas are built, Catholicism will thrive if it can replicate, for example, the Calcutta-centered muscular CST of Mother Teresa on a large scale. We need to recapture the feeling of being a pilgrim Church with good news the world needs to hear.
I read somewhere recently (in Commonweal?) that one-third of the voting members of the College of Cardinals will, in the next 18 months or so, become ineligible to vote because of the age 80 restriction. The ineligibles will include a large proportion of the American cardinals. The Pope will have many appointments to the C of C to make in the next several years, and his choices may greatly influence the shape and direction of the Church for decades to come.
I agree with those who say the overall social change in relation to authority is presenting a dire situation because the curia and some of the hierarchy expect their authority to be unquestioned.
A friend recently noted that in his parents’ day, when the priest did something outrageous or treated people badly, the laity would assume it was somehow their fault. In our generation, we realize the priest is wrong, roll our eyes and put up with it or go to another parish. The next generation will just say, “Screw you, I’m outta here.”
A story my ultra-trad mother told me once (apparently trying to inspire me) is illustrative. She told me with great devotion the story of a young man who discovered his wife did not want children, and divorced her. The fact that he could never marry again (because in those days annulments were not available) she found extremely moving as a sign of devotion and redemptive suffering.
When I heard this story, I saw it in terms of justice. The man was clearly entitled to an annulment and remarriage, and the hierarchy of the day were negligent and guilty of placing unreasonable burdens on people. She was as shocked by my interpretation as I was angered by hers.
The next generation, if told such a story, would merely say, “I don’t see why he needs a piece of paper from the chancery office to marry again.”
This is our evolution in understanding authority in the Church: from passive piety to anger at clerical injustice to near-complete irrelevance. The curial answer: to become more authoritarian. Clearly they are intent on driving the car over the cliff in the belief that accelerating will enable them to breach the gap.
As Ann points out, it is critical that we remember that we are only 6% of the Body Catholic and that it is growing and flourishing elsewhere. As I pointed out to a group of lay ecclesial ministers last week, there were 19 million additional Catholics on the planet in 2008 – - after deaths – the latest figures we have. That’s 52,000+ new Catholics every day, 36 new Catholics every minute. No Christian body, in our 2,000 year history has ever contended with such staggering numbers or been as truly global. So I think we can rest in the knowledge that Catholicism is going to be around at least a few more generations.
The American Church alone is so immense and complex. I’ve spent the last 13 years traveling incessantly across this country and I’ve worked in 77 US dioceses so far with at least 40,000 American Catholics at all levels and almost all within the parochial and diocesan system (not lay movements or academic communities and other specialized groups.) Where I’ve found the greatest discouragement and hopelessness are the grand old Catholic urban centers like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles. Where I’ve found the greatest hope for the future and creativity are the smaller and newer Catholic centers: Omaha, Boise, Atlanta, Corpus Christi, Houston, Minneapolis, etc.
It varies dramatically from place to place. There simply is no one “trend”.
I was intrigued by Cathleen’s mention of Vermont Catholics, so chased the story a little. And found the vicar general blaming everyone else:
1. First, he says it’s “not a Catholic issue. I think it’s an issue of the state of Vermont.” (Protestant numbers are down, too–but is it good to blame the populace?)
2. Then he says it’s a problem of low birth rate, (um…but the decline is especially steep among the young. Does it really matter how many young people there are if they don’t come to church anyway?)
3. He says it’s not reducible to sexual abuse, but he does admit some effect of several high-profile cases. (They put the diocesan administration building on the market to pay for settlements…)
4. Then he says the decline isn’t really so bad–people are counted differently, and that’s why it looks so bad.
Imagine if a regional officer of a company justified poor performance by blaming one’s potential customers, or how they’re counted: how long would such a clown keep his job? Just like a piece I read a few years back that said the priest shortage wasn’t really a problem since no one’s going to Mass anymore anyway. Sigh…
(Source: http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=12668946)
“But I think that working with the sex scandals is a rise in sin-and-rules uber-Catholics who want a smaller, more faithful Church, i.e., one in which everybody goes to anti-abortion rallies and doesn’t vote for Democrats.” (from Jean Raber).
Yes indeed, such people exist. What they don’t seem to realize is that what they want is not a church, but a sect. Unfortunately, the sectarian impetus seems to be strong even among the leaders of the church, who should have the clearest ideas about why “sectarian Catholic” is oxymoronic.)
As for Douthat’s point that there are many millions for whom Catholicism is finished, I’m afraid there’s no doubt that he’s right, as is Peter that for many of them (and us) the main point is not so much the sex, which we have always with us, but the way in which the hierarchy, all the way up to the popes (or all the way down to the Servus Servorum Dei, if you like), has failed to respond. Has the USCCB — or any comparable body in other countries — ever tried to come up with a document that might be a guide to troubled Catholics as to how to respond to scandal in their own church? I don’t think so, but maybe I’ve missed it. I suspect, however, they are fearful of tangling with the question. After all, they try to “guide” us on all sorts of other questions, e.g. health care, gay marriage, etc. etc. — why not this?
Or as a friend of mine, a lifelong Catholic until recently he was driven out by the scandal and the failure to deal with it, has said to me, perhaps much could be cured if the hierarchs began to behave like Christians.
As for the big question Peter raises: it is easy to see how Catholic leaders have, time and time again, shot themselves (and their brothers) in the foot. But I think that the decline of Catholicism — measured at least by numbers — has to be put in the broader context of the decline of Christianity in general (measured by the numbers). If sexual crime and its effects is a chief culprit in the Catholic Church, what are the culprits that have led Episcopalians, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, the non-Lutheran Refomed Churches, etc. etc., to abandon their ecclesiastical homes, not just in the US but in the West in general?
I would like to know more about that than I do.
Ted Hesburgh knew the changes necessary in the church long before Vatican II. He did his dissertaion on the Theology of the Laity. He considered his greatest achievement making Catholic universities independent from Rome. Still too many blindly look to that failed magisterium.
“Although he had excelled in his studies there, he had difficulty obtaining approval for the topic he had chosen for his doctoral dissertation: the theology of the laity. Some of the professors at CUA balked, dismissing the topic as insufficiently academic.
This was still a time, almost 20 years before the start of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, when the laity were regarded as second-class citizens in the church. The “real” church consisted of the hierarchy and the so-called lower clergy. Religious women and non-ordained religious men were in there somewhere, too, but only a notch or two above the laity.”
http://127.0.0.1:4664/cache?event_id=1013196&schema_id=1&q=the+real+church&s=YSGBKtzZJQT7GTlyRgZIaOcYxqE
Sherry, I think it’s extraordinarily significant that the “grand old Catholic urban centers,” as you put it, are discouraged and hopeless. These are the children and grandchildren of Catholics–the ones with it in their bones, the ones who saw it as church and not sect–as part and parcel of the fabric of life. There may be growth in some of these areas that you talk about-but how many of these are converts from evangelical Protestantism? And to what degree is the model of church developing in those centers really an evangelical Protestant model? As you know, I have significant reservations about Intentional Disciples’ approach to evangelization, which I think is too rooted in evangelical Protestantism–and frankly, I think you and your group are associated with too many convert-from-Protestantism Catholic apologists whose approach seems to me to include a lot of name-calling and general nastiness. (The Catholic Answers crowd.)
So I fear that that brand of apologetics and evangelization will attract a group of people who like name-callers and culture warriors. And that will, of course, repel others who don’t –likely the cradle Catholics from the northeast, who are not sympathetic to evangelical Protestantism.
That’s part of what I mean by de-evangelization. People leave for a reason. And no re-evangelization of Europe–or Quebec or any place else is going to be successful if its premise is, “Oh the poor church. .. the nasty Enlightenment unjustly deprived it (me/us) of its power and influence.” Europe/NE/Quebec tried Christianity–Catholicism–they found it false and dehumanizing and harmful, and so rejected it. In their experience, it was not “good news.” Unless this fact is honestly grappled with, no re-evangelization is going to be possible.
Here is a long five part series by Padavano about Mr. Steinfels’ basic question: http://www.catholica.com.au/gc2/ap/002_ap_210408.php
Highlights in terms of reasons for hope:
“We might do this by taking account of developments in the post VII period, developments we take for granted, developments we found unthinkable even in the euphoria at the close of Vatican II.
Latin-rite married convert Catholic pastors
Ecumenical and Interfaith Weddings
Pope at the World Council of Churches or praying in a Lutheran Church to honor Martin Luther or entering with devotion a synagogue or mosque
Formal apology by the Pope to the world for the evil done to it by Catholics
Majority of Catholic laity in favor of abortion in some circumstances, homosexual committed relationships, a married priesthood, the ordination of women (even though all of these were condemned by three popes in succession)
Legal status of homosexual marriages in traditionally Catholic countries
Conviction, Church-wide, by most Catholics that one remains a Catholic in good standing and is entitled to communion in divorce and remarriage, in homosexual relationships, after excommunication, resigning from canonical priestly ministry without dispensation, after an abortion
Catholics taking a bishop to court, favoring the bankruptcy of dioceses, forcing cardinals to resign in Austria and in the United States
World-wide acceptance of the ministry of non-canonical married priests
organized communities of Catholics favoring issues Church administrators condemn while insisting they are Catholics in good standing
Pope meeting for hours, in a friendly environment, seeking no retraction, with Hans Kung, a theologian who seriously challenges the legitimacy of papal infallibility
Assisi days of prayer with leaders of world religions gathered with the Pope as his equal
Formal acceptance by the Pope of the Augsburg Confession, the charter of the Reformation
communion at the Vatican, by the Pope, to those who are not Catholic, such as United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair
A number of the above items could have led to formal heresy charges against John Paul II by the Council of Trent.
Pius X at the beginning of the twentieth century excommunicated Catholic theologians for less than this.”
Follow up Highlights that addresses the above discussion about historical shifts/paradigms:
“In human history, paradigms prevail, and one can predict this, if they are endowed with certain characteristics. I argue that the paradigm the world works with now (open societies) and the paradigm the Church works with now (Vatican II) have these features. Indeed I would argue that Vatican II became the Council it was because it lived in a world shaped by the United States Constitution, the scientific method and universal education. For a paradigm to prevail, the following characteristics are imperative:
it must answer more questions and solve more problems than any alternative paradigm
it must be clear and not require artificial explanations to make its case
it must be theoretically and elegantly simple, close to life, so that people experience the paradigm as natural, logical, apt
it must inspire creativity and generate it precisely because the paradigm is open, resilient, inclusive, indeed, the people the paradigm attracts and the behavior it encourages are not irrelevant to the correctness of the paradigm”
From another presentation last year by Marianne Ferguson at Creighton University – “Is the church Ready for another Reformation?” http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2003/2003-3.html
Finally – can’t find a link but Robert Blair Kaiser has an excellent historical presentation on this same question called: “Essay on Vatican II” – go to: http://www.elephantsinthelivingroom.com; click on Documents; click on Theology; scroll down to Kaier’s presentation.
“We were as one, babe, for a moment in time…
And it seemed everlasting, that you would always be mine…
Now you want to be free, so I’m letting you fly,
‘Cause I know in my heart, babe, our love will never die…
You’ll always be a part of me;
I’m a part of you indefinitely;
Boy, don’t you know you can’t escape me,
Ooh darlin’ ’cause you’ll always be my baby…
And we’ll linger on;
Time can’t erase a feeling this strong;
No way you’re never gonna shake me,
Ooh darling cause you’ll always be my baby…
…I know that you’ll be back, boy,
When your days and your nights get a little bit colder…
I know that you’ll be right back, baby,
Oh, baby, believe me, it’s only a matter of time…”
~ Mariah Carey, “Always Be My Baby”
_____________________________________
“We started dancing and love put us into a groove…
But now he’s with somebody new…
What does love want me to do?
Love said: Let the music play; he won’t get away;
Just keep the groove, and then he’ll come back to you again…
Let the music play; he won’t get away;
This groove he can’t ignore; he won’t leave you anymore, no no…”
_____________________________________
~ Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”
“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”
“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.”
“If you become a fish in a trout stream, “said his mother, “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”
“If you become a fisherman,” said the little bunny, “I will become a rock on the mountain, high above you.”
“If you become a rock on the mountain high above me,” said his mother, “I will be a mountain climber, and I will climb to where you are.”
“If you become a mountain climber,” said the little bunny, “I will be a crocus in a hidden garden.”
“If you become a crocus in a hidden garden,” said his mother, “I will be a gardener. And I will find you.”
“If you are a gardener and find me,” said the little bunny, “I will be a bird and fly away from you.”
“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” said his mother, “I will be a tree that you come home to.”
… “Shucks,” said the bunny, “I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.”
And so he did.
“Have a carrot,” said the mother bunny.
_____________________________________
“…The earth can flee nowhere so deep that the heavens will not flow into it and impress their powers on it and make it fruitful, whether it likes it or not. This is how a man acts when he thinks that he can flee from God, and yet he cannot flee from him; every corner where he may go reveals God to him. He thinks that he is fleeing God, and he runs into his lap…” ~ Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
…So, I hear people are leaving the Church?
It is possible to look at the present widespread disillusionment about a clericalist Church as a blessing. Yes, the year of the priest has been an embarrassment to the powers that be. But the Holy Spirit has been at work, nonetheless, and we are the better for having been undeceived. What happens next, is the question. I agree with Bill DeHaas that Karl Rahner’s vision of a future church is a worthwhile dream. His essay on “Structural Change in the Church of the Future” in “Theological Investigations, Vol. 20″ outlines suggestions for a church in which” churchpeople are not mere recipients of what is done by the institutional church, but are themselves the Church”(123). We may not see such changes in our lifetimes, but they are worth hoping for.
No, the Church under Benedict is renewing. I just watched the press conference with Cardinal Marc Oullet of Quebec City on his appointment as new prefect of the Congregation of Bishops. His job, he said, will be to put before Benedict the names of men to be bishops who will guarantee the unity of the Church, that is bishops who are in union with the Holy Father.
Oullet is a very impressive man, clearly in Benedict’s mold. If he should be the next Pope, we can all be certain that Benedict’s agenda will continue for a long time.
There is reason to hope. What we, especially in the US have been suffering through, and what is the cause of the malaise, is the generation of Jadot bishops — although, to be honest, the problem goes back further, as I have pointed out before, to the “Americanist” tendencies going back to Carroll and continuing with Gibbons and Ireland.
Brendan, Mariah Carey to Meister Eckhart. . . incarnational mysticism. That’s actually the most hopeful post I’ve seen all day!
Here is an e-mail I received from someone who is following this discussion. It is based on this person’s experience, but it might help balance some of the other experience-based thoughts being offered here:
“For what it’s worth, i don’t know a SINGLE person who has stopped going to Mass, stopped tithing, or stopped identifying (even nominally) Catholic as a result of the current abuse scandal. Not even one.
Everyone I’ve met who complains about the scandal and talks up its incredible importance is either an already lapsed Catholic who uses it as an ex-post-facto justification for lapsing or an opportunist using the scandal to fight a proxy war for some other issue (usually the ordination of women).”
So John Carroll is the cause of the current problem? Um, well… points for creativity!
Paul Likoudis
“No, the Church under Benedict is renewing” certainly not in Italy. In the last few years all the survey said that more people stopped to attend church than before his election.Nobody cares about church’s teaching: in Italy 58% thinks that abortion law that made legal and free it ( the 194) is a good law, 70% said live togheter without marriage and marriage are the same thing, and so on.
Si indebolisce anche il legame di appartenenza con la Chiesa: il 59% ritiene validi i suoi insegnamenti (77% nel 2003), ma l’indice della centralita’ dei valori cattolici per gli italiani e’ sceso a quota 46, contro il 65 del 2000, anno del Giubileo: per i praticanti l’indice e’ di 73 contro il 95 del 2000. Relativamente a temi etici l’86% oggi e’ favorevole a una legge che, a determinate condizioni, consenta l’eutanasia; il 58% degli italiani pensa che la 194 sia una buona legge, il 69% e’ favorevole all’ equiparazione fra coppie di fatto e sposate, e il 92% e’ favorevole al testamento biologico.
A few years ago, a friend of mine said cheerfully that there have been bad popes and bad eras before. Well, there have–when the church was a temporal power. Never before has there been such a split between the actual power of the Vatican and the power it claims. Never before has Catholicism been part of so completely secular a world and so busy denying the realities of its situation. Most of the people I talk to and work with regard the Pope as an increasingly less amusing relic of a time that is long gone. When they hear a statement that doesn’t sound sane, they don’t think it’s true because the person saying it is wearing a mitre–they just take a mitre as seriously as they would a tinfoil hat, to the detriment of the shrinking number of good bishops. What I see with every round of new conservative appointments is a small circle of men talking to themselves while ignoring the conversations around them and thinking they control those conversations. They hold absolute power over a structure that is crumbling, they are refusing to acknowledge that it’s coming down, and more of us every day are heading for the door before the roof falls in.
I believe Prof. Kaveny is really onto something here:
At 1:21PM “People aren’t going to stay and fight for reform. . . . they’re going to walk away…. something’s snapped for a lot of people in the way Anthony Ruff is describing. …I do think it’s a framing issue…What I’m suggesting is that many people don’t buy that big story any more. That’s what’s different.
And that’s why we’re on the verge of something. .. one of my historian friends says Part II of the Reformation.”
A friend and I were talking, and he thinks it is not a matter so much of structures (monarchies, etc.) but of beliefs, the Big Story that no longer sells. The massive cultural shifts have more to do with science and its impact, the question of “religious pluralism that will penetrate all cultures” (Thomas Keating) and how we get along. Maybe the Roger Haight’s of this world are ahead of their times, and it is how the church frames the Big Story in light of these new realities that matters long-term.
Gary Wills had an interesting point recently:
“In keeping with its ahistorical and medieval roots, the papacy has been reflexively opposed to social changes. Pius IX condemned democracy as an evil and illegitimate form of government. The papacy has historically been at war with science—against the Enlightenment, against textual criticism from Erasmus’s time onward, against cosmology and astronomy in Galileo’s time, against the “liberalism” of Lamennais and others, against biology and geology in Darwin’s time, against psychology in Freud’s time—and, at present, against prenatal scans, in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, surrogate motherhood, fetal stem-cell research, and condoms to prevent AIDS in Africa.”
I may be speculating above my pay grade, but it’s the realities my children see that the church refuses to countenance beyond, no, no, no that turns them and so many aside; defensive, ridiculous aspects of the Story that no longer sell. And I’m not talking about the core of the faith in the Paschal Mystery. We’re in the space age in more than a literal way, but Rome seems oblivious.
To ponder later… I must read her last article to fill in some blanks.
What different perspectives – Ouellet is a disastrous appointment to me, and Benedict’s concern about union with the Holy Father being the main guarantee of progress is rather the source of conflict. Now, how do we accommodate each other in the same church? Hopefully, neither of us is going anywhere.
Charlie, I do–and a couple of them have extensive theological and historical training. At the same time, I think it can cause one to reframe all those other issues with a hermeneutic of suspicion rather than a hermeneutic of charity. In addition, of course, the scandal can cause one to rethink the assumptions about sex and gender in the church’s teaching. Crises often cause people to rethink basic assumptions.
Any virtue theorist is going to have an issue with the scandal. What does it say about the character of the bishops, individually and collectively–and therefore about their judgment about a wide range of other matters, particularly involving sex?
I almost always agree with Ross Douthat, but not on this. Prof. Kaveny says:
“What I’m suggesting is that many people don’t buy that big story any more. That’s what’s different.”
No, it’s not different. Huge swaths of the American Church–and the Western world generally–haven’t been buying into the “big story” for decades. Unprecedented material prosperity (yes, even now), more education, the disappearance of the Catholic ghetto and the ever-looming specter of modernity have all but guaranteed an exodus of Catholics from the Church in the West. I suppose the jury is still out on what the quantitative effect (e.g., declines in vocations, number of self-identified Catholics, weekly church attendance, etc.) the current sex-abuse scandal on the Church will be, but I’d be shocked if it approaches the losses suffered during the period following the Second Vatican Council. To be sure, a good number of “Christmas and Easter Catholics” continue to self-identify as Catholics and this most recent episode of the sex abuse scandal may push them over to full-blown “former Catholics.” That is certainly regrettable, but, in a certain sense, the more significant loss was suffered when they started going to mass only on Easter and Christmas, since it indicates a shift in understanding Christianity as an encounter with a Person and a lived Tradition to a mere cultural marker. (And, pace Commonweal, having Diocesan chapters elect bishops and permitting married priests, while not bad ideas in themselves, won’t reverse this trend.)
As for the anecdotal evidence of “professional and pastoral workers” within the Church who are finally saying enough is enough, I’m unimpressed. For one thing, this demographic has always–not surprisingly–been overrepresented when it comes to gauging the “voice” of the laity. In fact, this is a rather “elite” and unrepresentative group of Catholics, who generally lean left theologically (sort of like the type of people who read, write for, or comment on dotCommonweal). You may be able to extract some trends from such anecdotal evidence, but it doesn’t come close to supporting the broad claims Douthat and others are asserting.
Cathy, I do too. I just wanted to offer this person’s different experience perspective. Catholicism, even in the United States, is a wildly diverse phenomenon.
Even considering its (worldwide) diversity, it seems clear to me that the Church faces grave struggles in the developed West. These struggles, however, I think I best seen in light of this paragraph from Douthat’s column:
“A little historical perspective suggests otherwise. The Church has been horrifyingly corrupt in previous eras and still survived. It’s been led by ecclesiastics who make Bernard Law’s hands look clean, and still survived. It’s faced fiercer enemies than Richard Dawkins (think Nero, or Attila, or Voltaire) and still survived. Time after time, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs.” Each time, “it was the dog that died.””
How sad that ignorance and poverty are supposedly necessary for the Big Story to hold credence. I don’t buy that.
Crouchback,
It is interesting that you cite “more education” as one of the factors that has “all but guaranteed an exodus of Catholics from the Church in the West.”
Regarding the church having survived before, I am not by any means a church historian, but it bears reminding people that the church did not react passively to the Reformation. Yes, it exercised what temporal authority it had to squelch it where it could but it also engaged in what might be called obsessive self-examination and instituted changes in practice and governance. In other words, it didn’t just see the Reformation as a sign of people’s wickedness and falling away from truth — it saw it, in part, as a sign of its own failure and reacted with its own reforms. It’s this kind of honest self-examination that seems to be utterly lacking — and knowing that it is lacking leads people to conclude that there is no practical hope for improvement, give up and leave, to go elsewhere or not depending on their temperament.
Cathleen Kaveny’s mention of a Kuhnian paradigm shift brings to mind the mechanism of paradigm change Kuhn observed in science. There, old ideas of the big picture don’t die out. Rather, those who hold them do, and a new generation carries on with new ideas. That view has enough truth in it that it can be recognized in the culture, practice, and history of science.
In the church hierarchy, an opposite tendency occurs. The next generation is selected, formed, and strictly governed by the older generation to carry on with the status quo ante bellum, whatever the perceived “bellum” of the time. The Pope’s appointments of this week illustrate the hierarchical process. The result is institutional rigidity that obstructs reformation, no matter how obvious the need and the means. The situation is aggravated by a persistent failure all around to distinguish between Eternal Truths and “that’s the way we always do it”, which causes issues big and small to be met with equal vigor and heat. Under these circumstances, I believe Kaveny and Douthat are probably right.
The statistical data about the loss of faith support the anecdotal evidence–Quebec, NE, VT, the number of people disenrolling from the Church in Germany.
The Church will continue in some form. Nonetheless, I think people feel considerable grief, that the church is no longer a place that family members in the next generation can flourish. So Douthat’s column is cold comfort for people whose kids don’t go to church–when the church reinvents itself two hundred years from now, no one related to them will be there to care.
Kaput. The link between the Gospel and the Church today has been irreparably severed. In the U.S., many Cardinals live in mansions, such as Cardinal George. In Belgium, it a called a palace, and, when googled, yes, indeed it is a palace. And ever see pictures of the Pope meeting dignitaries? Opulance. What do these people do all day? Cannot they hold a press conference, meet with the flock, visit the sick, feed the poor, instead of hiding behind closed walls? Where is the Jesus of the Gospel?
From Newsweek:
“I pay no attention to popes anymore—they have nothing to do with the Gospel.” — Garry Wills
If clericalism is the problem, why has there been such a dramatic reduction in adherents and influence among denominations with less of it?
I’m not completely convinced by this objection myself. The traditionally Orthodox countries in Europe, no strangers to clericalism, have some very low church attendance/influence scores too.
“Now, you’re arguing that the usual big story still holds. What I’m suggesting is that many people don’t buy that big story any more. That’s what’s different. And that’s why we’re on the verge of something. .. one of my historian friends says Part II of the Reformation.”
Cathleen, you’re depressingly persuasive :-). (You said that people will grieve the changes – if you don’t mind my saying so, I detect a note of grief in your posts here – and grief can be contagious – I think I’m catching it, too).
I’m not ready to throw in the towel, though. But this has been a sobering conversation for congenital optimists like me. Clearly, things have to change. Reformation? Let it be a reform from within.
I really think the time is ripe for a moment and a person – or a movement. Someone, or someones, who can call everyone to repentance and renewal. Someone like this guy:
“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.
“He went throughout (the) whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah: “A voice of one crying out in the desert: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”
“He said to the crowds who came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce good fruits as evidence of your repentance; and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?”
He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.”
Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?”
He answered them, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.”
Soldiers also asked him, “And what is it that we should do?” He told them, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.”
Now the people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Messiah.
John answered them all, saying, “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Exhorting them in many other ways, he preached good news to the people.
William Collier writes above: “Catholic social teaching is the Church’s ‘secret weapon,’ and the sooner it is brought to the fore and visibly deployed on a world-wide basis, the better for the physical and spiritual health of the Church.”
I think this is true on more than one level. We often forget that it was a “secret weapon” in the early church. Imagine how thunderstruck Romans of the early centuries were to see a group of people who took care of their widows and orphans instead of shunning them; who never had a member go hungry or homeless; who did not leave their unwanted children (especially girls) out in the weather to die; who did not allow their men to dispose of wives who became unwanted.
The early church concentrated its charity on its own members — not, I assume, out of some sort of exclusivity, but because they had no power in those societies to act upon anyone outside their faith community. And the poor, especially, took notice and flocked to the shelter of the church to learn about such magnificent motivation. And well-disposed well-to-do people lent their houses and fortunes to the cult and its works of mercy. While the Catholic Church certainly does wonders for the poor and oppressed in many places still, it can also rejoice that certain of the original Christian impulses to help the unfortunate have spread through civil society. At the same time, however, the church has become preoccupied with preserving (even extending sometimes) the privileges and prerogatives of its hierarchy and clerical caste, and the poor and humble within the church — or simply the middle-class parishioner in temporary crisis — has no undeniable claim on them in their majesty, except to look up to them and hear them with reverence and to be buried with proper rites.
What if the church once again modeled an ideal society where mutual love kept every member, even the least intelligent, attractive, or well-connected, safe in the arms of a loving mother-church — a body consisting of sinners motivated by the love of Christ and overwhelmingly conscious of their share in the Paschal Mystery?
As the letter to the Galatians says: “While we have time, let us do good to all people, especially those who are of the household of faith.”
I have a similar question as Brian. I just started John Allen’s book “Future Church.” I was amazed at the growth demographics in what he would call the Sub Sahara Church, the Asian Church, the church in India. I realize none of these churches have much representation in Rome since they have very few Cardinals in proportion to their numbers and their growth. I wonder how they are effected by all this clericalism and scandel etc. Maybe, because of distance and newness, they operate very much on their own and are more concerned with social justice and a liberation type theology. It’s a shame that we don’t seem to have any input to see if any of this even reaches them or bothers them.
Let us all pray that God’s will be done in the church and the Church. Whatever that is. That God would be God and that church would be church.
“At the same time, however, the church has become preoccupied with preserving (even extending sometimes) the privileges and prerogatives of its hierarchy and clerical caste, and the poor and humble within the church — or simply the middle-class parishioner in temporary crisis — has no undeniable claim on them in their majesty, except to look up to them and hear them with reverence and to be buried with proper rites.”
Roger Evans – Overall, I found your comment to be very good, but I do disagree with the excerpt I’ve pasted here. I don’t find that “the church” is preoccupied with privileges and prerogatives. Perhaps there are some hierarchs (but certainly not all) who are preoccupied as you describe. But my experience over a lifetime (getting longer every day :-)) of parish life in the US upper midwest is that privilege and prerogative has virtually nothing to do with everyday lives of faith.
(I can certainly vouch, from first-hand experience, that the poor and middle-class parishioners of my parish do not hold the clergy in awe! :-). Undeniably there are some vestiges of traditional reverence – and a couple of the older guys actually are deserving of it – and the rest try hard, I hope, to not let it go to their heads).
It’s hard to discern whether Crouchback has more contempt for the “Christmas and Easter Catholics” or those who devote their whole life and labor to the church’s mission:
“As for the anecdotal evidence of ‘professional and pastoral workers’ within the Church who are finally saying enough is enough, I’m unimpressed. For one thing, this demographic has always–not surprisingly–been overrepresented when it comes to gauging the ‘voice’ of the laity. In fact, this is a rather ‘elite’ and unrepresentative group of Catholics, who generally lean left theologically (sort of like the type of people who read, write for, or comment on dotCommonweal).”
I have to wonder what Catholic meets his requirements for authenticity — besides, of course, Ross Douthat, “almost always.”
“Just as most of us did not choose to believe in God after an honest look at the alternative but rather just “stuck with Him”, most of us stayed with the Catholic Church simply because it was our “tribe”, our “family”, and its customs became as much a part of who we are as our ethnicity or our allergies.”
Wm. J. O’Malley, SJ, Parents are Apostles (article), “America”, 1-20-90.
In 1990 when Fr. O’Malley wrote this, that may have been the truth. But 30 years have transpired and a lot of eyes have been opened by and to a lot of things. And many of us don’t like what we have been forced to see and deal with. Thousands (nay, millions) of us have simply brushed the dust off of our shoes and have gone elsewhere or no where. Others, for many reasons (some of which are even valid) still hang in there. But what was in the 1950s, 1960s or even as late as the early 1990s, can be no more.
Maybe Tom Beaudoin put it best in his article in the March 26th edition of “America” entitled: The Expiration Date of This Catholicism: Being a Theologian in an Abusive Church (http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=2685) in which he said this:
“ — there will have to be a a new Catholicism, or new Catholicisms. There will have to be, because new Catholicisms are already emerging. It is now old news that the old system of a deferential laity who will continue to show up for “full, conscious, and active participation” in the face of an inability of our church to come to terms with an adult laity and the mendacity of its old structures of authority – this system is gone or going. Different Catholicisms are already detaching themselves from these old structures, from below: Catholics redefining their mass attendance, their loving relationships, their relation to the magisterium, their sense of the roles of women, their relation to people of other faiths and religions, and more.”
Re: Brian on June 30th, 2010 at 12:29 pm in which he said: “ — told that Africa, full of civil war, dictators, genocide-carried-out-by-machetes, transactional sex, AIDS, and general economic exploitation is a wonderful continent that hasn’t “lost the faith” like some others have.”
“Is the poor, southern, non-white world also to become anti-Christian because the white, capitalist world is claimed as Christian? Such a scenario is not wholly devoid of plausibility. Let liberation theology be “excommunicated” in Latin America; let the black millions of central Africa be alienated from the churches by a prolonged while-black conflict centered upon a South Africa firmly supported by the United States and Western Europe; let the classic Christian communities of the southern continents be deprived of the eucharist, and starved of life; let a diminished priesthood retreat into the realm of the sacral, reasserting its segregation from the laity, and its concern with more important clerical matters than torture and starvation; let an other-worldly and authoritarian form of Christianity be proclaimed again as the only one fully acceptable to Rome; and we are almost there. It is not impossible.”
Adrian Hastings, African Catholicism, SCM Press (1989).
Jim Pauwels, it is presumably my fault that you misread me. I too have been fortunate enough to have considerable contact with and benefit from the sort of clerics you instance. But if those were the sort of people more widely in charge, we wouldn’t have seen case after case of the sensitivities and prerogatives of bishops and priests being preferred over the simple safety of child victims of rape. (The time will come, I imagine, when using clerical sex-abuse of children in an argument will be ranked with introducing Hitler into one. Until then, I think we are obligated not to avert our eyes from that conspicuous example of clerical abuse of power for a moment, especially since it is only a more dramatic manifestation of horrors that are inflicted on members of the church through clericalism every day. It is with much emotion that specific examples crowd upon my mind.)
Sherry, you said: ” — there were 19 million additional Catholics on the planet in 2008 – – after deaths – the latest figures we have. That’s 52,000+ new Catholics every day, 36 new Catholics every minute.”
How do these numbers account for the large numbers who walk away and don’t go through the process of removing their names from the local parish or other rolls?
Peter Steinfels,
I would be interested if you would elaborate on the sense you personally give to the assertion you make in the post: “Yes, the gates of hell will not prevail.”
Jim, I have to give a talk on this general topic in Chicago in a couple of weeks. So I’m thinking out loud, so to speak. I am trying to figure out what the sea change is–and what caused it. And then, what can be done.
I think it’s going to take some actual broad, communal practice of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy to put ourselves in a position to see the way forward. And I think that can’t be merely activism or merely theology .
We need to combat the cult of appearances. And the corporal works of mercy aren’t glamorous. Here’s someone who seems to have the right take on things:
http://ncronline.org/blogs/my-table-spread/buying-diapers-keeping-cheerful-quest
I promised myself not to take part in this discussion. I’m no good at promises (and a lot of other things). Peter Steinfels had it right at the outset. Catholics are adrift. Now the church (which might not be the same as the people, but that’s a topic for another time) is on the rocks (the Rock of Peter/the Rock of Ages?) and is sinking/sunk. The sexual abuse crisis is at once a devastating blow to the institution and its credibility and a symbol of other problems as well. I find it hard even to engage my contemporaries (never mind children, nieces, nephews, etc.) in a discussion of the church’s future. They’ve moved on/are moving on. The hierarchs fulminate/legislate/castigate. But the Spirit liveth and bloweth where it will. She/he could care less what idiots like me/you think/believe/maintain. Jesus is alive now as he ever was. Is here now. The Gospels confront/challenge/baffle as they always have. Women and men respond. As they always have. Or they don’t. As they always have. We are wedded to definitions. God isn’t.The Mass remains for me a continuing source of comfort/confusion/wonder/mystery/connection. We mistake the punctuation that contains us for the story, the minute for the hour, the hour for the day, on and on. God can live without us. We cannot live without God. Dante described that conundrum almost a millennium ago.The crisis is undeniable. The outcome is unknowable. All we grasp of the future is that we can’t grasp anything beyond what Hopkins said we must grasp/confess/cling to: “Thou mastering me, God.” I should have kept my promise. I will now. Sorry. Live and learn.
“The Church will continue in some form. Nonetheless, I think people feel considerable grief, that the church is no longer a place that family members in the next generation can flourish.”
Kathleen — Kids started leaving in large numbers two generations ago. The beginning of the exodus pre-dates the scandal and even VII. I suspect Gary Wills is on to something too. The Enlightenment has won. But it too is on the way out.
So what will replace both worldviews?
“Cannot they hold a press conference,”
Gerry –
Excellent idea, but as likely as hurrican Alex reversing direction and backing away from land.
We are witnessing the local church disappearing in France. There is a very painful transition from a time, in the early 20th century, when almost everyone was a practicing Catholic, to the current time when Sunday Mass gathers a minuscule fraction of the population (maybe 2%). There are pockets of vitality here and there, but France has now become a land of mission. It’s a dramatic change. For centuries the Catholic faith was transmitted from parents to children, but that transmission, in France, is broken.
Those who want to be engaged in the church, wish to address the change and are looking to Rome for direction see nothing but retrenchment. No help from there, few signs of hope. A few days ago there was an article in “La Croix” about a 63-year old parish priest who committed suicide.
As to the future church. The progress of science, molecular biology and brain science, medicine, science exploring what it means to be human: how can we integrate rapidly evolving modern science with our Catholic faith? Divorce and remarriage, birth control, homosexuality, world population explosion and the strains on the ecosystem: how can we refine our Catholic beliefs to understand the changes in society? Those questions are very challenging and I think that how they are addressed is key to retaining credibility among people like my children. We have to be respectable players in the area of intellectual endeavor.
“We have to be respectable players in the area of intellectual endeavor.”
Claire –
It has been is a truism that the U. S. is anti-intellectual. I don’t believe it’s entirely true. The U.S. population was just largely without college education until the late 40s, after WW II when the G.I. Bill made college available to millions of veterans. Many went to Catholic colleges but many more went to secular ones. It was there, I think, that the influence of the Enlightenment started to take hold: Catholics began to be taught to think critically.
The exodus started slowly. Not all layers of society were equally affected. You’ll notice that on this blog the paradigm of the passive, gullible Catholic is always “the little old lady in the pew”. Well, that little old lady is usually the wife of a returning WW II veteran who got a college education. *He* is not passive; She is — and their children and grandchildren, having gone to college have become less willing to put up with the Church’s closed-mindedness, its blindness, its knee-jerk reaction to new ethical questions raised by new life-altering biological technology. e.g., the pill, invitro-fertilization, stem cells, etc. The laity is now better educated than the clergy (science isn’t big in the seminaries), and this is one of the main reasons for the exodus. At least, that’s how I see it.
Kathleen, you wrote:
Sherry, I think it’s extraordinarily significant that the “grand old Catholic urban centers,” as you put it, are discouraged and hopeless. These are the children and grandchildren of Catholics–the ones with it in their bones, the ones who saw it as church and not sect–as part and parcel of the fabric of life. There may be growth in some of these areas that you talk about-but how many of these are converts from evangelical Protestantism?
Kathleen – I almost don’t know how to respond to you. Do you really think that the inhabitants of the “grand old Catholic urban centers” are the only children and grandchildren of Catholics – the only ones with it in their bones, the only ones who saw it as church and not sect – as part and parcel of the fabric of life. Are you really implying that the growth, hope, and creativity is only occurring in the Catholic equivalent of “fly-over” country through an influx of those “damned evangelicals” (as one woman in my parish in Seattle memorably described them).
First – the facts: Of US adults who were raised Catholic, 14% are now “nothing”, 15% are now Protestant, 3% are now part of a non-Christian faith, 38% still call themselves Catholic but hardly ever show, 30% attend Mass once a month but only half that number are in Mass on any given weekend.
There are basically two “tracks” of form”er Catholics and the “exodus” is overwhelmingly of the very young. 79% of Catholics who become “nothing are gone by age 23 – the majority by age 18.
Those who leave to become Protestant behave somewhat differently – they tend to leave later (although the majority still leave by age 23) and spend some years in religious limbo before joining a Protestant congregation – and their motivation is quite different. According to the Pew study, the sexual abuse issue is NOT one of the major reasons that people give for leaving and either becoming “nothing” or Protestant.
Of course, it is significant that so many Catholics in Boston and Chicago and LA have lost hope. It is tragic. I’m reporting the facts as I’ve encountered them on the ground, not rejoicing in these developments. I found it both distressing and depressing because I had hoped to find that these places with their rich Catholic heritage and all those institutions would be in better shape. They just are not the only or the most dynamic centers of American Catholicism anymore.
Just as Catholicism has become a predominately southern hemisphere faith in our lifetimes and “multi-polar” as John Allen put it in his recent book on the Future Church” so American Catholicism is becoming southern and western and multi-polar. I couldn’t find a single native Georgian in Atlanta. They are all transplanted New Yorkers.
Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles never were the only centers of cradle Catholicism in this country – although Boston and Chicago each tended to regard themselves as the center of the Catholic universe. The people we work with in places like Omaha and Corpus Christi are humbler, but just as overwhelmingly (98%?) cradle Catholic. (Corpus Christi has the highest percentage of Catholics in the population of any diocese in the country – something like 75%).
They have been Catholic for as many generations as the ones we work with in Boston and Chicago and Los Angeles. It is as bone deep, part and parcel for them as for any Irish Catholic from Boston. And they have the same right to have their Catholic experience be taken as seriously as Catholic. And many of them are not despairing.
The subtext of your comments seems to be that only European/Quebec/Northeastern US Catholics are “real” cradle Catholics and the faith and experiences of the 50 million American Catholics who live elsewhere are somehow less than Catholic. That our experiences in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Long Island are real encounters with “real” Catholicism but Des Moines, Kansas City, New Orleans, Wichita, Seattle, Vancouver, Houston, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Los Angeles don’t count?
On a personal note: Must I point out again that only a few of the Institute’s many teachers around the country are converts and I am the only one on staff? My two Dominican co-directors are bone deep cradle Catholics who never left the Church and had absolutely no personal experience of or interest in evangelical Protestantism. Neither I as an individual or the Institute has ever once done anything with or been associated in any way with Catholic Answers. I have never done apologetics nor has the Institute ever been involved in apologetics. I don’t travel in the EWTN/”star” apologist circles at all. We have always worked within the parochial/diocesan system – except on the rare occasion when a specialized group like Maryknoll brings us in. I am at a complete loss as to how you arrived – or more accurately, jumped – to your conclusions.
Once again, you don’t have to like the term “Intentional disciples” but it isn’t Protestant and wasn’t imported from my evangelical youth where I never once heard anyone use that language. My co-director, a cradle Illinois Catholic, and I MADE THE TERM UP 4 years ago to clarify a teaching point. At the time, we thought it was about as “out there” as apple pie with a skim milk chaser. Guess not.
Catholicism is being destroyed both from the right and from the left. The right have presented a repellent caricature, with the effect that what most young people think of when they hear the word Catholic is “against gays” according to some recent poll. The left have indulged in an immanentist, gnostic, vacuous religiosity that really amounts to a glorification of American pragmatism. The two decadences face each other across a bitter chasm.
The remedies? Intelligent biblical culture and intelligent dialogue with other churches and religions. That would make our religion joyful and interesting again.
Joseph O’Leary,
Intelligent dialogue nourishes the soul and intelligent biblical culture feeds the mind.
But joy is being enraptured by the beauty and love of Christ who first “loved me and gave himself for me.”
He is the Church’s “whole treasure.”
Cathy Kaveny,
Thanks for the link to Nussbaum’s splendid article.
I identify with both opinions by Kaveny and Disco: that there is “considerable grief” among this ganeration that children and grandchildren will not be participating members in the church and that ignorance and poverty are required to hold the Big Story as credible. It is not reassuring to note how much the church of third world countries are viable and flourishing. What happens when they become more and more educated and discerning? I strongly believe that immigration reform is just, merciful and necessary. I am doubtful that bishops who are out front on this issue care about the individuals involved. I suspect, instead, that they see a population, devout and compliant to authority. The perfect “little ones” for the bishops. Our hierarchy does not see that the core of the gospel can stay intact and continue to inspire without Catholics becoming slaves to a narrow and medieval interpretation of what it means to be a Christian. We all need to live in our own time. This understanding does not mean that we are ever shifting in the wind-subject to passing whims. It does mean that we recognize the facts on the ground . We have a living faith, not one that’s been “deposited”, never more to be examined and refreshed.
Sherry, I’m not saying that Catholics in other contexts don’t count. I’m saying that the rich Catholic life in the Northeast –(and Chicago and LA) provided a major intellectual, political and social matrix that allowed Catholicism to function, at least for a while, as a world –not merely as an affiliation or a parish or a denomination. The groups that provided the intellectual and moral leadership in this country for Catholicism in this country are now rejecting it. Simply saying there are new groups to take their place doesn’t address this problem. What does it mean that as Catholics become more educated and prosperous, they leave. Is it a problem with the message? Or is it a problem with them?
My assessment of your program is based on your website, and your description of how you operate in parishes–but we’ve been through that before. As for the blogosophere, I’m thinking of Mark Shea, who divides the political world into “evil” and “stupid,” and seems to have a penchant for crude insults and even cruder arguments. You’ve defended him on this blog, and he identifies you as a friend on his. I think this approach to evangelization is counterproductive, myself. Verbal abuse isn’t good news.And I would be very much opposed to introducing that sort of divisiveness into any parish or diocese.
“There are pockets of vitality here and there, but France has now become a land of mission. It’s a dramatic change. For centuries the Catholic faith was transmitted from parents to children, but that transmission, in France, is broken. ”
Interesting comment, and as Cathleen struggles with identifying the big changes in Catholicism, I don’t think things that are happening at the parish and family levels can be overlooked or underestimated.
Our former Deacon is about my age, and his favorite riff during sermons was how his mother and father beat the tar out of her 12 kids if any of them failed to behave properly at Mass, and required them all to say the rosary nightly for the conversion of Soviet Russia or the pagan babies.
I wouldn’t call the kind of thing our Deacon spoke of so fondly as quality transmission of the faith; in fact, it shocks a lot of GenXers trying to give their Millennials some kind of spiritual grounding.
The Church needs better people on the ground who understand what’s going on in the secular world and can craft a Catholic response to it that is both loving and gives kids the wherewithal to resist some of its more insidious and harmful aspects.
It might be a good idea to put all this into perspective. Jesus continues to work through the church despite the empire builders. Jesus would have been crucified if he lived in the fourth and subsequent centuries by the hierarchy. Contrary to what Rome says Jesus is present more in the other 90% of the church.
I think it is vitally important to pay attention, as many of those commenting on this thread have done, to the next generation of Catholics — our grandchildren, our daughters and sons, our nieces and nephews and so on.
I don’t know that my experience with my three children is representative of what is happening in other Catholic familes, but it is deeply troubling to me. All three were beneficiaries (and I believe that is the right word) of excellent Catholic elementary and secondary educations. Yet, even before their respective graduations — and after countless retreats, including the transformative Kairos experience, and service projects — they had begun to drift away from weekly Mass. My son is a scientist and no longer has any relationship with the Church. My youngest’s last Mass was the day before she graduated high school a year or so ago. My middle daughter was briefly active at the Catholic Student Center at the university she attended, but had lost interest by the beginning of her sophomore year.
I have asked each on several occasions why they feel the Church no longer speaks to them. Initially the common theme was boredom with the whole “thing” — insipid music, the sameness of the liturgy, and the meandering homilies, all presided over by a priest old enough to be their grandfather. But later, and to their credit for at least paying attention, the scandals began to intrude in their own reflections. They were reluctant to express their feelings about the scandals to me, but I sensed they were talked about them among their similarly-educated and churched friends, who were themselves begin to fall away.
There was a time when I thought they would return to the Church, doubts and reservations intact, but willing to put them aside an hour each week for the hope and joy embodied in the Eucharist. I am not so certain of that any longer. What I get from them now when I have this conversation on a Sunday morning is complete indifference — it is as though they no longer understand why anyone would consider their attendance at Mass or further engagement in the Church a fit topic for conversation.
My wife and I began praying for their return to the Church several years ago with a priest friend of ours. After hearing of these most recent revelations from Europe (and Ireland, particularly, where my wife grew up) and the Vatican’s clumsy response to the many challenges that continue to daily damage its credibility, I have asked my friend to pray that I will have the courage to remain in the Church.
Cathleen, if your talk in Chicago is open to the public, can you post the info here, or email me details off-line?
“ignorance and poverty are required to hold the Big Story as credible”
I’ve lost the thread of where the notion started in this conversation that one must be poor and ignorant to believe in Catholic Christianity, but I certainly disagree with it.
It does seem to be a particular fallacy of the educated, though, that education is a prerequisite for Christian faith.
And I’d be the last to deny that prosperity can be a tremendous obstacle to a life of faith.
But it’s ironic, because one of my own theses, based mostly on personal observation, is that the Catholic church is flourishing (and yes, it really is flouriishing, in spite of everything, in many parts of the US) more so in middle-class suburbia, where the grandchildren of the urban Catholic ghetto-dwellers now live, than in the inner city among the poor who now live in those old ‘ghetto’ neighborhoods.
FWIW – my personal opinion is that a good part of the “glue” that attached American Catholics to the church was not a bundle of doctrines, nor personality cults of virtuous leaders, but cultural attachments – family, school, neighborhood. Families are much weaker now, the religious orders that ran the schools are all but gone, the neighborhoods have changed. So what is the “glue” now?
Charles Taylor, speculates on possible mechanisms bringing people back to a full religious engagement:
“First people are drawn to a pilgrimage, or a World Youth Day, or a meditation group, or a prayer circle; and, then later, if they move along in an appropriate direction, they will find themselves embedded in ordinary practice…
Many people will find themselves joining extremely powerful religious communities. Because that’s where many people’s sense of the spiritual will lead them…
…the strongly collective options will not lose adherents. Perhaps even the contrary trend might declare itself. ”
A Secular Age, p. 516.
More on Taylor and hopeful signs in (gasp!) France:
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/2010/religiously-unmusical-and-musical.html
Wow, Gone one day and 78 posts!
Good thread, Peter.
One vital thing to note is that, in contrast to days past in times of bad Church events, many are better educated and have access to information a lot more quickly.
We also operate, certainly in the US, in more polarized and individualized ways of doing business.
I don’t see the Church as “finished” but (I’ve used the term) slow motion imploding – or eroding.
The sex abuse issue, especially its handling, has been a big factor in eroding the credibility of the Church(‘s leaders). As a voluntary group based in faith – that’s critical.
Beyond that, as noted above, there is a tendency to blame everyone else for the problem.
I”ve often criticized the Romanita curial style which contributes heavily to this and which stretches back to VII and the kickback against it.
So a major influence has been a intransigent resistence to change – any progressive change and (as the Rigali quopte to Weakland scores so well) loyaklty above all.
Consequently, there is a corruption of honesty in the name of apologetic (e.g. no “cover up,” as we just talked about.)
Many mentioned the issue of clericalism as deeply problematic but we get a”year of the priest” – the priest is everything” and at the conclusion, BXVI blames Satan for the revelations of what the Church actually did wrong.
We’ll get a new Roman Missal, the continuing “visitation” of our nuns (see Joan Chitister on the ugliness of the process) etc. and in this better educated more informed world, erosion grows apace.
Folks are still joined by Eucharist and good works but the erosion is caused by a sense of SOS from the top down and credibility is weakened by beaurocratic vistitations and commissions that see problems everywhere except on the inside.
I don’t know what the Holy Spirit will do with this mess, but I’m not optimistic about my lifetime, especially as there are still many apologists for going backward.
My view is that the center , in declining numbers, has little hope. Even the anecdotal signs thereof here seem obverwhelmed at least in the US and in Europe by the demographics.
Joseph O’Leary
You say: “The left have indulged in an immanentist, gnostic, vacuous religiosity that really amounts to a glorification of American pragmatism.”
Could you give some examples. I have trouble imagining of whom you speak.
“We are witnessing the local church disappearing in France. There is a very painful transition from a time, in the early 20th century, when almost everyone was a practicing Catholic, to the current time when Sunday Mass gathers a minuscule fraction of the population (maybe 2%).”
I suspect you are exaggerating the numbers of practising Catholics in France during the early years of the 20th century. If almost everyone was a practising Catholic, why did the voters–men only, I realize–consistently elect anti-clerical governments?
Sorry, I meant to address Claire above.
Does every liturgical year still begin with a reading at first vespers of the first Sunday of Advent from first Thessalonians? “Do not stifle the Spirit. Do not despise prohecies. Test EVERYTHING; retain what is good. Avoid any semblance of evil.”
We are to use our brains and follow our instincts.
Those who were educated by nuns now see those nuns being investigated. Those who were proud to be Catholic now see the Church focused on one issue, servile to one political party, dominated by people they cannot follow and would never associate with.
“There may be growth in some of these areas that you talk about-but how many of these are converts from evangelical Protestantism?”
I find it interesting that in a thread about the supposed unpopularity of the Church, it somehow counts as a negative that the Church may be doing a good job at attracting converts.
Theologians and academics always think the answer to every question must be some deep theological principle full of abstruse reasoning, the kind of thing that really should be published in a journal article. If you asked a blog full of plumbers why people don’t go to church anymore, they’d probably tell you it’s the clanking pipes.
Church attendance is down all over the modern world because there are a lot more fun things to do on a weekend than there used to be. (Just think of those Sony ads, in which people at a party are making hand-shadow-puppets on the walls and the text says “In 1910, they thought this was entertainment.” Hand-shadow-puppets have lost a lot of adherents lately too.) Long ago, going to the movies couldn’t be done until two o’clock in the afternoon and you had to go downtown to do it. Now that seeing a movie means waving a remote at the humongous-screen monstrosity in your bedroom, people are a lot less likely to get to mass on Sunday morning.
How difficult it is to interpret prophecy! All these centuries, everybody thought the end of the world would come in an immense conflagration, with locusts, famine and a war to end all wars. Now it turns out the end of the world is whole cities full of obese, semi-catatonic semi-humans, gaping and drooling at LCDs, and on the LCDs are movies and video games full of conflagrations, locusts, famines and wars to end all wars.
I don’t know how good a job it’s doing, Stuart. But there’s more to conversion than simply shifting one’s denominational affiliation. There are significant differences in sensibility. I think of it akin to knowing a language. Now, it is true that I’ve known some converts who have the facility of native speakers, and who in fact speak the language better than most native speakers (interestingly, the people I’m thinking about are very good at language.
To do its job effectively the Church’s governance needs reform. There has been talk of reform of the Church since the Middle Ages, and there have been many attempts, but none have enjoyed more than a partial success. While the papacy is central to the mission of the Church, it is also the greatest obstacle to reform. The history of the Church after V2 perfectly illustrates this point. The Bishops of Rome have long assumed and have no desire to surrender the role of an absolute monarch. The Bishops of Rome listen to those from whom they wish to hear and no one else, and they are never to be contradicted or criticized. As for the papal bureaucracy, the Curia, it goes without saying that since it owes all its power to the Papacy, it will denounce any threat, real or perceived, to the papacy’s absoluteness. As for the other bishops, they are appointed by the Bishop of Rome and are expected to echo his policies without hesitation.
Is it any surprise that young people whose schooling has told them that one ought to think critically and think for oneself–I do not say they always do these things well–but is it any surprise that many young people find this virtual monolith rather hopelessly out of date as a scheme of governance?
Joseph: Re: numbers: I admit that this assertion is based on anecdotes.
Anecdotal evidence: in my mother’s village in central France, on Sundays pre-WW2 every woman went to Mass. Men were split between going to church and going to the nearby cafe. My dad (a wealth of historical knowledge) said that actually the church hierarchy in France was already worried by decreasing attendance among men and possibly among city people starting in the late 19th century. Also according to him, many people went to Mass but felt that the clergy were much too intrusive in the political life, and therefore they voted anti-clerical in protest. Also many men went to church just to accompany their wife or children but couldn’t care less. Also some families went to church until children had done their first communion, then stopped.
An ancient joke about France: “Ce pays ou l’on fait sa premiere communion pour se debarrasser de la religion, ou l’on se marrie pour se debarrasser de l’amour, et ou l’on fait son service militaire pour se debarrasser du patriotisme” — “France: this country where people do their first communion to get rid of religion, get married to get rid of love, and do their military service to get rid of patriotism”.
In other words, perhaps religious practice was cultural rather than linked to strong faith.
The 2% number I gave for current Mass attendance is what I heard from the bishop of Amiens; but it’s not uniform across dioceses.
Good topic. We need some well-supported research by credible institutions that will extract, document and expose the underlying causes and reasons for this malaise. Guesswork and reliance on survival through the work of the Spirit doesn’t do the job. We all have our suspicions (mine are that my kids are both bored and appalled). Oddly, more fallen away just remain inactive rather than join alternative churches indicating some remaining loyalty to being Catholic. Ocassionally we see bumps like Catholics Come Home programs or temporary return when our grandkids reach baptism, first communion or confirmation age but they seem to then lose traction.
Our priests are now almost all foreign born with difficult accents, lack of cultural understanding and overall substandard seminary preparation. Most cannot preach effectively, administer any program and yet, 3 to 4 years after ordination they become pastors. If we were a bank, we would be bankrupt in a week. Is the Catholic church too big to fail? From where will come the ‘bailout?’
Vatican III can’t come soon enough.
No. The Church is not finished. The Church is always reformable. However, the present Episcopacy, much less than one percent of the Church, and likely the future Episcopacy, is not reformable. It is self-appointed and self perpetuating, creating a condition that is probably not going to voluntarily be changed by the Episcopacy. And since the Episcopacy has absolute authority, no one else can reform or change the Church. As there is no evidence to date of any intent to reform after all that has happened, it is disingenuous to expect it, or to expect the Holy Spirit to do it for us. Perhaps the formation of an American Catholic Church as a home grown liturgy, one based on Vatican Two and early Church practices, more democratic, more American than Roman,offering the same sacraments and communion with Rome could be an example for the rest of the Church and the Episcopacy to emulate. We need the Church and need to preserve it. We do not need the Episcopacy as it presently is, and there is no need to preserve it. If anything should be finished it is the Episcopacy and the failed management system used by it to govern the Church.
Gerelyn: Yup. Well put.
“If you asked a blog full of plumbers why people don’t go to church anymore, they’d probably tell you it’s the clanking pipes.”
I thought it was the cold bathrooms in the winter :-)
Numbers in France:
I don’t have the book with me at the moment, so I can’t look up actual stats. However, I did some research into the history of the French church for my doctoral comps, and as I recall, as best we can tell, for several centuries mass attendance varied widely across cultural areas of France. Places like Brittany had mass attendance in the 90%s — men and women — right through the mid-20th century, where other places had extremely low mass attendance–like, 20%-ish of women and virtually no men–even in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries.
It varied widely depending on a number of cultural factors–like how strongly the local population understood religion to be a “women’s thing” and emasculating or threatening to men (who might lose their wives to priests.) Or how strongly the clergy was seen as being on the side of a far-away and resented central government, vs how far it was seen as being tied to local culture.
Mass attendance also took an enormous hit in France as a result of 19th-c industrialization. People moved to cities and became detached from their native villages, and city parishes had charge of enormous numbers of ‘souls’ and thus lacked a personal touch–and of course, if you were working in a factory practically round the clock six days a week, was it really the best use of your sunday to go to a parish where you didn’t know people, etc. And then of course the perception that the institutional church was on the side of the rich, the industrialists, etc.
In 1943 two sociologists named Godin and Daniel published a book called “France, pays de mission?” (“France, is it a mission territory?”) which argued that yes, it was, because mass attendance had dropped off so sharply everywhere over the last 150 years or so. It gave a big impetus to the worker-priest movement after the war–worker-priests take the position that the urban industrial centers are basically like China, “un-evangelized,” and so they should be allowed to adjust their lives to the “mission territory” they were in, just as missionaries in China were allowed to inculturate to a certain degree.
So the crisis of mass attendance in France is not exactly new. It just depends on what territory you’re looking at.
“Now it turns out the end of the world is whole cities full of obese, semi-catatonic semi-humans, gaping and drooling at LCDs, and on the LCDs are movies and video games full of conflagrations, locusts, famines and wars to end all wars.”
Felapton – have you seen the Disney-Pixar movie “Wal-E”? That’s pretty close to its vision of the future of the human race.
“Is the Church finished?”
“But of that Day and Hour, no one knows…but the Father alone.”
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/matthew/matthew24.htm
Jesus was the First to be Baptised into His Church with both Water and the Spirit and at The Great Commission He promised to be with us until the end of The Age.
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/matthew/matthew28.htm
I think a lot of this depends on what your experience of Catholicism is. In the Mexican American experience especially, the clergy never played a huge role to begin with, especially if you lived in a rural area. Or to put it another way, a lot of people in Latin America have always been Catholic “a mi manera” (in my own way). Their Catholicism didn’t depend on the clergy so much. A lot of marginal cults, spiritism, “syncretism” (I hate using that word), and so forth have been going on for a long time. We are just shocked because the U.S. church was so good at institutionalizing Catholicism at some points that once people kick the institution to the curb, we are surprised and think the sky is falling.
That is what I think is the main problem, not the health of the particular institution. Our children are not just “badly catechized”, but they have a culture in which their belief is replaced with nothing. We have been so good at institutionalizing the religion that it appears to be something “out there”; Catholicism belongs to the clergy, not to us. In Mexico, if a street peddler never goes to church but at least carries around a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, at least I see hope there. And he is probably someone who expects the Church to be broken institutionally. But with American Catholics, once the institution goes down the tubes, that’s it for Catholicism.
Then again, it is all about what you want the Church to look like. If you are bothered by the fact that 95% of Catholics will necessarily be “cultural Catholics”, I don’t know what to tell you. You are going to be disappointed. Sometimes I think Vatican II was more about turning the laity clerical than empowering the laity. But as it stands now in the Southern Hemisphere, the Catholicism that is flourishing is charismatic and anti-institutional, very much like the Pentecostal churches. They are probably more obsessed with casting out demons during a lay exorcism than what the Vatican curia does or doesn’t do. And they aren’t very good with that priestly celibacy bit. It may be that European institutionalized Catholicism in all of its forms is an endangered species compared to that.
“As there is no evidence to date of any intent to reform after all that has happened, it is disingenuous to expect it, or to expect the Holy Spirit to do it for us.”
George Bouchey – you may be right about the lack of evidence to date. I’d imagine, though, that a frustrated Catholic ca. 1955 might have said the same thing. Yet within a decade an ecumenical council was completing its work.
The surest path to reform is for a pontiff to say aloud, “We need to reform.” It’s not the only way; cf St. Francis of Assissi, St. Theresa of Avila, St. Odo. But it is a very efficient way.
Thanks Catherine. Great information! I guess my family comes from a historically high-attendance region. (And now there is no one at Mass there: that I have seen with my own eyes).
Do you think that any of the phenomena that contributed to this 19th century de-conversion might help understand what is happening now?
True to a point, Jim Pauwels. Yes, the council completed its work, and the episcopacy has nullified and continues to nullify V2. Actually, I do not believe we have other than the words in place, certainly not the spirit and words,or we would not be on this blog. God maiy have given us J23 and V2, but we now have little more than a memory of them!
I recently completed a Master’s in Pastoral Ministry and in the course on the liturgy, the teacher asked us to write about what could influence the future of the liturgy. I did some research and gave my thesis as follows; “the formation of the priests and the formation of the laity” could influence the future of the liturgy. Dean Hoge of Catholic University interviewed recently ordained priests about the theologian they admired most. The first group named Karl Rahner. The second group, some years later, named John Paul II. The shift that has occurred is priests formed for service (Karl Rahner) and priest formed for the Mass or cult (John Paul II). The result is clear to see. I also recently read Martin Marty’s book , Martin Luther. (Penguin Books, 2004, New York). Here are the sticking points that started the reformation: The non-negotiable themes, April of 1531:
• The Papal Church was infallible
• No change of Mass as Sacrifice.
• No priesthood of all believers.
• Insistence on celibacy for priests.
• Deny the cup to the laity at Mass.
Could it be that these thematic points that began the reformation could be calling for a reformation where these items could be put on the table?
As a Lutheran, I am also struck with the how much the average Catholic is willing to take. For serious Catholics, who feel that the Catholic Church is the only true means of grace and the sole road to salvation, there is no alternative to “the one true faith.” For these individuals, and they are, I believe, the vast majority of Catholics, there is no limit to what they are willing to accept from a hierarchy which seems to often care little about their desires for how the church should function.
Unlike us Lutherans who must actively attempt to placate every disgruntled member, the Catholic clergy can literally dismiss their concerns (or even abuse them), and they will keep coming back for more.
So I don’t see the Catholic Church going away, in fact, it may be the only part of Christianity that survives, since its perceived performance in “managing” the faith is irrelvant.
When we Lutherans screw up, they go to the McChurch down the street. When the Catholics screw up, they show up the next Sunday too.
I am a “revert” (some would append a “p” to the beginning of that word, but that is another topic) in a parish consisting mainly of other reverts. I am sure that our membership is unique as it is truly an intentional community. Virtually no one lives within the parish boundaries. 40% of us don’t even live in the Archdiocese (the benefit of another diocese being just 12 miles to the east). The stories that we tell each other of how and why we “came back” are varied, but all have a similar core theme: we were invited, welcomed and ministered to by a wise succession of pastors and, even more importantly, an active, committed group of parishioners who take their membership seriously. We also believe that we are in a unique position of being able to minister TO the church.
We insist on (vocally and often) well-prepared homilies, superb liturgies and music, and active ministries within as well as outside of the parish. We take NOTHING for granted. We have had our ups and downs as a parish (including an increasingly cold and distant archbishop) but we all know that “all church is local.” We can’t blame anyone else for failures except ourselves and we can rightfully crow about our successes, because they were and are “ours,” not the pastors, the archdiocese’s or anyone else’s.
We consistently attract a decent size number of people to our RCIA program and ultimately into membership of our 400 person (person, not family) parish. More and more we are seeing young couples with children coming to – and more importantly, returning to – our liturgies. We unfortunately lose most of them when the kids become school age because we don’t have a parish school so they join other parishes to have access for their children to a Catholic education.
Our parish boundary has a neighborhood that is changing to include more young families and young singles who are not our usual demographic. Our challenge is to ensure that our parish does not get complacent in remaining what the current aging membership wants but, rather, offers the programs necessary to “attract, retain and motivate” the new neighbors. Our future existence and success will be dependent on our ability to do that. Why? Because younger gays and lesbians who were raised Catholic quite frankly don’t give a damn about being Catholic or what the church says to, about or against them. They have dusted their shoes and moved on.
That is the true crisis in the church today.
Auturo’s analysis of the Mexican American church should give us a way to cope/hope while seeing the withdrawl of our Anglo children /grandchildren from the ‘institutionalized ” church. Maybe the other posters and I are of the last few of the generations who were the only ones ever that gave such credence and trust to the over clericalized church that we now fuss over.
I see residual faith connections in my extended family that are not too different than Arturo’s street peddler with his Guadalupe pic. I watch with curiosity how mine show reverence at funerals/weddings baptisms;;.and I think none would ever joinup with another religion. maybe ‘cultural catholic’ is enough..that’s why the prayers/Mass of the few slop over for the many.
Nicholas asked:
“If sexual crime and its effects is a chief culprit in the Catholic Church, what are the culprits that have led Episcopalians, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, the non-Lutheran Refomed Churches, etc. etc., to abandon their ecclesiastical homes, not just in the US but in the West in general?”
I can’t speak of the West in general, but the Episcopal church of which I am a member is relatively full — and includes among its members a significant number of cradle-Catholics like me.
The RC Church may ultimately rescue itself from its corrupt hierarchy, mouldering clericalism, and dumbfounding, self-defeating authoritarianism. I hope it does. But life is short.
Timothy,
If one has to just look at attendance the RCC still beats everyone. You seem to miss the point completely.
I think we are going to have another Reformation, which will pretty much finish the Vatican structure as we know it. Jesus did not intend for his Church to be run along the lines of the Roman Empire (something i like to mention to people who keep mindlessly repeating “the Church is not a democracy”). I am a cradle Catholic who still attends Mass and Communion on Sundays and holy days. I am a lector, but I am dropping all other parish activities. I haven’t been to Reconciliation for some time, because we don’t have a parish priest who would understand the terrible disillusionment of so many of us. The diocese in which I live seems to be taking the attitude that if we just don’t talk about the scandal, perhaps it will go away. Regnum Christi is far too powerful locally, and there is a great tendency to regard those of us who are not among the most conservative as “not really Catholics”. I think that things will change, but I may not see it in my lifetime, alas!
I think Arturo’s read on the institutional church vs. the church a la “mi manera” offers a lot of wisdom and food for thought.
I used to think that a new Reformation is the answer. However, that seems most unlikely because, unlike the first Reformation, there are too many existing alternatives that easily offer homes to those who might be future Martin Luthers. Then, too, it is possible to continue to worship as a catholic without worrying too much about what the Catholic power structure says. They can’t imprison you for speaking up and out and the threat of excommunication elicits, at best, a mild ho-hum. The idea that God would actually be bound by dyspeptic utterings and mutterings of bishops these days is laughable.
“As a Lutheran, I am also struck with the how much the average Catholic is willing to take. For serious Catholics, who feel that the Catholic Church is the only true means of grace and the sole road to salvation, there is no alternative to “the one true faith.””
Dennis –
Yes, there are severe problems with the clergy. But we believe — and experience — that the grace of God is available whether or not the priest celebrating Mass is a good man or not. Many studies show that the Mass is central to our belief — not the Pope, bishops, or individual clergymen. This is, I think, a fundamental difference between Protestants and Catholics. Protestants seem more dependent on preachers and preaching, especially the new unaffiliated groups. I think the Orthodox and Episcopalians are generally closer to Roman Catholicsl.
But I’m sure that the RC clergy does not realizre that their often poor preaching has something to do with the dissatisfaction of many. Sometimes I wonder if RCs watch the effective Protestant preachers on TV and this encourages some to leave the Church. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Anyway I”m quite convinced that the reason many of us are not ever going to leave is because 1) we have learned Who God/Jesus is and 2) we have learned and experienced His place in our lives, especially through the Mass and other sacraments.
With all of this good discussion I’ve been asking myself: what would it take for *me* to leave the Church? The only thing I can think of is a serious threat of torture. How about the rest of you bloggers?
“With all of this good discussion I’ve been asking myself: what would it take for *me* to leave the Church? The only thing I can think of is a serious threat of torture. How about the rest of you bloggers?”
Are you saying there might never be “St. Ann Olivier, Martyr”? You might want to reconsider your one game changer: martyrs are put on a faster track to sainthood. :)
Though I understand others’ disaffection, I’m not leaving either, Ann, for the same two reasons you expressed.
“Oddly, more fallen away just remain inactive rather than join alternative churches indicating some remaining loyalty to being Catholic.”
Would that it were so! My own anecdotal experience (in New York) is that all the “former Catholics” I know insist that the Catholic Church has turned them against religion of any kind. I find their attitude very difficult to crack indeed. They seem to be inoculated against religion. I, as one of the people condescended to above as being a Catholic who came from another tradition and have not “spoken the language” from my birth feel an intense loyalty to this household of faith, which I’m convinced has a permanent claim upon me..
Joseph Gannon, it would be obnoxious to name names; I was thinking of postmodern death-of-God intellectuals, or of people who put (Celtic or other) “spirituality” above and beyond the deposit of New Testament faith.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols gave an interesting interview on the BBC’s Hardtalk, claiming that the Church was far more solid than met the eye. Then in response to statistics of decline cited by the interviewer he recalled Card. Ratzinger’s 1986 prediction of a smaller, more faithful Church, a “remnant”. Challenged on homosexuality, he said the Church’s concern was with the meaning of sex, its connection with procreation, and denied that the Church was dogmatically saying “we have the truth”; rather it was involved in the search for truth. On condoms in Africa he first claimed it was a surface technological response, not liberating for women; then when challenged with reference to Bishop Kevin Dowling’s claim that distributing condoms was a pro-life activity he backed down, saying he could not pontificate about Africa, never having been there, and that he bowed to Dowling’s experience. On celibacy he said he would never attack the beautiful practice going back to the tribe of Levi, but murmured something about being flexible. The general upshot was that people fell away from the Church through infidelity and not through any basic failure of the Church.
Ann Olivier writes,
“Anyway I”m quite convinced that the reason many of us are not ever going to leave is because 1) we have learned Who God/Jesus is and 2) we have learned and experienced His place in our lives, especially through the Mass and other sacraments.”
Those two points were true for me as well, and leaving has been a very deep loss. I admire my friends who stay and fight for justice, but in the end I could not. I left because I could no longer offer financial or spiritual support to an organization in which clericalism was a virtue and protecting the faithful was not, where Sr. Margaret McBride was excommunicated for exercising responsible judgment to save a woman’s life and Cardinal Law was kicked upstairs after protecting child molesters.
There are other churches where I can meet God/Jesus and experience his place in my life. They all have problems, and none of them is the Catholic Church that I love, but God is there and there is a place and a voice for all their members.
The loss in shared memory between the Church I knew growing up as a boomer and the Church my kids know is just astounding. From the experience of a whole coherent world centered on the felt presence of the divine to the experience of being bored and appalled (as Mike put it) in one generation is a gob-smacker.
I blame it on education ( I know, pretty ironic in a Church whose intellectual tradition values the harmony of faith and reason).
Once we were educated, the Enlightenment hit the neighborhoods. We no longer tolerated divine right monarchies and irrational pontificating. Vatican II reversed some of the Church’s anti-modernist lunacies, but the reforms were insufficient. It’s like the Church tried to act rationally but just couldn’t pull it off. As a result, the old institutional authority broke but was not replaced by anything workable. The institution that passed the faith from generation to generation failed — the lineage of belief was broken. There is no longer a trusted authority to articulate what we believe. As French sociologist Daniele Hervieu-Leger says, the repository of the truth of belief has passed from the institution to the believer.
I think as a result of the breaking of authority back in the day, we tended to accept only what made sense and to turn away from the mysterious and that associated with authority and tradition. In worship, anything too mysterious or traditional, priest-centric, complex, or devotional didn’t make sense and was left behind as “old school.” This gives us what some call “beige Catholicism,” a Catholicism as non-threatening, accessible, and culturally appealing as possible. Of course a church bereft of the authority of its historical tradition and a church that shies away from mystery pretty much sucks as a church, which is why a lot of people find it boring and appalling.
Resolving these issues requires the Enlightenment’s valuing of evidence-based reason coming face to face with mystery and tradition — and this hasn’t yet happened.
Catarina’s daughter –
Yes, God is in all churches. But I should have also said that I stay because I think that Jesus established a church and the Catholic one is it. Yes, the others are in communion, but they don’t have the continuity with the past, the memories, the many continuing lived traditions of the RC Church. Obviously I think there is much wisdom in the past — not just old ideas, but wisdom. Yes, a lot of the past has to be dumped. But a lot has to be retained.
When I look at the history of Protestantism, what do I find? An strong inclination to fracturing. There are now thousands of Protestant churches. Why? Because Protestantism lets everyone be his own pope. We don’t need that. We need NOT- that. Humility requires that we seek wisdom not only in our own experiences and own hearts but in that of others as well, and that includes the people in the past.
I guess I just don’t care very much what any particular clergymen says, and I certainly don’t care what kind of hat and shoes the Pope wears when he tells me what *he* thinks is the best of Christian experience. (HE might look silly, but that’s mainly his business.) Sure, he’s wrong sometime, but to use a homey analogy, he’s still the great Christian Associated Press, as it were. He *collects and disseminates* the wisdom of the Church and passes it on as best he can. That should include the best new thinking in the Church too, but sometimes we have to wait for it Further, from a practical standpoint, right or wrong, he is still, as Kissinger might put it, the one to call. The Church of Christ, being a human institution, needs a focal point, someplace whee the action is, somewhere we can criticize or praise.
Is my view of the Church one of a very messy institution? Yes. But if it’s going to be unified and remain plural — Catholic — then it will invariably be a very messy group.
I suspect that one reason the boomers pretty much started the exodus was because they typically didn’t, and still don’t, have an appreciation for the past. In fact, they began not trusting anyone over 30, remember? They seemed to think they had to reinvent the spiritual wheel. So who can blame them — why would they stay? But what have they found or invented?
Their children and grandchildren don’t seem so prejudiced against what went before, but I can’t see how this crop of bishops, having destroyed their own credibility, can ever reach them. So, yes, I’m quite discouraged. We need some miracles.
I remain a Catholic for one reason: love. I think the most edifying thing I have seen in the past 30 years was Ted Kennedy’s funeral Mass which focused on the gospel of St. Mathew. It was about: love.
It’s almost funny. After all these years I have focused on one thing only that is my faith and my life: love. It sometimes seems as if the hierarchy does it best to beat love out of us and focus our attention away from that one simple message of the man who preached and died i the land between th the seas: love.
St, Paul wrote and surprisingly buried beneath the accretions of two millenia, it still remains at the core: love.
It is through love we are saved and drawn into something more; a unity of consciousness with that consciousness from which reality sprang. That consciousness from which all proceeds: love
You might be interested in something I wrote on my blog on the occasion of my son Michael’s death. It’s about: love. For love is our salvation. There is no other.
http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html
It seems to me that, disregarding great ceremonial occasions, no one has really ever listened to popes but intellectuals, politicians (we’ll include kings in this class), and clergy. Now that the first two classes have met the current crisis with deepening incredulity and ever more strained tact, the pope has given up speaking to be heard by any class but the third. Thus he uses the phrase “idle gossip” to raise the morale of his clergy. The wagons are circled and he is facing inward, turning his back on the pain the church has caused.
Walter Kasper is gone. I see an institution ever more dedicated to its own perpetuation, unwilling to risk the consequences of true penitence.
“There are now thousands of Protestant churches.”
I always enjoy remembering what Voltaire said: “The French have a thousand sauces and one church. The English have a thousand churches and one sauce.”
More seriously, I think one of the great things that has kept schism mostly at bay in Catholicism is the richness of religious orders. Many times, when someone felt that an area of belief or practice was being underemphasized, he or she founded a new community that took that on as a specialty. And people gathered round. The Dominicans and the Jesuits have even fought over major doctrine — but stayed in the same church. That’s what we need: zeal and unity.
As one struggling with these many issues — Wow!
It is difficult to know where to begin, so I”ll try to limit my remarks to one or two smaller areas.
Clearly the Pope and much of the hierarchy are self-absorbed and oblivious to their perception by the rest of the world, including many Catholics. That was unfortunately evidenced by the recent series of reactions to sexual abuse coming to light in Europe — remarks intimating that these were baseless attacks on the Pope; others focusing on the abusers instead of the victims; and the recruiting of “loyal” laity to hold supportive rallies in Rome. Things eventually began to improve, with the Pope meeting with victims, etc. But by then, it was too late.
As has been pointed out, most people in today’s world simply do not care to hear or accept any sort of guidance on any topic whatever from this hierarchy — but most bishops don’t get it. Instead, they continue to shoot themselves in the foot on one issue after another; as for example, the obtuse position on the new health-care legislation to which the USCCB clings in spite of better advice from people who know — lawyers and legislators (e.g. Bart Stupak, who got hung out to dry for his trouble).
Another side to the same issue is Rome’s apparent belief that they still live in the Middle Ages, when canon law was on a level with civil law. Uh, guys….things have changed.
Which brings us to Fr. Anthony’s observation. Why are these engaged, educated Catholics saying they’ve “had it” with the Church? Likely because a) they have experienced that principles of social and economic justice only seem to apply OUTSIDE the institution, and/or b) because they are not consulted or listened to regarding matters which fall within their professional jurisdiction or expertise. Or, like the rest of us, they are simply teed off at the general abuse of power and the intellectual obtuseness of the institution. (E.g., musicians are being “offed” by the new liturgy “translation” and the new rules that go with it.)
Jim Pauwels and others have pointed out that “all church is local”, and Arturo Vasquez wisely points out that we do not need to be so wrapped up in the institutional side of the Church.
However — riding my current, and probably long-term, hobby horse, the new so-called “translation” of the liturgy — it seems to me that this is bound to strike at the heart of “all church is local”. The implications are far-reaching, but there is no doubt that it will have an impact upon parishes. It strikes me as a huge abuse of power to require pastors to stand up in front of their congregations to defend what they know to be, at best, an inferior product and at worst, a work which is itself the result of a gross abuse of power over a period of many years and unhealthy for the local church. It is humiliating to our priests to put them in such a position, and if further erodes their pastoral authority. Apparently a case of episcopal “let’s spread the joy around”.
The “translation” itself is a travesty, on at least two fronts: It is a poor translation, based upon faulty principles; and more importantly, it was ideologically inspired as a part of the Curial effort to reverse as much of Vatican II as possible, under the circumstances. In my judgment, it is the opposite of the work of the Holy Spirit which J 23 so desired. So every time we are subjected to a Mass celebrated with this “translation”, we will be reminded of the abuses of power which lie behind it. Some will be satisfied to stand mute in their pews in protest; others of us may be forced to practice “a mi manera”. Brendan, fleeing the church is not the same as fleeing God.
(On a somewhat lighter note, you’ve probably heard about the “pro multis” controversy. I note that Latin has (with a few limited exceptions) NO definite article. If the translation is to be faithful to the Latin, that must require deleting ALL use of the word “the”. I’m sure it will be quite elegant and “sacred” — just not English.)
In spite of that pessimism, I don’t think we are at the end of the line for the Church, but it may take us a long while to recover. One potentially helpful tool in thinking about our crisis is a book called Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 by Neil Howe and William Strauss. It only applies to the American case, but may still be helpful. Its basic insight is this: “if you understand that history is really the process of different generations moving through time, then the swings of American history no longer look so mysterious; they appear as predictable manifestations of the fact that different generations with different life experiences have risen to the foreground.” (From an online review by Odysseus “A Traveller”, http://www.amazon.com). I haven’t worked through all the implications yet, but hope to.
I also hope to be on the side of the Holy Spirit in all of this, Lord willing.
This has been one of the longest — and most revealing — of the posts I have had the pleasure of seeing and reading on dotCommonweal to date.
Ad multos annos!
I don’t think it is education, per se, which makes people think church is boring. It is the fast paced life we have found ourselves. Everything comes faster and faster, and speed becomes an addiction. Cars, television, music, etc started the process, video games, the internet, the cell phone, et. al. have continued it through.
The church is my family and being Catholic is part of who I am. I cannot leave. Whenever someone says: “Well, if you don’t like —, then why don’t you find yourself another denomination?”, I am nonplussed.I believe that all of us Catholics, as different from one another as we may be, are called to stay together and work out our conflicts.
But there is also another reason: stubbornness. If, say, my bishop and I have differing views, why should I be the one to leave? Even if reconciling our viewpoints seems impossible, who is to say that he is more Catholic than I am? Why should I concede, leaving the battlefield of arguments to someone who I think is wrong? I want to “fight the good fight”. (So much for being humble!)
Ann, I’m not sure why you think Protestants don’t have a religious history – they have the same on we do, up until the reformation.
Claire’s comment about stubbornness and her ability to outlast her bishop brings to mind something I’ve been reflecting on a little bit (and that has been alluded to in prior comments): to be blunt – longer life spans.
If a diocese has a new bishop appointed at age 58 (as can happen in metropolitan sees whose archbishops typically have had a number of years of prior seasoning in smaller dioceses) – he could easily reign for 30 years or more. That is a significant change from previous ages.
To repeat a theme I’ve sounded once or twice now: an energetic, visionary and inspired leader – particularly a pope – is, in my view, the best hope to reverse some of the dispiriting trends we’ve been discussing, and to begin to lead us out of the wilderness. Such a leader needn’t be young – cf Blessed John XXIII – but youth and energy would be helpful.
Just in case any of our red-vested electors are reading dotCom today :-)
Crystal –
Yes, we share some basic beliefs but not all. The Protestant beliefs about the Eucharist (which is central to RC belief) is very, very different from the Catholic one, though the high-church Anglicans and Lutherans are closer. Add to that the RC belief in the functions of the papacy (some of which seem to be changing) with the correlative views of autonomy of the Protestants With the rejection of those beliefs the Protesstant view of the history of the Church became different. It rejected the papacy, with all the beliefs and attitudes and rituals associated with it. Where I come from up until recently there were still people who view Catholics as Satan.
Jeanne -
Thanks for a particularly insightful post. What you say about mystery and the boomers is, I don’t doubt, right on the mark. And I think their lack of mystery is probably due to the catechetics of their childhood which rightly emphasized the practice of social justice, but which skimped teaching those children about God in Himself. It also skimped teaching about human nature (our spiritual part) and human destiny. This left the boomers ultimately stranded here.
I guess the moment I was most hit by the disconnect between the papacy and the laity was Christmas Eve 2007. My family and I had been laid over in fog in London and arrived in Rome much later than scheduled. We asked someone about the easiest way to get to St. Peter’s and he said that we would never make it in time for the pope’s mass due to the traffic. He suggested we go to Santa Maria Maggiori up the hill from the train station (and within walikng distance).
During the mass, I noticed that the celebrant was saying mass in Italian, but clearly had an American accent. Then a light bulb went off! It was Cardinal Law! His “punishment” was this beautiful church? What kind of signal is this to send to the average Catholic struggling with an abuse crisis?
John Klotz –
Your meniton of Teddy Kennedy reminds me of another reason I stay Roman Catholic. The Church is one in which sinners (and Teddy admitted his sins) are more than anything *loved because of their virtues*. As you say, it is love that counts most, not just following the rules. Yes, Confession is another reason to stay Catholic. Though we don’t go as often, we know it is there, and we know why it’s there — because we’re sinners and God loves and forgives us, really forgives.
I’m so terribly sorry about your son. Thank your for your wise and touching blog reflection. I’m sorry that the Church taught your generation so very badly about life after death. The old teaching about Heaven is yet another reason we old folks stay Catholic. Life really makes no sense at all without it.
Parents really do bear some of the responsibility for introducing their children to the Triune God. Taking them to religious ed class is not sufficient (of course, there are a lot of parents who can’t manage to get over this low bar). Ultimately, if we want our children to know God, they must *experience* God. The sacramental life certainly is the centerpiece of this expereince, and parents who withhold the sacramental life from their children are doing them a grave disservice (in my opinion). But the sacramental life doesn’t exhaust the ways we can encounter God. God is all around us to be sensed, appreciated and praised. A vigorous prayer life is also essential.
I don’t hold myself up on a pedestal in this regard – as a parent, there are things I can/should do better. Just reflecting on parental responsibility.
None of this is to absolve the sins of the church fathers, either. All of us need to keep our houses in order.
Johm Allen today in “Seven Days that shok the Vatican” tells us what we can look forward to from BXVIU: more “robust Catholicism.”
I think he’s right in that analysis and can only see more problems down the road.
The New York Times today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/world/europe/02pope.html?hp
I just finished teaching my summer school class of 30 students a third of whom are young people preparing to go out as catechetical instructors in parishes around the country. In addition, I have a clutch of adults who spend their vacation time working on the summer MA as well as four (young) religious men and women. Another of my students is a child psychiatrist from Puerto Rico. In classrooms adjacent to mine are over 100 young people who are enrolled in the ACE program preapring to volunteer two years as teachers in underserved Catholic schools around the country. It is those people who keep the church vibrant and few of them spend time wringing their hands about papal flaws and inept bishops.It is to those that I look with hope (not optimism, but hope) for the church and as for the flaws – it should not surprise anyone who has read a little church history.
Continuing our focus in this post’s thread on the configuration of forces that produce Roman Catholic religious observance and using what we know about that to make sense of a claim like “the Church is finished,” I present a short dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and humanity.
The dialogue highlights a problem people have with the primary marker of Roman Catholic distinctiveness. People leave because of it. People never enter because of it. And, puzzling to me, many people have a problem with it but remain, since they appear to relate to Catholicism as an ethnicity. But can you imagine the Maltese claiming for themselves what the RCC claims for herself, and on the same grounds, in the dialogue below?
RCC: Hey, did you know that it’s been supernaturally revealed that I am the unique, divinely instituted, infallible interpreter of the authentic sense of supernatural revelation?
Humanity: And how would I come to accept that claim?
RCC: Because I teach it. It’s a claim about supernatural revelation, and that same revelation includes the proposition that I alone can infallibly give you its authentic sense. So can I get you started today on learning the Fullness of Truth?
Humanity: Wait, you’re telling me the reason I must accept that you are a teaching authority is because you teach that you are a teaching authority?
RCC: Precisely.
Humanity: There’s no other way?
RCC: Nope. We used to appeal to people to take the gospels to be history books and then lay out a non-circular approach, using verses like photos and tape of what Jesus did and said, but that’s over.
Humanity: Then why are you special?
RCC: We teach that we are, as you say, special.
Humanity: I’ve gotta go.
RCC: Wait! There’s a Civilization of Love to build. And what about the next World Youth Day? You seem young. Don’t you like crowd behavior? And yelling? Here, take these glow sticks …
Humanity: No, this is ridiculous. It’s over. I’m done.
I believe it is fruitless for Protestants to bash Catholics for staying as it is for Catholics to say Protestants are second class Christians. Both are ungenerous outlooks. Jesus distinguished his followers by their love and good deeds towards enemies. He said even pagans do good to those who do good to them. Now that is a standard and practice which can draw a lot of people.
Structural reform — We certainly need it; it would help, but would not solve all our problems. We ought to give it a try, and now may be the time.
As a non-lawyer, it seems to me that this week’s decision of the Supreme Court to allow a suit against the Vatican to proceed COULD have the following result (almost irrespective of the case itself): It MIGHT put a thought into the minds of the Pope and Curia that they need to adopt some strategy which would reduce their exposure to foreign courts. While this goes against the grain, against their instinctive desire to control everything everywhere in the worldwide Church, the potential financial losses might convince them otherwise.
Fortunately for the Vatican, they have at hand a theoretical basis for such a change, along with a few practical, working examples. The theory is founded on the principle of subsidiarity and upon Vatican II’s enunciation of the principle of collegiality. However, these need to be fleshed out, developed into working structures and procedures and rules of governance.
The practical examples already exist to some extent within the Catholic Church. Some Eastern Churches, for example, elect their own patriarchs and bishops; these elections are then confirmed by Rome. Of course, there are also centuries of history during which different polities from the one we now enjoy were in vogue, starting with the New Testament and the Council of Jerusalem in Acts.
As in the case of the question of religious freedom (John Courtney Murray et al.), the American Church may be in a particularly good place to help design a polity which could work. (By the way, although messier, it is not a foregone conclusion that the model must everywhere be the same.) Our experience with the separation of powers and with more-or-less orderly representative government are certainly a help. In addition, we have many other models from the Orthodox and Protestant Churches to draw upon, some of which seem to fit better than others. Interestingly, many of these ideas are not new, since our first bishop, John Carroll, proposed many of them in the 18th century.
Perhaps a visionary group of lawyers, canonists, women and men, clergy and laity, could be convened to propose a concrete embodiment of these ideas as a sort of “pilot program” for the Vatican to consider?
In all of this, it is worth remembering why we have the over-clericalized system we now do. It was in reaction to inappropriate interventions by secular rulers in the past. This factor needs to be taken into consideration when designing new arrangements. In particular, we need to realize that by increasing lay participation we are politicizing the system in a new way; we need to build in safeguards so that the rich and influential are not the sole determinants of what happens. Perhaps Benedict’s Rule would be helpful, and/or the Dominican Constitutions, both of which provide ways for everyone to be heard.
While I might long for a new occupant of the See of Peter, or perhaps even a new Council, it’s important to count the votes in advance. The John XXIII cohort of bishops are aging-out and/or dying; more than half of our current hierarchy were chosen by John Paul II. Benedict has recently appointed an Opus Dei bishop as coadjutor of Los Angeles. FDR was right; packing the Court works. Unless someone like J 23 flies under the radar and gets elected by surprise. In other words, a new Council is likely to be disappointing at best, a disaster at worst. Better to concentrate on our own national level. Who knows? Maybe we could at least have our Synod of Bishops elect new Bishops.
Will that keep us from being “finished”? Maybe not, but it would fun to give it a try.
Hi Ann,
Yeah, some of their beliefs are different (though some Catholics have different ideas about the Eucharist too, like Rahner and Schillebeecks), but I meant that they do have a religious history … the disciples and Jesus, the early church fathers, etc. … we have that history in common. If a family gets divorced, it doesn’t uncreate all they shared before that or make orphans of children. The Eastern Orthodox churche doesn’t recognize the pope as the head of the church but they still have theor history.
Thanks for starting this thread. The comments were great. Wonderful ideas, suggestions, anecdotes, theories, now scattered all over the place. I’d love it if someone (the person who started the thread, maybe?) combed through them and made a summary.
To the question of why people leave, I answer that many do not believe. Obviously, those who become Protestant do believe, but the nothings presumably do not believe.
I’m not saying that this is good or bad; I’m not saying I want a purer church or whatever.
Isn’t this what happened to the Mainline? I think perhaps the shrinking of the church could be explained by the same reasons for the shrinking of the Mainline. (Why has the Mainline declined?)
In the old days, people who didn’t believe stayed for cultural reasons, (as one kook put it here, they celebrated the seasons), but now they don’t because the culture is gone.
Henry, [concerning 6/30, comments at 12:05, 12:32, 12:56 pm]
You write, “Every time there are different issues, every time it is ‘different’ and ‘unique.’ But still every time, after every ‘death knell’ experience, something happens, reformation from within (which is always needed), bringing new life. Indeed, the cycle is in a way a cyclical repetition of the death and resurrection of Christ.”
I think you’re right. What is different this time (from my limited viewpoint) is the recognition the that system of absolute monarchy for Church governance, some 1500 years in the making, is at its end. That is to say, this isn’t just a garden variety problem of the sort that arise in every century, it is an epochal shift.
The only way I can remain in this Church with integrity is to trust that this system will collapse. The Spirit will work (through scandals, through holy and prophetic reformers, etc.) to make it apparent that fidelity to the Gospel demands a change. I can’t set a timeline on the Spirit, and I may well not see it in my lifetime. But if I have to believe that it will come. If I thought it wouldn’t, if I thought the system were incapable of changing, I would have to give up on this Church and discern where else God is leading me.
Pax,
Anthony, OSB
For me the church was “over” twice — for two separate decades, roughly the 70s and the 90s. I returned again in May 2001. Just in time for the sexual abuse scandal. I had failed at agnosticism, secular humanism, non religious meditation and Lutheranism. I didn’t try atheism, which seemed just too definite and as one law professor said recently on C-Span “sneering.”The church is the only place I’ve found where I can reliably pray and make some contact with God, whom I’ve found I need. So where am I going to go? This time, at age 69, I’m staying. Since 2003 I’ve been a Benedictine Oblate, and like a few other Oblates, I’m more Benedictine than Catholic.
Also like many other Catholics, I’m not staying quietly, or blindly obedient. Whether the church is over is too big a question for me. I think it is an individual question, maybe a series of many individual questions. When I wasn’t going to church I thought no one else was, and I was surprised when I returned and found so many still going. It’s largely a matter of perspective as to whether the church is over.
A short, 94 page book (2007) “Why Spirituality is Difficult for Westerners” by David Hay, Scottish zoologist, is very germane to this discussion. As a number have said above, it’s mainly Europe that has stopped going to church. The European perspective for some time has been that religion and any and all churches are so over. Only they aren’t. Europe is the exception, much to the annoyance of the new atheists.
“I’m more Benedictine than Catholic.”
You could do worse — like Jesuit? In college my Newman Club advisor introduced Fr. Lemieux, SJ as “a Jesuit and a Catholic priest”. :-)
Jim Lein, I find your testimony very refreshing. As for “more Beneditine than Catholic,” I think you’re more than safe. Who was more Catholic than Benedict? As I say above, we Catholics are so lucky in that we have, without schism, something like denominations-in-communion-with-each-other to sublimate our differences of emphasis. I congratulate you on finding yours.
But, unlike Ann Olivier, I’d be just as happy for you if you’d attached yourself to the great Ignatius, who has kept so many of us more or less Christian for so many centuries!
The word ‘Church’ still evokes the most distasteful associations. Vatican II tried to banish them by defining the Church as the People of God, a biblical term. The Church is simply the people assembled by their belief in the living God. Of course the word ‘God’ also suffers from wrong associations. Today’s reading from Hosea, presenting a loving God who bends over his covenanted bride, the People of God, is intended to banish those. To renew the Church we need to get back to being an assembly of God-seekers, in biblical style.
Michael — You wrote, “Brendan, fleeing the church is not the same as fleeing God.” True, although I can’t help but remember that line from some of the Church fathers (St. Cyprian, for one, and I think St. Robert Southwell, SJ in the 1500s used it too — to his own father, in fact), “One cannot have God as a Father without having the Church as a mother.” Now, obviously, a lot has to do with what “Church” means in that statement — if it means “Mystical Body of Christ,” to which one can belong by implicit baptism of desire, etc., then it’s true.
You could also invert the line, and look at it this way: precisely because “one cannot have God as a Father without having the Church as a mother,” anyone who has God as a Father (or Mother, really) must also in some mysterious way have the Church as a mother, whether they realize it or not. Perhaps precisely because one cannot flee God, one cannot ever really flee the Church either — “Church” in that statement functioning on a variety of levels of meaning. I realize I’m taking refuge in being mystical and enigmatic here.
An attempt at humor — some other possible blog posts like this one:
“Is Molinism finished?”
“Is liturgical dance finished?”
“Is ‘Cats’ finished?”
“Is Luxembourg finished?”
“Is the telegram finished?”
“Is Arbor Day finished?”
“Is CNN finished?”
“Is Wyoming finished?”
““Is liturgical dance finished?””
I certainly hope so.
I am lately come to the discussion, and I have absorbed it in awe and gratitude. As an ex-seminarian and (gasp!) and ex-”practicing” Catholic, I feel that I have brought the best of my intense Catholic upbringing with me in my journey toward where I think I know where I am going and I so deeply relate to those above me in the “string”. It is possible, I believe, to keep what is keepable and reject what is extraneous, bizarre and pejoratively medieval without becoming a “cafeteria” Catholic or a complete apostate. I figure I am a Spong non-theist at this point, but I sleep well and pray well, meditate daily in both Aryuveda and Xaverian frameworks, and sometime wonder what all the fuss is about. Thanks, Commonweal!
Mr. McIntyre –
What is a “Spong non-theist”?
Welcome to the blog :-)
The batter says “Please God, let me get a hit.” The pitcher says “Please God, let me strike him out.” What’s a self-respecting “God” to do? Is “God” an intervener? Doies “He” have bounds and limits?
The cosmology – the world view – that created the great creeds of the church no longer exists for most people. Most of us don’t believe in a three-story universe, where earth is sandwiched between heaven and earth, and God lives somewhere beyond the sky. This God has the characteristics of theism, namely he is external, supernatural, and invasive. Like a superparent, God looms over creation as a law-giver and judge–his favor to be curried, his wrath to be avoided. We frightened children cower in fear of what we may fail to do correctly, or well-enough, or not at all.
For countless intelligent, well-read, and thoughtful people, going to church and saying creeds which speak of virgin births, spatial ascensions, supernatural powers, selective intervention, and exclusive efforts on behalf of the chosen are an exercise in self-deception. We either say them without believing them, reject all that science has taught us in the last two millennia, or give up on church all-together
Like the Jews before us who could never believe in the same God they worshiped prior to their exile, modern Christians cannot accept the notion that faith means believing things that we know perfectly well are not true
The God of the past simply no longer has any work to do. He no longer fights wars on the side of the chosen, suspends natural law to help their cause, sends plagues and other maladies to afflict the enemies of the chosen, heals the sick, spares the dying, or even judges the sinner. He doesn’t reward goodness and punish evil. Yet this unemployed God is still the object of worship and adoration.
So the answer to the question, “Is the opposite of a theist an a-theist?” is “not necessarily.”
We can reject what theologians call an “anthropomorphic” view of God, where we start with human categories and just improve on them, or reverse them–and not be rejecting God at all.
“For countless intelligent, well-read, and thoughtful people, going to church and saying creeds which speak of virgin births, spatial ascensions, supernatural powers, selective intervention, and exclusive efforts on behalf of the chosen are an exercise in self-deception. We either say them without believing them, reject all that science has taught us in the last two millennia, or give up on church all-together”
Thanks for the explanation. But . . .
Many of us believers think that if God could create a world from nothing (speaking metaphorically) then virgin births, etc., would seem to be child’s play for Him. The question is, I think, do those miracles have a place in the world-as-artifact, not the world-as-machine?
You say, in effect,that to reject miracles is to reject all that science has taught us. But “science” isn’t some thing out there, it is the thinking of scientists, and scientists as such aren’t a bit competent to judge the world as work of art. (I’m talking theology now.)
I’ve always loved science (what I understand of it), and I’m not a bit inclined to reject either science or theology.
For some of my women friends, the Church is finished. Yes, because not so much of the sex scandals but because of the Vatican’s inadequate response.
To me the Church is not finished, but ‘my’ Church is probably quite different from the way Conservatives see the Church. The Church is in the Catholic Social Teaching, in the liturgy which I rewrite constantly to make it women friendly, in my relationship with Christ, in prayer, and in going out to all the people marginalized by the Vatican.
And then, in a way, when one says ‘the Church’, is it as in ‘We Are the Church”? We are the Body of Christ?
The Church is not the Vatican. The Vatican at the moment is like a boil, or a wart, on the Body of Christ :-)
“For countless intelligent, well-read, and thoughtful people, going to church and saying creeds which speak of virgin births, spatial ascensions, supernatural powers, selective intervention, and exclusive efforts on behalf of the chosen are an exercise in self-deception. We either say them without believing them, reject all that science has taught us in the last two millennia, or give up on church all-together”.
Science is overrated. Some people think that whatever is true must be provable by science. But see, for example, Godel’s incompleteness theorem. If your rules for logical deduction are consistent (i.e. such that you cannot prove an assertion and also prove its negation) then there have to exist meaningful assertions that cannot be proved, and whose negations also cannot be proved — so your deduction rules are insufficient to completely decide which assertions are true and which are false: incomplete. That limits the understanding achievable by exclusively scientific means.
Yes, I agree with Claire that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is germane to the question “What does science ‘prove’?” And I would mention a couple of other things.
In many cases, scientific theories don’t pretend to establish causality anymore; just really good correlations. When one says science “proves” that the electrons of the helium atom are in spherical orbitals, it’s really a short way of saying: if we solve this differential equation and take the magnitude of the solution at each point and if, further, we do a very large number of experiments in which we locate the electrons of a helium atom, then we find that both (the solution to the differential equation and the distribution of the experimental results) are spherically symmetric with the same radii. But nobody thinks the wave equation tells us anything profound about “what really is” in the helium atom. It’s just a very accurate way of predicting the outcomes of experiments. I think Science (the Deist goddess) gradually gave up on the idea that it “proves” anything about “reality” during the nineteenth century.
In the modern world, scientific claims are often even more tenuous. An awful lot of scientific claims now are of the form: We have a computer simulation which, if you input the geometric properties of your system, will tell you where an electron beam directed at the system will deposit its energy. We have run this program many times and always found that the output corresponds extremely well to experimental evidence. However, the simulation is based on an absolutely unphysical model. So whatever is “really” going on, we know it isn’t what the program is simulating. (But it works, so we sold it to GE.)
But I think maybe it is possible for science to “prove” that a teaching is logically impossible. For example, the Passover of the Jews is always at the time of the full moon. Christ was crucified at Passover and there was an eclipse while he hung on the cross (say the Gospels.) Now, science has pretty well established that it isn’t possible to have a lunar eclipse when the moon is full. Maybe a volcano erupted nearby and the dust obscured the light of Sun; maybe an asteroid came between Sun and Earth and the effect was indistinguishable from a lunar eclipse. But it was not an eclipse, because “eclipse” is defined to be what happens when Moon comes between Sun and Earth.
Felapton –
Scientists might say with a high degree of probability (whatever “probability” is — they haven’t decided yet) that there was not an event that could properly be called an “eclipse” in the strict scientific sense of “eclipse”. But scientists don’t own that word. (Nobody owns any word.) So the writer of the Gospel could properly call the astronomical event at issue an “eclipse” according to the ordinary sense of the term of the on-lookers. So you haven’t “proven” the Bible is mistaken.
As to scientific proof, it has been realized since Aristotle that all empirical statements are contingent ones — that is they could be otherwise, and attempted proofs using contingent statements can never be certain. So “science”, in the strictest sense (ordered, universal, necessary knowledge of the causes of things) as expressing *necessary* relationships is impossible, at least for us humans with regard to empirical matters. But as you point out, they can have a high degree of probability, again, whatever that is.
Is the church finished? Probably not in the largest sense. I still have faith that its future may depend upon what we DO about its problems. But I will comment on one tiny aspect: This whole business of re-evangelizing Europe is a perfect illustration that Rome has no clue about its lost credibility. What matters to people is how the Church conducts its internal affairs. Do its processes and decisions reflect Gospel values or not? It is not enough to propound those values in print or in the other media; you’ve got to live them in the real world. “Do as I say, not as I do” does not hack it.
Until we start to “get” that fact, Europe (or North America, or anyplace else) is not going to be evangelized, at least not by the Roman Catholic Church. It is one thing to ask people to accept the Gospel, and quite another to ask them to join themselves to a patently corrupt institution which seems also to be deaf and blind. Anti-intellectual? Why do we see a hierarchy becoming almost fundamentalist, overthrowing or ignoring centuries of development in moral theology? It is a sad turn of events.