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The survey sampled 35,500 people. One could argue that the sample size in a country of more than 300 million was too small. However, the survey generally confirms what many observers of the Catholic scene in the United States already knew -- at least anecdotally.

Here in Central Florida, the number of Catholics is growing. Since I have been bishop, I have established eight new parishes or missions. This Easter season, more than 1,000 people will join the Catholic Church here in our diocese. Our pews are full because of the continuing influx of people to our area, either from the North (the snowbirds moving to a warmer climate) or from the South (Puerto Ricans and immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean). It is tempting to glibly dismiss the Pew study. However, given the constant arrival of newcomers, we might not as easily notice the members who quietly defect.

Why are we losing people? A possible explanation -- but one I think is too facile -- is that many adult Catholics have left the Church because of the phenomenally poor religious instruction received by Baby Boomers and their children over the last 40 years. This certainly plays a role; more often than not the former Catholic who joins another religious denomination did not understand why he or she was Catholic in the first place. But that cannot be the sole explanation. In fact, many of the immigrant Catholics who built the Church here in the United States a century ago were poorly educated in their faith and in just about everything else. However, they kept the Faith and built the schools that handed the Faith on to their children. These immigrants brought with them a culture that helped to shape their faith and forged a collective identity in which Catholicism was part of a distinctive way of life -- a way of life that revolved around the parish.

Something changed though when their children and grandchildren entered into the American mainstream. Catholics were assimilated -- or absorbed -- into American culture, resulting in an erosion of Catholic identity. The parish plays a lesser role in their lives. The strong individualism of our culture undermines the sense of a collective identity. And thus Americans become individual consumers of religion, picking their religious identity a la carte, as it were. Churches are seen as merely voluntary organizations, and affiliation or non-affiliation a matter of personal taste or choice. The attraction of the Evangelical denominations with their emphasis on the therapeutic side of faith seems to bear this out.

What do we do about it? Certainly better catechesis is needed; but Catholics do not live their faith merely as individuals but as members of a community. Parishes are key to reinforcing Catholic identity and providing a place where people can experience the distinctiveness of Catholic life. Parishes at their best can draw people into a Catholic ethos in a way that does convert them. Most parishes did that well up until the mid-20th century -- and many still do. If we want to stem the leakage from the Church -- and at the same time reach out to the unaffiliated -- parish life must be revitalized. As Pope John Paul II said in Novo Millennio Ineunte, the Church must be "the home and school of communion" where each member of Christ's faithful is valued and taken into account, and where each is aware of his or her active responsibility for living the faith.

 

 

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There are many possible answers to the question posed here. I am first inclined to consider Pope John Paul II's call to a new evangelization. Without an evangelized heart, without falling in love with Christ -- which is really what it means to be evangelized -- the practice of the faith redounds to duty and obligation. There is only a slim possibility of persevering in the practice of a faith that is viewed primarily or exclusively this way. Perhaps those properly evangelized would not so readily leave the One they love.

Another possible consideration: I am a firm believer in the Providence of God, and at the same time that this question was posed to me I happened to read a passage from G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. It seems, oddly, to apply:

 

A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut forever. Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.

 

We, as Americans, tend to look for rational reasons for action or for failure to act. There is inherent in the question a search for "reason," but perhaps it is reason itself, cut off from faith, that is precisely the cause of the abdication of the Catholic Faith. Have we not, after all, made the concept of assent to the truths and teachings of the Catholic Faith much more a matter of reason than faith? Phrases like "I just cannot believe that" manifest a great confusion between reason and faith. What we believe as Catholics is certainly reasonable, but raw reason, without any input from Faith, would of necessity reject a vast majority of what the Church believes and teaches. Modern man finds faith unreasonable and therefore unbelievable.

In America there is a very strong notion that what we believe must make perfect sense to us, and that we are somehow automatically absolved from believing that which does not seem to be rational. Once a person ensconces himself on the Inner Circle of cold reason, he "will go round and round his logical circle . . . unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mysterious act" of making a personal faith commitment.

One definition of Faith is "a sacrifice of reason," a willingness to assent to the unreasonable. Faith has an element of unreasonableness about it. Unless we are willing to make that leap, we will never truly arrive at committed faith.