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The Pew survey confirms what we already know: Americans are very mobile. During the course of their lifetimes they're likely to change jobs, homes, political parties, and yes, even religions, any number of times.

 

"Church shopping" seems to be one of the signs of our time, and it does present new challenges to us. But our basic mission remains what it has been since the first Pentecost -- bearing witness to the gospel and bringing all people to deeper knowledge and love of Christ.

The Pew numbers tell one story. Pastoral experience on the ground tells another. Here in San Antonio, our churches are full; we don't feel anyexodus" of Catholics. We are very much an immigrant Church, as San Antonio always has been. We're a Church of Americans, Mexicans, Asians, Africans, and Europeans.

San Antonio is not out of the ordinary; the Catholic Church in America today is most obviously an immigrant Church. The survey found that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of American Catholics were born outside the United States.

Hispanics -- immigrants and U.S.-born -- now make up 29 percent of the Church. More than that, Hispanics make up almost half of all U.S. Catholics of prime child-rearing and career-building ages -- 45 percent of Catholics ages 18-29 and 44 percent of Catholics ages 30-39.

The statistics on the faith of immigrants were also revealing. Nearly half of all immigrants to this country are Catholic (46 percent), and the influx of immigrant Catholics is the most hopeful sign of growth in the American Church today.

It's very clear that this future is closely linked to immigration. I hope this survey leads us to find new openness in our hearts to our immigrant brothers and sisters.

 

 

 

In an ecumenical discussion group I recently attended, a lay Episcopalian campus minister commented that, at his university, the religions with a thriving campus ministry are Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic. He theorized that this is because these three have a strong cultural identity. A Methodist minister in the group followed up by commenting on an article he had recently read: The author was pondering why more Catholics hadn't left their Church in the wake of the clergy sex-abuse crisis. One would have expected Catholics to leave in droves, and yet the great majority has remained faithful to the Church. He opined that the identity of Catholics with their religious culture was likely the reason.

 

I make reference to this not to downplay the seriousness of the situation, but rather to approach it from a different perspective: If people, for the most part, are not leaving the Church because of their Catholic cultural identity, then, to the extent that they are, it is because this cultural identity has been weakened.

 

The real question, then, is this: What are the key constituent elements of Catholic culture? The answer is certainly a complex one, but I would suggest three such Catholic-defining elements: liturgy, education, and common prayers and practices. Furthermore, the seeds of this identity have to be planted deep in the psyche early on in life, otherwise they will not take root and have the power to keep people in the Church (short of a genuine conversion experience later in life, of course). Unfortunately, all three of these elements have been, to some degree and in some way, in crisis for a very long time, which means children have not been receiving this essential formation.

 

To keep our people in the Church, their Catholic identity must result from deep love for and cultural connection with their faith tradition. They must also find inspiration and spiritual nourishment in their faith communities, and in a way that accords with Catholic-defining elements. If they don't, and if they are unhooked from this deep-seated Catholic identity, then it is not surprising if they go elsewhere to find it. If just one of these realities apply, people will stay; however, the contemporary situation of the Church is all too conducive to our people being subject to both of them at the same time.

 

 

 

On May 20, 1998, at the age of 67, I was baptized as a Christian and confirmed as a Catholic. Pat, a fellow journalist and longtime friend, read about it many weeks later and greeted me: "Congratulations, Bob. Welcome to the church." When I asked Pat his parish, however, he said he had not gone to Mass in 20 years.

 

That pointed up the difficulty of counting Catholics in present-day America. Is Pat a Catholic? He thinks so, though truly he is only ethically and culturally, not theologically, a Catholic. It compares to my ethnic but not theological Jewishness when I abandoned the religion after my bar mitzvah at age 13. Pat's classification in the Pew Forum's study would depend on what exactly he said -- whether "Catholic" or just "raised Catholic." If the latter was the case, he would be classified as "ex-Catholic."

 

More significantly, my encounter with Pat and others who were "raised Catholic" created for me an image of the church as a revolving door: people like Pat leaving, people like me entering. That was nothing like Conservative Judaism, the religion of my youth; no apostates left, and certainly no converts entered.

 

The difficulty of classification and the revolving door image both make meaningless the alleged exodus of American Catholics. Pew sees a 10 percent exit because of the alleged reduction of the country's Catholic population from one-in-three to one-in-four, but those numbers are skewed by faulty counting.

 

Mark Gray, a research associate with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, calculates a net gain of 150,000 American Catholics in 2006 without including the impact of immigration, much of it illegal.

 

Statistics aside, I am fascinated by the difference between people going in opposite directions through the American Catholic revolving door. Those leaving remind me of assimilated Jews who no longer enter the synagogue and in all likelihood have married non-Jews. Talking to many who say they were "raised Catholic," I find people who were bored stiff by sluggish performance of the liturgy and uninspired homilies and seem to know little about their faith.

 

In contrast, I find during each Lenten season at my church, St. Patrick's in downtown Washington, bright, eager young men and women converts entering the Church -- touched by the Holy Spirit, I believe, as I was. They represent a surge in Catholics by choice, reflected by the rise of students at Newman Centers across the country. I think Pew has missed the boat, demonstrating the failure of statistical analysis.