Catholic Sensibility

On the Catholic Answers web site, Karl Keating weighs in with his version of Catholicism. Starting with the question: IS THE CHURCH LIKELY TO SHRINK--AND SHOULD IT?

I have to say from the outset, the incredible shrinking church notion just slays me. It represents a degree of narcissism the worst excesses of the post-conciliar would have to work at to match.

The answer to that question is: It depends on where you live. In some places the Church is growing fast--Africa, for example, where Catholics were 12 percent of the population 25 years ago but now are 17 percent. The talk in such places is not about whether the Church will or should shrink; it is about how to manage runaway growth. It is a nice problem to have.

A nice problem to have, but no thanks. We want something smaller.

In other places Church participation is in decline, Europe being the most obvious example, but America is in this category too. A few decades ago three out of four American Catholics attended Mass regularly. Now the proportion is one out of four.

The research I've seen suggests one out of three registered Catholics is sitting in the pew on any given Sunday. Age certainly is a factor; commitment for ages 20-34 is very close to those 65 and older.

It is a little hard to brag about having 65 million American Catholics when only 16 million of them show up on Sundays.

If we want something to "brag" about, we could just say the same number of American Catholics are receiving Communion as fifty years ago.

Catholics are 23 percent of the U.S. population. If you subtract the nominal ("Christmas and Easter") Catholics and consider only regular Mass-goers, you can say that active Catholics are a mere 6 percent of the national population.

I'd say it's more like 8%.

Using the same formula, forty years ago they were 18 percent.

You have to use the same formula? What about the actual statistics for percentage Catholic in 1950 and percentage going to Mass?

Once upon a time Hollywood feared the Legion of Decency because the studios could not afford to have priests instruct tens of millions of Catholics not to attend particular movies.

From what I hear, the studios feared all committed Christian demographics. I remember how the network people were a bit nervous about Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie in the 60's. They were more concerned how those shows would play in the Protestant South more than the Catholic Northeast.

There is no such fear today.

More because the clerical leadership in both Catholic and Evangelical circles has taken huge PR hits.

There are proportionately fewer Catholics in the pews to hear such instructions, and no such instructions are given anyway. Older Catholics can remember a time when American bishops were paid attention to not just by Catholics but by the general public, even by political leaders. If you were a politician, you may not have agreed with someone like Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, but you didn't cross him either. He had clout.

Ah yes. The same clout that was jealous of Fulton Sheen and shipped him to Rochester with the full expectation he would fail as a pastor of a diocese.

Does any American prelate have clout today? I can't think of one.

The last was probably Bernardin. I think a bishop is recognized as a voice to be listened to when he actually has something to say.

They have no clout partly because they do not try to exercise any but also because to have clout you need to have a committed or sizeable constituency behind you.

The Gospel is not enough. Now there's a novel theology: strength in numbers.

Six percent is not sizeable and does not suggest much commitment. How did we come to this pass?

Dying to hear.

Ironically, the Catholic Church's present-day unimportance in the U.S. is largely a consequence of a "big tent" mentality: Church leaders have not wanted to lose anyone, no matter how marginally Catholic. The result has been a Church that is big and flaccid and almost without influence.

And this was different in the past how?

(Who pays attention to USCCB position papers?)

Foreign policy and economic conservatives paid enough attention in the 80's to attack the bishops for making statements about things they didn't agree with. But with the curia clamping down on bishops' conferences there's nothing substantive coming out of the USCCB these days.

For the Church in this country to regain influence, it needs to shrink first, on the principle that if you want a fruit tree to grow and to produce good fruit, you must prune it aggressively.

Karl goes off the deep end on this one. Karl the branch deciding which other branches need to get pruned? I don't think so. Catholic Answers should check John 15:1; the Father is the vine grower. Karl's theology is a repudiation of Paul's Theology of the Body (1 Cor 12:12ff). He might wrap his ideas around pruning tools, but don't be fooled. It's all about the eye telling the hand, "I do not need you."

This is precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been quoted as saying about the Church as a whole: A smaller Church is more likely to be a "creative minority."

I think we could say a more "intentional" Church is more likely to be creative.

A Church from which the heterodox take an early retirement will be internally more cohesive and can set itself some modest goals, such as getting back to the business of converting the whole world.

I've heard this argument frequently, but the narcissism of it intrigues me. The viewpoint is essentially that all the people who disagree with us are bothering us and stopping us from getting significant work done. Essentially, Catholic Answers is promoting a sort of whiny neocon Catholicism. Reminds me of all the excuses people give when they don't want to do something: I'll get to work when I get paid more ... when I lose some weight ... after I quit smoking or drinking ... when God gives me that new car. And they complain about liberals being navel-gazers!

A smaller, more orthodox, and more cohesive Church, one relieved of the burden of people who maintain membership in it primarily in order to oppose it (as some people remain registered in a political party only so they can vote against certain candidates in the primary elections)--such a Church is free to grow.

I see. All those liberal semi-Catholics reading their Sunday papers in bed are just on the rolls to drag down the True Believers who want to Get Things Done. I too lament the low church attendance on weekends, but it never occurred to me that inactive Catholics were sniggering over their tea and toast rubbing their hands with glee over all the evangelization they were sabotaging. Sorry, Karl; this seems a little too self-serving a theory to me.

It is free to be itself.

"I've just got to be me?"

It will end up doing more good for more people than it could have while paralyzed through internal bickerings.

Neocons used to populate more of the sidelines in post-conciliar Catholicism, and now they seem to be waking up. Someone should tell them active Catholics, progressive and traditional both got a lot of work done while they were eating their own bedroom breakfasts.

In last week's E-Letter I mentioned Rosemary Radford Ruether...

A common tactic: find someone ruethlessly objectionable and assume that all opponents think like that.

Why do people such as Ruether cling to the title but not to the content of the faith?

Because being a Catholic is a response to a call from God, not from a Catholic Answers orthodoxy survey.

Partly it is because of clout.

Wait! I thought we lost that clout when Cardinal Spellman died.

What little they have is a consequence of their being thought of as Catholics. If Ruether described herself as "a non-Christian New Ager," would her writings be taken as seriously as they are? Of course not. Where is Starhawk now?

Where is Deal Hudson now? Or Cardinal Law?

I have no insight into what Pope Benedict will do to make the Church a "creative minority." I think the Church in this country will trend that way no matter what. Someone like Rosemary Radford Ruether may stick it out until the bitter end, but over time many nominal Catholics will conform to truth-in-advertising principles and will start calling themselves something else.

Faith has become a matter of personal marketing? I think Keating is reading too much of the WSJ.

They will give up pretending to be what they manifestly are not. More importantly, they will give up trying to make the Church into what it is not. They will find another sandbox to play in.

I wouldn't give up on the bed and breakfast crowd so easily.

Even though things will go this way regardless, the Pope is positioned to give real momentum to the shift, and I hope he does, for everyone's sake. He could invite some people, particularly those with notoriety, to find their religious home elsewhere, but I hardly expect him to do that.

I don't either. Pope Benedict knows that God's call and the many traditional Catholic expressions of it override what any particular sub-group thinks or does.

I don't think he needs to. All he needs to do is to remove their wiggle room by defining and reiterating Catholic teaching ever more strongly.

Takes a lot of clout to do that. Do we have it or don't we?

The people who attend Call to Action conferences still push for women's ordination, arguing that the male-only priesthood is a cultural artifact, not an irreformable dogma. They pay scant attention to "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" or to the later dubium, signed by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, which affirmed the infallibility of the Church's teaching that woman cannot be ordained. But what if Pope Benedict issued a decree, couched in the plain and traditional language of infallible teachings, saying that it is now and always will be impossible to ordain women, take it or leave it?

It seems to me that's already been done. But the question seems to keep coming up, so it could be one of two things is happening. Either the teaching hasn't been taught as well as it could be, or perhaps the teaching is fundamentally flawed in some theological way. Either way, women's ordination (to use Keating's example) isn't on the top of most Catholics' list of essentials. I know a lot of women (and lay people ingeneral) who have particular expertise in many areas, and all they want is their priests and bishops to listen to their good ideas and input and take it seriously.

I think a fair number would leave it, and in the long run that would be good for them and for the Church.

Catholic tradition has usually seen it the other way around. People have always been dissatisfied with the larger institution of the Church, with the culture, with what the Church is doing or not doing to further the Gospel. In the 4th century, instead of shrinking the Church, they just went into the desert to pray and find their own way. It was good for then and the Church: we have the monastic tradition because of it, and people continue to seek God in very serious and intentional ways by separating themselves from the world. What Keating proposes is Country Club Catholicism: kick everybody but the Faithful Republicans out. Somehow, if the neocons got their wish for a smaller kick-butt Church, I suspect they would quickly lose their enthusiasm for converting the world.

It would be good for them because they no longer would be living a lie, and there would be hope that, at length, they would wake up, see the wisdom of the Catholic position, and come home--as fully Catholic. I've seen it happen.

In country clubs, no doubt.

Any other comments?