The remedy is no mystery, only difficult to achieve: good catechesis, strong support for Catholic family life, orthodox seminaries — and perhaps a few martyrs.
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Why are so many cradle Catholics falling away from the Church in adulthood? In a nutshell, it is because so many Catholic clergy see the world in a way that does not match the views of most religious Americans.
Since the early 1970s, many priests and religious have shunned orthodox Catholic teaching, while in many cases also openly advocating politically liberal social viewpoints. Especially in the Northeast, where there is a disproportionate number of Baby Boomers who grew up in Catholic families, the flavor — if not the explicit teachings — of Liberation Theology is spread in homilies about social justice, economics, and the role of government. At the same time, the Church’s teaching on issues such as abortion is often obscured and ignored.
The trend toward a more heterodox, politically liberal Church mixes with American social trends in a noxious way. Consider this: The General Social Survey reveals that while 27 percent of Americans who called themselves "liberal" or "extremely liberal" attended church weekly in 1974, only 16 percent did so by 2004. In contrast, the percentage of American calling themselves "conservative" or "extremely conservative" rose over the same period from 38 percent to 46 percent. Regular attendance at a house of worship has declined very little over the decades, but this obscures the fact that there is a growing faith gap between Right and Left.
The religious trends among conservatives and liberals have the same effect: They empty our Catholic churches. Conservatives — increasingly religious — are less and less at home in the established Catholic Church, and are looking elsewhere for a message about the world that accords with their faith. Meanwhile, liberals are quitting religion entirely. In other words, the progressive Church is preaching to a vanishing group.
Arthur Brooks is the Louis A. Bantle Professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author of the forthcoming book, Gross National Happiness.{mospagebreak}
On this question of why Catholics leave:
The first reason pertains to those Catholics who leave for Christian sects, usually of the Evangelical/Fundamentalist variety. It was my friend and former boss Karl Keating who convincingly put forward to me the idea that these folks do not leave, on the whole, because (as is often claimed) they were snubbed by their pastor or uninspired by the lack of liturgical dynamism or "fellowship" in Catholic parish life. Rather they leave, he said, because through some experience with a sect and its members they are led to experience for the first time an intellectual connection with Christianity.
They may hear a Scripture verse placed into the larger context of salvation history, and for a brief second glimpse God’s revealed word as something majestic and profoundly true — instead of as a collection of Hallmark sentiments best used as a jumping-off point for mundane, anecdotal sermonettes. They may hear a "testimony" on sin and conversion, and be bowled over by the radical nature of Christian faith — apprehending for the first time that it demands a totally new (and often scandalous to the world) series of life choices. Or they may simply encounter theological conviction in an unadulterated form — be told unflichingly by someone that Jesus is wholly divine, or the Bible is inerrant, or paradise and hellfire are real and one of them awaits each of us, and that this truth has unavoidable implications — and say to themselves, I want more of this. I want a religion that makes a statement about the way things really are.
The Catholic Church makes that statement in its fullness, of course. But for a couple generations now it has failed conspicuously on the local level to put it to the flock (in ways and for reasons that would be a subject for another day, but still — let him with ears to hear, hear). And so parishes have emptied while the little Bible chapels swelled.
For the second reason I refer to Catholic sociologist David Carlin, whose wondrous book The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America explains not so much Catholic attrition to the born-agains, but the loss of Catholics simply to irreligiosity.
Carlin paints a picture of an American Catholic Church that, after two centuries of manning the "Tridentine ramparts" against its Protestant foes in what had traditionally been a hostile land, by the 1960s finally considered itself in a strong-enough position — both as a religion and as full participant in the national culture — to drop some of its defenses and engage its old enemy on genial terms. But when it did so, it was wholly unprepared to discover that its enemy was no longer Protestantism but secularism,which had already hollowed out the doctrines and practices of mainline Protestant churches, and was now being invited to infect Catholicism — through contact with modernistic Scripture scholarship, mischievous moral theology, corrupted social sciences, horizontal liturgism, and the generalized rebellion against tradition and authority that marked the era. Thus did liberal Christianity — which Carlin characterizes as low-doctrine, anti-miraculous, morally malleable, and geocentric in its aims — enter the Church through the front door and go on to leave its mark on Catholic life and practice.
How does this bear on the question of why Catholics leave the Church? Because liberal Christianity, being essentially a working compromise with secularism, cannot sustain itself. This is observable both as a historical phenomenon (each time Christianity has engaged in compromise with secularism, it has emerged less distinctively Christian than it was before) and also in reflection upon human nature. For religions retain believers, and especially those most fervent and active believers, when their doctrines and practices are distinct, complex, and engaging — and lose believers when they’re not.
Put into concrete terms: A Catholicism that sets before its believers a broad and strict test of moral and doctrinal adherence will keep its members. A Catholicism that is reduced (and often it is so, ironically, in order not to scare folks away) to "being a good person" will lose them. Because — and this is the nub of it — one can be a good person without going to church.
On this point, the mainline Protestants have been somewhat more advanced than we. But now the Catholic children of the children of the 1960s, unburdened by conviction or even mere nostalgia or guilty habit, are figuring it out in droves.
Todd M. Aglialoro is the editor of Sophia Institute Press and a columnist and blogger for InsideCatholic.com.
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While I love the Church and have grown closer to it over the past decade, I think that our leaders have failed by trying too hard. What I mean is that we have dumbed-down the liturgy, offered (already out-of-date) "pop" music, decreased the number of Holy Days of Obligation, de-emphasized confession, let the standards for Catholic education slip, and eliminated Catholic markers like "no meat on Friday." The thought was that these things were hard and were causing people to pull away from the Church. What we are finding instead is that many people lost the sense of identity as a Catholic and left the Church. Others were driven to adopt a more traditional form of Catholicism, just to retain that which should have been there all along. Now we have less of an identity and more division within the Church.
I personally know two converts who came to the Church precisely because they studied the Catholic approach to birth control, realized that this was indeed the proper Christian position, and continued reading Catholic teachings until they overcame their previous bias. Yet how often does an average Catholic hear about the Church’s teaching on birth control?
I also know a couple who delayed entering the Church for almost a decade due to the sloppy teachings put to them in RCIA class. The nun who taught the course the first time they attended equated all religions and said there was no difference; the key was just to be a good person. Of course, they had been perfectly content as good people in their Baptist church. They were seeking more. As they explain it, they came to the Catholic Church in spite of RCIA, not because of it.
I also have a very good friend who is a traditionalist Catholic. He used to be a left-leaning "social justice" Catholic, and he attended a Mass where the priest let him "drop a needle" on any record he chose. Later, he attended the oh-so-groovy guitar Masses that were offered in most Catholic parishes. My friend, quite a connoisseur of modern music, told me that there had to be something very wrong in any Church that played such poor music. He eventually made his way to one of those groups that was always on the fringe of being schismatic. (I’m hoping that recent developments in Rome will help solidify the relationship.)
Examples could go on, but the main point is that I think the Church needs to ask more of us, not less. Most people are pretty strong when they are assigned a task and know that others expect them to meet it. Most of us tend, however, not to be particularly good at self-motivation. I’d like to see the bishops pick up the challenge, ask more of the people, and develop a more robust Catholicism.
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The closest you ever get to a poll in Scripture occurs in the memorable exchange between Pilate and the crowd concerning the fate of Jesus and Barabbas in Mark’s Gospel. Given the signal failure of democracy, along with all the other forms of government and philosophy, it is not terribly surprising that the New Testament does not concern itself overmuch with things like Pew Surveys. The popularity of the Church has ever waxed and waned, and the reasons for that are all over the map. Sometimes the Church is popular because it is right; sometimes it is unpopular because it is right. Sometimes a saint is beloved because he is a saint; sometimes a saint is martyred because he is a saint.
Add to that the fact that the Church is, in this world, a hospital for sinners before she is ever a shrine for saints, and you have a recipe for ensuring that poll results are always going to tell you . . . well, not much that is useful in terms of deciding what to do next.
At present, the Pew Survey tells us that "the Roman Catholic Church has lost more members than any faith tradition because of affiliation swapping . . . . While nearly one in three Americans were raised Catholic, fewer than one in four say they’re Catholic today. That means roughly 10 percent of all Americans are ex-Catholics." Knowing this, we should . . . what?
Well, using the Pontius Pilate method for spiritual navigation, we should listen to the loudest voices screaming advice and make the Church more Episcopalian by embracing various trendy leftisms such as approval of gay marriage, easing up on abortion, and all those other pelvic issues, and generally stop offering any challenges to whatever it is the New York Times says we should be doing and thinking. What some screamers want is a gospel of license, rather than a gospel of grace.
Or, if we apply to other sectors in the Culture Wars, we should Hannitize the Church by kicking butt and taking names, seeing to it that all that mercy crap is flushed out along with all the other sob-sister stuff that makes the Church a haven for weak-kneed Peace-n-Justice types. What some screamers want is a gospel of law and judgment, rather than a gospel of grace.
The point is, in both cases, we think we should be navigating by poll, which is precisely the way the apostles never thought to proceed.
Not that they were oblivious to the needs of the flock. Indeed, much of our present predicament seems to me to proceed precisely because of our bishops’ stunning obliviousness to the needs of the flock and their over-attention to world methods of navigation. When the flock cried for justice in the matter of the rape of their children, our bishops heard only the counsel of lawyers and psychologists, not the bleedin’-obvious testimony of the Tradition. When the faithful begged for decent catechesis, a generation got "Cut, Color, and Draw," not formation in the Tradition. When the pope tried to make Catholic universities teach the Catholic faith, our bishops labored with might and main to make certain that Ex Corde Ecclesia was dead on arrival, lest we learn the Tradition.
In each case, however, the problem has not been with the Church not knowing what to do. It has only been with the Church not liking what it had to do: namely, preach the gospel in season and out of season. That is what the flock needs, what it has ever needed: a Church that preaches and lives the Tradition of the Apostles. If we live it, they will come.
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The Pew Foundation reports that "Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes." This should cause the American leadership to rethink its marketing strategy. Why is it that people remain attached to a religious affiliation? Is it because it offers a less impressive version of the fastest-growing affiliation? Or is it because it offers something uniquely desired by its current members?
Another way to ask the question: What is the comparative advantage that the Catholic Church has over its competition? The concept of comparative advantage is familiar to students of economics but not usually outside of it. In brief, the idea here is to find the task that you are uniquely suited to do within the overall structure of the division of labor. This offers the greatest hope for success for you in the marketplace. You might be a wonderful violinist, but the market is already crowded with them. Another skill you have is accounting, which is much in demand. Your comparative advantage is to specialize in accounting.
For as long as I can remember, Catholic leaders have said that this trend, which they have long detected, should be addressed by attempting to copy the styles and approaches of their more successful competitors. Hence we should be warm and wonderful and have uppity music just like the evangelicals. Or maybe we should have long and inspiring sermons. Or maybe we should set aside a time in our services for personal testimonies and otherwise try to enhance that feeling of togetherness as a community. Everything must be super accessible and superficially edifying, so that people always feel good about themselves.
The question is rarely asked whether this really works. The data seem to show that it doesn’t.
Let’s leave doctrine and liturgy out of it completely and consider the best approach from a marketing point of view. If friendliness, togetherness, happiness, socializing, and chit chat are what people want, they will get all that and more at the local evangelical sect. Catholics can attempt to copy this for 1,000 years and never come close to doing it as well as they do.
It makes far more sense for Catholics to focus on their comparative advantage: robust doctrine, mystery in its liturgy, unfashionable teachings on morality, and its claims to truth. There is also the obvious marketability of a 2,000-year-old heritage, which must be kept alive in order to retain its market share.
Look at it from a business point of view. If your computer company were losing profits, what is the best approach: attempt to be just like Dell, or offer something unique and attractive that Dell does not offer? Everyone in business school knows that pure imitation is a sure path to failure. The market leader will remain the market leader, and you will be forever playing catch up with a phony version of the real thing.
Or consider another analogy: Let’s say you had a product to offer that was very much bound up with a long heritage of service and a huge devoted following, something like Coke. Would it be wise to suddenly spring a New Coke on the market? Coke found out otherwise, in one of the most legendary calamities in the history of marketing.
It seems that postconciliar attempts to be hip, modern, chummy, communicative, and all the rest should also be ranked up there in the history of religious marketing failures. It is not only doctrinally unsound; it is simply bad business practice. Catholics have so much that no one else has. Recapturing that is the key to firming up the Catholic Church’s share in the religious market.
Jeffrey Tucker is editor of www.Mises.org. E-mail him at Tucker@mises.org. {mospagebreak}
Why have so many Catholics left the church? In my opinion, the two most important reasons seem to be contradictory: first, because people did not find the faith to be relevant to their lives. Second, the Church tried too hard to make the faith relevant to their lives.
What I mean is this: Many Catholics left the faith because it was, to their minds, a dull, routine performance that was no more than eternal fire insurance. People want a faith that is alive. They want a faith that is practical, personal, and real. They want to learn how to pray. They want to be healed when they are anointed. They want to feel forgiven after confession. They want inspiring homilies they can understand and remember. They want simple opportunities to grow in their faith, be involved in their parish, and belong to a warm Christian fellowship.
They didn’t get this. Instead, they got a Church that confused personal relevance with communal relevance. Too many in the church thought that relevance meant being socially aware, politically correct, involved in peace and justice issues, and fighting for human rights. While these things may be worthy, they did not nurture the faithful with a powerful, dynamic, and personally engaging experience of Jesus Christ.
They also thought that, to be relevant, they had to mimic the Protestants. The problem is, they imitated the worst things about Protestantism, not the best. They built churches that looked like bare preaching halls, tried to make the liturgy more folksy, and brought in folk music. In other words, like the cowboys that are all hat and boots, they were "dude Protestants."
Catholic parishes grow when they are authentically Catholic. They grow where priests and people truly believe in the reality and efficacy of the sacraments. They grow where people believe in the power of prayer, the necessity for spiritual warfare, personal discipline, and the universal call to holiness. They grow where priests and people strive together to learn more about the faith, give sacrificially, and work together to evangelize. They grow where there is inspired and powerful preaching based on the Scriptures, and where the faithful are called to live dedicated lives set apart for God.
Fear not. The Church of the 21st century will be a lean, mean, fighting machine, or it will be nothing at all. From that concentration and focus new life will come.
Rev. Dwight Longenecker is the chaplain of St Joseph’s Catholic School. His newest book is Praying the Rosary for Inner Healing. Visit his website at www.dwightlongenecker.com.
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There are a million reasons why Catholics leave the Church, from "mean nuns" and cranky priests; to the serious breach of trust engendered by the revelation of sexual abuse by priests and the cover-up by bishops; to the deplorable catechesis of the last 40 years (thank God we are finally moving away from CCD programs full of stick-figure cartoons and the "everyone is special, mass is special, God is special, and you are special" theology-of-goo that rendered every treasure of the church down to treacle and plasticine and inspired nothing in our children); to the priests who — no longer feared — discovered they wanted to be loved and stopped preaching about sin, sacraments, and salvation; to the poorly taught reforms of the Second Vatican Council; to the simple fact that a prosperous society, becoming too comfortable, always tends to put God on the backburner until circumstances bring Him to the fore. Ireland used to be the most devout of Catholic nations; now she is prosperous enough to forget all that, and to forget gratitude as well, which means she will soon be joyless, because where there is not gratitude, joy fades.
But I think things also need to be put into perspective. The Pew report suggests that mainline Protestantism has actually suffered a greater blow than the Catholic Church, and the mainline churches, let us remember, are churches that have, for the most part, fully embraced the times. Moreover, as with every study on religion, much is made here of the change in numbers since the middle of the 20th century — the coming of age of the baby-boomers. That generation swelled numbers beyond earlier norms in every way, in every institution — and, of course, in religious vocations as well — but the numbers themselves were aberrant, because of the post-war boom. Eliminate that generation, and the high drama of these numbers suddenly becomes less so.
That’s not to say, of course, that the church has not lost members and is not still losing them. But there is something to be said for a Church that is engaged, faithful, lively, vigorous, and smaller, rather than larger-but-mostly-dead. What we’re beginning to see in America is a Church that is growing from the inside out — from the Mid-West and the South — and the vibrancy of the church in places like Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky will spread outward toward the mostly dead coasts, which are already becoming mission posts for African and Asian religious.
I think ultimately we have reason to be optimistic. The generation that had serious issues with the Church, and which moved to either "bring the church into the times" (where it would die along with the unrecognizable mainline Protestant churches) or desert it completely, is a generation that is reaching its culmination. They are now the establishment generation, and they are as out-of-touch as they used to claim their parents were.
They do not understand that a new generation has succeeded them, one that does not share their experience or understanding of the Church, one that is not still "reacting" to Humanae vitae but is actually reading the thing and responding to it. This generation has no neuroses attached to devotions, no uncomfortable acquaintance with "old world" superstitions, and it wants to reclaim all the babies that were tossed out with the endlessly flung bathwaters. They’re bringing back devotions, novenas, and Benediction, and they’re bringing new life back to the moribund idea of religious vocations, too. The number of men and women in religious formation in America went up 30 percent in 2007. Over 60 percent of those religious communities and seminaries surveyed reported an increase in inquiries.
The Spirit is at work, and springtime is coming in more ways than one. A Pew report may say one thing this year, but a report from the pews in the coming years will, I think, say something very different.
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I was recently struck by a poll poll published in the Financial Times that found that more than half of the inhabitants of Great Britain do not believe in God. When I arrived in London to stay with friends, I mentioned my surprise to them. Their response was surprise that the number of believers was so high.
With these observations in mind, I read with interest, but some detachment, the recent study of the Pew Research Center on religious life in America. While much emphasis has been given in the press to the fluidity of believers’ affiliation, in particular the alleged attrition among Catholics, I see a different landscape.
We live in a country that is astoundingly religious. Religious groups receive, by far, the largest grants of charity. Religion is a major factor in the current electoral campaign. Candidates refer openly to their faith, and regularly appear in venues of worship. This would be unheard of in virtually any European country. The United States has the largest private, religiously affiliated school system in the world. Moreover, individuals are not locked into ethnic or familial religious practices, but move freely on their own.
My skepticism emerges on how the survey sought to identify one’s "original" religion. In a word, they "self-identified." Now, we all know that Catholics more readily identify themselves as incubate Catholics than any other group. In other words, if the last time they had been in a church was when they were held over the baptismal font, they think themselves "raised Catholic." This may account for the extraordinarily high number (one in three) of Americans who claim to be raised Catholic. Perhaps only Jews have a similar familial adherence.
I am encouraged by the finding that seems to indicate that the better educated the Catholic, the more likely he is to remain in his Faith. My fear is that this survey may, however, give fodder to the neo-Pelagians who would like to impose rigid obligations upon potential converts or mildly observant parents wishing to baptize their children. We are, remember, the Church that received the baptism of a dying emperor, but also confirmed the austerity of the Grande Chartreuse. We are the Church that sanctioned Boniface’s catechism class for thousands, which lasted only as long as it took him to cut down Donar’s sacred oak, but also the Church that lovingly embraced reception of a Newman, who took half a lifetime refining truth.
Msgr. Steven D. Otellini is a priest of the Archdiocese of San Francisco and chaplain for the Knights of Malta.
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The recent mass exodus from the Church stems from the interrelated negation of Catholic identity and a corruption of the Catholic parochial system, leading to a collective failure to support and encourage the act of faith. In other words, the Church in her most visible forms has offered nothing distinctive or compelling because she has lost her ability to manifest to the world her purpose: to proclaim with authority the full truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
In diluting her doctrine and discipline, she had no public identity and began to lack that "catching force" Cardinal Newman speaks of, and the evangelical institutions of the Catholic parochial system began serving platitudes, not incarnating the Truths of the gospel as a witness to the world. This, in turn, led to an inability of the Church to propose to people with confidence and authority the necessary prerequisites that lead one to accepting the gift of faith, and then to support and form in them all that is necessary for living the life of faith.
At the bottom of this problem is a failure of holy leadership willing to lead by faith, not by worldly sight or calculation, as St. Paul instructs us. This point has been illustrated in abundance at numerous flashpoints in the long progression of the Catholic crisis, which has been with us in acute and chronic form since the close of the Second Vatican Council. In every instance where clear, confident, forceful, orthodox, and uncompromising pastoral leadership would have served as a bracing tonic and healing balm to the moral, pastoral, spiritual, and theological maladies of the day, such leadership was not forthcoming. Even at present, when we are still realizing the effects, past and present, of such a failure of faith-guided leadership in the Church, there is still a destructive reticence on the part of the leadership of the Church to lead according to the full reality and to accept with courage the implications of Catholic orthodoxy.
In short, the Church in these last several decades lost the courage to be Catholic, trusting that the entirety of the Faith is true. In losing the courage to be Catholic, we had only the timidity to be "relevant," which has made us more irrelevant than we could have ever imagined.
Rev. Phillip W. De Vous is the pastor of Divine Mercy Parish in Bellevue, KY, and St. Bernard Parish in Dayton, KY. {mospagebreak}
The Wall Street Journal examines the winners and losers in the recent Pew survey by noting that "religions that demand the most of people are growing the fastest." Want proof that the dynamic described is at work in the Catholic Church? Take a look at Mass attendance figures for Denver, whose shepherd, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, is a model of orthodoxy:
Mass attendance in the Denver Archdiocese is higher than that of the national average, shows a recent survey commissioned by the Denver Archdiocese. The survey also shows that a majority of Catholics in the archdiocese, 51 percent, are "fervent" or "faithful" in their belief.
A total of 45 percent of local Catholics polled said they attended Mass in the prior week, compared to 32 percent nationally.
Want more proof? The inverse of Denver is Rochester, whose shepherd, Bishop Matthew Clark, serves the same weak tea as the mainline Protestant denominations. There, Mass attendance is in a free-fall, dropping almost 20 percent since 2000.
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The published findings of the recent Pew Forum survey (PFS) should, without a doubt, provoke a keen sense of urgency among Catholics. Pope John Paul II called for the Church to take up a New Evangelization, and the internal need for better catechesis and ongoing adult formation is widely acknowledged.
Before we think the situation appears too bleak, however, three qualifications to the PFS conclusions should be made, which, while not exhaustive, are particularly revealing.
First, when MSNBC reports that the "Roman Catholic Church has lost more members than any faith tradition," it should be remembered that these are absolute numbers, not relative numbers, because the Catholic Church is the largest faith group in America. Thus, while Catholicism has retained 68 percent of its members, Baptists only retain 60 percent; Episcopalians, 45 percent; and Jehovah’s Witnesses, 37 percent. The reason that 10 percent of Americans are ex-Catholics is that Catholics had by far the most American members to begin with.
Second, broadly speaking, it is more demanding to be a Catholic nowadays than it is to be a member of a Protestant denomination. Few other faiths have retained an intact teaching about sexual morality or life issues. Catholicism still teaches that abortion, contraception, cloning, and homosexual acts are objectively wrong, and people have left the Church because of this. In liturgical and sacramental questions, similarly, the Church keeps its tradition: Divorced Catholics who have not received an annulment cannot remarry in the Church, nor does the Church allow the ordination of women to the priesthood. In sum, people leave the Church because of the commandments, not necessarily the Creed.
Third, those Catholics who have remained with the Church have demonstrated a tested fidelity to the faith of their upbringing that should not be ignored. Gone are the days when it could be presumed someone would die in the same faith they were born into. Many Catholics who have remained Catholic experience something akin to being "born again," returning to a Catholic faith that they may have abandoned for some time. Again, the Pew Forum has no way of measuring how likely it is for someone to switch back into their former faith, nor does it have a way of measuring the transition of so-called "cradle Catholics" into self-consciously "proud Catholics," by which I mean those who have actually "switched" to the Church, even if they were already technically a baptized member of it.
I do not mean these three considerations to diminish the urgent need for all Catholics to address the causes of defection. Thirty-two percent of Catholics leaving the faith is still 32 percent too high. But the most effective external evangelization must start with better self-understanding and disciplined self-catechesis.
Thomas Peters studies and works in Washington, D.C., and blogs at AmericanPapist.com.
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What accounts for the recent exodus of American Catholics from the Church? In a word — narcissism. The culture of self-love that has sprung up in our time is one of the principal reasons why I believe American Catholics are leaving the faith. They leave because it’s more about "me" than it is about God. They say, "I don’t get anything out of Mass," but rarely ask what they should be bringing to it. They complain about the rules (particularly those that deal with sex or mandatory attendance) but never seem to entertain the notion that the rules might serve a good purpose, even if it’s one they may not fully understand.
G. K. Chesterton famously replied to a newspaper inquiry on the question of "What’s wrong with the world?" with two simple words: "I am." It strikes me that the attitude of those leaving the Church en masse,if asked the same question, would be, "It isn’t me!" The narcissist never sees a failure in his own doing; it’s always a problem with the system or with somebody else.
Because of this, one’s religious creed has become less of an eternal obligation and more like a check box on the consumer satisfaction index. "If my religion fails to give me the good feelings I’m looking for, I’ll simply shop around until I find a better one."
In this regard, it’s no wonder they’re leaving the Catholic Church. Despite quite a lot of bad theology and shameless pandering to emotion in the last 50 years, Catholicism is still too immutably centered on the crucifixion to truly please the narcissist. The passion, death, and resurrection of Our Lord is inseparable from our law, as well as our liturgy. With each consecration of the Eucharist we look upon Golgotha, facing our own sinfulness and feeling compelled to worship our savior rather than ourselves. This is why the laser light and rock music shows that pass for religion in some other denominations never make sense in ours: The others may talk about Calvary every Sunday but we go there, and there is no place for entertainment masquerading as religion when standing at the foot of the cross.
Perhaps the saddest thing is that the self-love of the departing faithful has been nourished by pastors. The abandonment of ad orientem has given Catholics a false but heightened sense of self-importance; after all, the priest has turned his back on God to have a dialogue with us. Add bad catechesis, poor sermons, lousy liturgy, vapid confessions, and so on, and Catholics are left wondering what, exactly, is worth staying for. At the megachurch down the street, they can have more fun and follow fewer rules, and the doughnuts and coffee are better, too.
A little card my uncle had in his house said, "The Catholic Church: Never Popular, Always Attractive." If we want to keep them, we have to remember how to be Catholic again.
Steve Skojec is a columnist and blogger for InsideCatholic.com. Visit his personal blog at skojec.wordpress.com.
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The Pew study identifies 10 percent of all Americans as "ex-Catholic," making the U.S. Catholic Church "the group that has experienced the greatest net loss by far." The data points for young adults as hard hit — most of whom are "currently unaffiliated with any particular religion." Indeed, Pew reports that 16.1 percent of the U.S. population is "unaffiliated," with over 25 percent of that group being raised Catholic and 31 percent being under the age 30 (compared to 20 percent of the overall adult population).
There’s no surprise here. The 2001 report "Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice"warned, "Catholicism’s institutional vitality, public witness, and capacity to retain its young are in jeopardy." As the count currently stands, only 18 percent of Catholics are 18-29. Academics have attempted to identify prominent factors for this youthful disillusionment. In Being Catholic in a Culture of Choice, Thomas Rausch of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles cited young adults’ desire for "a more egalitarian, participatory, and democratic community."
These numbers, it seems to me, reflect a normal faith cycle now aggravated by a culture "whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence," to use John Paul II’s phrase — a culture that has mislead many Catholic educators to water-down and even dissent from core Church teachings. The danger lies in these cafeteria Catholics pressuring to implement as a solution the very tactic which has undoubtedly contributed to the disaffection in the first place: dilution of doctrinal authority in the core teaching areas of the Church. Calls for a more "youth friendly" Catholicism — in other words, less authoritarianism with greater "tolerance," particularly on sexual issues — must be soundly rejected. It is the authoritative teaching of moral truth that brings our young adults back to active Catholicism. In fact, 41 percent of U.S. Catholics are 30-49 years of age, compared to 39 percent of the population overall.
In 2001, I was involved in founding the only Catholic private preschool in San Francisco. Now, seven years later, we have a long waiting list of families desperately seeking admission into our doctrinally uncompromised Catholic school. Pew might have counted many of these young adults "unaffiliated" but, faced with the formation of their first child, the structure, authority and truth of the teachings of the Catholic Church take on a profound significance that self-centered pursuits in the culture of choice and compromised teaching had obscured. Their hearts are turned by love, their heads turn toward reason. As John Paul II said, "God endowed [the human race] with the capacity to attain to the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good and behold it face to face."
Once they get it, they are Catholic forever.
Marjorie Campbell is an attorney and speaker on social issues from a Catholic perspective. She lives in San Francisco with her family and blogs at www.dealwhudson.typepad.com. {mospagebreak}
When you ask someone why he is longer Catholic, the answers are generally self-serving. From complaints about the nuns or priests to doctrinal teachings on marriage and family, the individual avoids personal responsibility for leaving the Church. When the person has adopted another Christian expression, the circumstances generally reflect first a falling away from Catholic practice and then a "finding Jesus" in the Evangelical community. The person now is "being fed" and feels "welcome." His memory of his Catholic upbringing has been reduced to rote formula prayers and "praying to Mary." In many cases, there is also a second marriage and children and a spouse who is a "Christian believer."
These stories reflect poor catechesis. Starting with the Mass, Catholics have been treated to an explosion of confusion as to what this central act of worship means, both personally and to the entire Church. Many Catholics do not understand the real presence of Lord in the Eucharist, nor do they appreciate the other sacraments. As a result, when there is a crisis, they do not know how to seek help within the Church. When the temptation to leave arises, whether due to marriage issues or disagreements with Church teaching, they cannot adequately consider the question because they have not developed a properly formed conscience.
Population mobility has also had a negative effect on Catholic stability. When Catholic families are isolated without a strong community, everyday life can cause the family to drift from the Church.
Feminization in the Church through its staff and preaching has turned many men away from the Faith. Men want Catholic priests and teachings that inspire courage and strength of character. They do not want women to use authority to undermine the special role that men play in the Church, in the community, and in the family.
The secular influence of society has been destructive as well. Church teachings and traditions are ridiculed, and no one has the courage to stand up for them. People who do not want to follow the Church’s teaching on marriage, divorce, and contraception find that it’s easier to leave. Many divorced Catholics view the Church’s annulment process as a burden, so it is easier to go somewhere else. The Church has failed to clearly articulate the rationale for God’s word, and so it appears irrelevant.
The blurring of the distinctive nature of the Church also affects their outlook. After all, they think, "It really doesn’t matter where I worship; all of these religions are the same. God loves me even if I do not go to church."
The good news is that there is a new generation responding to the gospel commission that invites everyone to examine the truths of our Faith. Of all the institutions in society, the Church stands alone in her commitment to the sanctity of life, the integrity of marriage and the family, and the dignity of human freedom. As Rev. John Neuhaus reminds us, this is the "Catholic moment," and we need to issue the call for the sake of civilization.
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Why are Catholics leaving the Church? For the same reason most Americans are overweight, can’t identify a constellation other than the Big Dipper, or understand economics past the value of a mutual fund going up or down.
While most people remember their catechism classes about as well as they do seventh grade math or literature, they recall it with even less affection, as it involves demands and rules that seem to run counter to one’s choice and free will. Partner that with a poor prayer life and an absence of felt purpose, and one becomes vulnerable to other temptations.
It’s easy to dismiss a concept barely understood; it’s easier still to embrace something thought a suitable substitute. Those afterlife scenarios the Church offers can be pretty readily ignored; they don’t address the emotionalism and easy spirituality on offer in the popular culture today. And they make few real demands.
We’d all be better off if we could return to the simple but total faith we had as children.
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While many blame poor catechesis for high numbers of baptized Catholics leaving the Church, I think this is only a small part of it. The full reasons are varied and complex.
Societal pressure to conform has changed a great deal. My grandparents, born in the early 1900s, were well-educated in Catholic schools. But they didn’t know a great deal about what the Church actually taught. It didn’t really matter. If you were born Catholic, you went to Mass, made your Sacraments, prayed your rosary, and didn’t question anything. If you did, you kept it to yourself. You didn’t leave your Church, just as you didn’t leave your spouse.
Then came my parents’ generation. They were raised on orthodox catechesis but the culture around them was changing; it questioned everything. No longer did you have to stay in a church (or a marriage) that meant nothing to you. Rituals, rules and traditions rang hollow. So many began to leave, and if they stayed, they did so on their own terms.
Here are some of the other reasons I believe Catholics leave the Church today:
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They don’t have a relationship with Jesus Christ. And if they do, they don’t understand why the Catholic Church is the best place to live out that relationship.
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Most parishes are lifeless. “Dynamic orthodoxy” is hard to find.
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In today’s culture, people are drawn to authenticity and heroic virtue, which they see infrequently among Catholic leaders today.
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In a busy, disconnected society, people now expect the Church to meet many of their human needs. If these needs aren’t met, they’ll go elsewhere.
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Because they can.
Fault lies across the board for the loss of numbers in the American Church. We shouldn’t despair, however. Better to have a small group of Catholics who are authentic, joyful and heroic, than large numbers of Catholics simply going through the motions.
Zoe Romanowsky is a development consultant and blogger for InsideCatholic.com.
I remember a Catholic friend once explaining to me that, when she did go to Mass, she would often only stay through the homily, which she thought to be the most important part of the liturgy anyway. Seeing the Mass in that light, it’s a wonder we have any Catholics left at all.
But it points out what I think is a key reason for the exodus from the Church: In a bid to be more "relevant," we’ve abandoned the difficult task of raising our understanding of the Faith and instead simply lowered the Church to our level. In the process, we’ve flattened it and shed its unique signifiers, thereby making the Faith something easier to be cast off or traded in. After all, if faith is simply a matter of the best preaching, I can think of any number of places I’d go before the local Catholic church.
On some level, I think that sense of being set apart and called to something better and higher than our ordinary lives is what appeals to most Catholics, fallen away or no. It’s telling, for instance, that outside of Christmas and Easter, the most heavily attended service of the year is Ash Wednesday, when we are imposed with a physical reminder of our difference from the rest of the world. If given an adequate understanding of what we are being called to, and why, Catholics can rise to the occasion and embrace the fullness of the Faith, which is so countercultural. But if the Church itself no longer emphasizes these truths, trying instead to become more like other congregations, why shouldn’t Catholics take it at its word — that these beliefs are all interchangeable?
In short, it’s not that the Church needs to change to become more like the world; of course, simply standing athwart history yelling "stop" won’t work, either. But if we can perform the difficult work of truly catechizing the faithful — of explaining the miraculous event that happens immediately after the homily — the Faith becomes "relevant" in the most important and lasting way.
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