November 20, 2009
 
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| Why Are They Leaving? An InsideCatholic Symposium |
| by InsideCatholic Staff and Friends |
| 3/11/08 |
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First of all, let's take the hysteria down a notch. The Pew survey doesn't paint quite the horrid picture of a dying Catholic Church that the media want to portray in a spasm of wish-fulfillment. The Protestant picture is much worse. With 51.3 percent of America claiming to be Protestant, we're on the verge of an historic sea change: an America where Protestantism is the minority.
But rather than engage in joyless stats, let's take on face value that the Catholic Church suffers the largest gross number loss of adherents and quickly assess the problem and the solution. The problem, as with every faith community, is that young people vanish and they don't come back. Talk to a 50-year-old that doesn't practice his or her faith, and 90 percent of the time you'll be talking to a person who dropped out in his late teens or early 20s. That's exacerbated in the Catholic Church because we have lost the old Jesuit model of equipping young adults with a sense of apologetics and mission.
We need to teach a new apologetics. We don't teach young people how to defend their faith in contemporary culture, so we lose them to what appears to be a better argument. It isn't so much sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll that pull them away, as in my salad days. It's the constant bombardment of secular imagery and secular thinking. They are untrained to see it for what it is. And they are definitely untrained to present a reasoned counterargument. They judge the Faith through the eyes of the world because they have little training in judging the world through the eyes of faith.
At the same time, we do not teach our young people how to mission -- how to evangelize non-believers. Thus, they become those evangelized by the culture, rather than the "evangelizers" in the world in which they live.
We're teaching the faith better than we have in years. But we cannot forget critical thinking, apologetics, and mission. This requires discipline and study, not feelings and emotions. It is training of the mind as well as the heart.
Bob Lockwood, director for communications for the Diocese of Pittsburgh, is the author of A Faith for Grown-Ups: A Mid-Life Conversation about What Really Matters (Loyola Press).
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"Why do people leave the Catholic Church?" Isn't this the wrong question?
It may still be a fruitful question; wrong questions often are. There are all kinds of potential sociological or theological explanations that could be presented: If you want a sociological prescription, I'll say that parishes should provide support for children from divorced families. Elizabeth Marquardt's excellent Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce talks about the spiritual and ethical searches that children of divorce must undertake from a very early age -- searches in which they frequently receive no guidance from church.
But fundamentally, the question of why people leave the Church -- like, in some ways, the question of why people enter -- will always be a mix of sin and virtue so complex that even those who make the decision may not understand that decision very well, and outsiders can't hope to. Intellectual disputes with the Church, for example, can be simultaneously genuine philosophical seeking and sinful intellectual pride.
Moreover, even people who seem to have a relatively well-defined problem with the Church may need a lot of different things to help them keep the faith or return to it. Someone who considers herself an "ex-Catholic" because of the Church's stance on homosexuality may need a better understanding of the theology of sex; she may need to get to know Catholics who aren't dismissive or even hateful toward gays; she may need guidance on how to express deep, genuine love (whether her love of other women, or her love for a gay family member or friend -- the two most common kinds of love which people most often experience as in conflict with the Church on this question), so that being Catholic doesn't seem to require denying love, care, beauty, and joy. She may -- shoot, she does -- need Christ in the Eucharist.And to make matters even more complicated, she may be wrong about which of these things she needs most, and what she's really seeking.
So the real "solution" always has to be, Do more of everything. Better art, better journalism, better catechetical education, better living on our own parts (Catholics are probably the number one reason people leave the Church), et familiar cetera. Whatever you can do that is Catholic, do more of that thing, so that the people who yearn for it can find it. We often don't find it at the parish church.
Specifically, Americans are obsessed with finding narratives of personal discovery -- finding our true selves. Narratives of transformation are more obvious in this respect than any other kind. Who wants to say, "Yeah, I was born Catholic and . . . am still Catholic now, so I guess that's who I am . . . you know, by default"? That just doesn't have the ring of radical self-discovery that Americans tend to consider "authentic."
So perhaps what American Catholics need is a renewed devotion to the saints. The saints offer countless stories of people born Catholic who nonetheless underwent radical personal transformations in the fire of Divine love. Even saints who were born Catholic aren't Catholic by default. If we need some kind of story to tell us who we are, we could do much worse than becoming a self by surrendering that self to Christ.
Eve Tushnet writes from Washington, D.C. Visit her blog at www.eve-tushnet.blogspot.com.
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What's to be done about the exodus from the Catholic Church? Well, God created the universe, He is the Lord of history, and His Church saves us; we don't save it. He no doubt will surprise us with a resurrection like He always has before.
We even have some indication what it will look like. In 2001, Pope John Paul the Great laid out a plan for renewing the Church that amounted simply to letting God do what He planned all along. John Paul implemented the plan with extraordinary effort in his final years, and Pope Benedict XVI picked up where he left off.
The plan: promote Sunday Mass, confession, prayer, and charity work. The plan is simple and profound. It calls for actions that are objective, easy to describe, not daunting or excessive, have tangible benefits, are available to every Catholic, and transform the lives of anyone who takes them up.
For full effect, the plan should be vigorously pursued immediately in the Hispanic community, which the Pew study saw as the major source of vitality in American Catholicism.
I know what they mean. My own Mexican grandparents spent their last days praying the rosary for me in Spanish, and my Mexican mother went to confession when she could no longer speak, and Sunday Mass until her dying day. The Mexicans are the hobbits of North America: forgotten country folk to the South who just might save Middle Earth -- if we stop assimilating them downward.
Another thing that can be done is an earlier plan of John Paul's, one that Benedict will address in his U.S. visit: reclaim the universities.
Without the universities, all is lost. And whoever has the universities has everything.
Catholics universities gave in to ghetto insecurities, tried to look as smart as the secularists, and stopped teaching the Faith long ago. But now, a new crop of colleges is actually complying with canon law and the bishops' clear guidelines once again.
What will their impact be? Back in the 1980s, the St. Ignatius Institute (SII) was one of the very few places you could study the faith in higher education. Today, the editors of Our Sunday Visitor, Catholic World Report, Faith & Family, and the National Catholic Register are all SII grads. If you read the pope's new book, you read an SII grad's translation. If you saw the Vatican on CNN when John Paul II was pope, it was an SII grad reporting.
The impact of the graduates of today's mandatum universities will be far more than even wishful thinking expects. The Catholic truth, once it's allowed to be spoken, always surprises us with its power to change what we thought could never change.
And when it's shut up, it always surprises us how fast the Church's numbers disappear into thin air.
Tom Hoopes is executive editor of the National Catholic Register and with his wife, April, is editorial co-director of Faith & Family magazine.
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The Pew findings are dissapointing but not surprising. During the past 40 or 50 years, Catholicism in the United States has become "Americanized" -- which means that, since the United States is, historically speaking, a Protestant country, American Catholicism has become "Protestantized." And the form of Protestantism that has served as the model for this transformation has been Protestantism not of the conservative-Evangelical species but of the liberal-mainline species.
Thus Catholics, with the consent of their clerical leadership, have de-emphasized the distinctively Catholic elements of their creed and moral code (including, for example, abortion and homosexuality). Instead, they have come to believe in something that may be called "generic Christianity" (or "least common denominator Christianity"). Although there are important exceptions, today's Catholics tend to be very "tolerant" and au courant (the two are really the same thing).
Small wonder, then, that many of them feel free to switch to another denomination that also believes in generic Christianity. Small wonder, too, that others, who have no stomach for the watery religion represented by generic Christianity, switch to Evangelical churches. And finally, small wonder that many give up on Christianity altogether, moving directly to the a-religious state that is the natural terminus ad quem of generic Christianity.
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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. |
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