February 09, 2010
 
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| Why Are They Leaving? An InsideCatholic Symposium |
| by InsideCatholic Staff and Friends |
| 3/11/08 |
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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. Elizabeth Scalia writes from New York and is a columnist and blogger for InsideCatholic.com.
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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.
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