The church is a bridge institution in a divided nation: It bridges
races and classes, suburban neighborhoods and inner-city ghettoes.
It links power brokers in downtown corporate headquarters and government
offices whose grandparents were immigrants from Europe with new
arrivals from Latin America, Haiti, the Philippines, and Southeast
Asia.
In the archdiocese of Los Angeles Mass is celebrated every Sunday
in at least 38 different languages. A few years ago, I was attending
a conference near Holland, Michigan, the home of tulip festivals
and churches descended from Dutch Calvinism. I called up St. Francis
de Sales parish to find out the Sunday Mass schedule. I was not
surprised that the recorded message was in both English and Spanish
and told me about Masses in both languages. It was more interesting
that in this corner of Michigan, the parish also had a monthly
Mass in Vietnamese.
The church in America is also a bridge ideologically
and politically. Its traditional morality links it to conservatism.
Its positive attitude toward government
intervention to assist those whom the market economy leaves out links it
to liberalism. Despite the sex scandals, Catholicism remains a
powerful moral
force in a society with fewer and fewer moral authorities of any sort. But
like other sectors of society, Catholicism is facing the same issues—anxieties
over rapid change, over sexuality, gender roles, and the family, the distrust
of large institutions, the tension between inclusiveness and a need for boundaries,
doubts about the quality of leadership, and a groping for spiritual meaning
and identity.
So it is not difficult to see why the fate of Catholicism is
a matter of interest to all thoughtful Americans—and not only to
committed Catholics like myself. That fate will have a significant impact
on the nation’s
fabric, on its political atmosphere, its intellectual life, and its social
resilience.
As the largest single religious family in the world’s most powerful
nation, American Catholicism can have a significant impact on the world.
What does it mean to say that a religious group of such size and
scope faces a crisis?
After the trauma of the sex abuse scandal, it did not seem unthinkable
to many people that Catholicism here could suffer a sudden collapse
in one or two generations, such as was seen with what once looked
like a virtually impregnable Catholicism in French Canada or may
even be underway in Ireland. In 2002, like others I found myself
saying that the sex abuse scandal had changed the history of the
Catholic church in the United States.
Eventually, I decided that that was not really right.
I came to realize that there is scarcely a known or likely result
of the scandal that was not somehow already underway, from the
drop in Mass attendance, the questioning of leadership, the reduced
numbers seeking the priesthood, or the disaffiliation of young
adults from church life.
It would be more accurate to say that
the scandal did not so much change the course of that history
as immensely accelerate it. It gave a new urgency to
questions going well beyond the scandal. It revealed the distrust already
simmering just beneath the surface of American Catholic life, ready
to boil over into
anger. Although it temporarily united left and right, liberals and conservatives,
in criticism of the bishops, ultimately it supplied the polarized camps in
the church with new reserves of outrage to fuel their conflicting outlooks.
The real danger, it seemed to me and many others, was not a sudden
drop in numbers. It was something much harder to measure. It was
the danger of a hollowing out of the faith, what I call in A People
Adrift, a soft slide into a kind of nominal Catholicism. Catholics
will not be seen fleeing the church, repudiating the creed, or
spurning its familiar sacramental ministrations, especially, as
the phrase goes for hatching, matching, and dispatching. But they
will participate in its communal worship and service more and more
irregularly and occasionally. Their faith will become an increasingly
marginal or superficial part of their identity, bearing less and
less on the important choices of their lives – about work
and career and sacrifice on behalf of others, about sex and marriage
and how they raise children and honor their own aging parents.
Just compare the percentages of Catholics saying that their faith
is the most important thing in their lives. That is the position
of 37 percent born before 1943 compared to 14 percent born after
1961. For the younger generations, 41 percent consider faith important
only among other things, almost twice the percentage of their elders
holding that view.
"A People Adrift" was a phrase born of long observing
church leaders caught in a kind of ecclesiastical gridlock. They
appeared to be blocked by suspicion, polarization, and inhibition
not only from acting but often from even acknowledging major changes
that were taking place and the challenges that these posed. I am
not only talking about the hierarchy—the bishops’ failures
have been painfully exposed. At the beginning of the Nineties,
I remember being astonished at the extent to which some Catholic
educators—members of religious orders and lay people alike,
almost all of them intelligent and liberally minded—seemed
determined to avoid recognizing serious questions about the Catholic
identity of their colleges and universities.
For years, Catholic attendance at Sunday Mass declined without
alarm bells going off loudly and repeatedly among Catholic liturgists
or liberal activists. That changed markedly when the unavailability
of the Eucharist was tied to the church’s refusal to ordain
married men or women. As long as it was a matter of Catholics voluntarily
absenting themselves, it was apparently not a big deal.
In 1994, when a New York Times poll found that there might well
be significant slippage in Catholics’ belief about Real Presence
in the Eucharist, I was struck by how many people, especially among
liturgists and liberals, rushed to dismiss the findings—often
the same people who had groaned when bishops tried to minimize
polls revealing the extent of Catholics’ disagreement with
the church’s position of contraception.
One could make a list of crucial issues (and the initial statement
from the Common Ground Initiative, quoted on pp. 18 and 19 of my
book, actually made such a list): The church’s loss of credibility
in teachings about sex. The changing profile of the nation’s
Catholic priests, fewer in numbers, older in years, less in tune
with their congregations. Religious illiteracy among younger Catholics.
Erratic or ebbing understanding of central sacramental teachings.
Highly uneven implementation of liturgical renewal. Decline in
financial support for the church. Again and again, I found that
rather than confront solutions one found unpalatable, too many
Catholic leaders, at all levels, preferred to deny that a serious
problem existed.
Obviously Catholicism is undergoing a crisis of leadership. This
is the leadership being reshaped by the two converging internal
transitions I referred to: First, leadership by priests and nuns
is giving way to leadership by lay people. Second, leadership by
Catholics formed in the tightly bounded, highly defined, often
ethnically based Catholicism that flourished before Vatican II
is giving way to leadership formed in the wide open, rapidly changing,
and often highly unstable Catholicism introduced by the Council.
The first of these transitions hardly needs illustrating. Think
of the staffing of parochial schools. In a few decades, not only
have lay people replaced women religious as virtually all the teachers
in these schools. Lay people now constitute the vast majority of
principals of these schools. A few years ago, Georgetown University
chose a layman as its new president—an excellent choice,
in my opinion, but also a milestone, because it reminded us of
the reality that even the largest of the men’s orders will
soon have only a handful of priests with the necessary background
for leadership posts at each of more than two dozen colleges and
universities.
The same transition in the leadership of Catholic higher education
is occurring in the leadership of Catholic health care institutions
and Catholic social services—this vast network of institutions
that it has been the genius of American Catholicism to create and
which serve millions upon millions of citizens, Catholic and non-Catholic
alike. Religious orders, which have often served, if you will,
as the entrepreneurs or venture capitalists of American Catholicism
while the diocesan clergy did the yeoman work of maintaining parishes,
were the vehicle for the Catholic identity of many of the institutions
that constitute this network. Can lay men and women, without benefit
of that intense, prolonged, and common formation, take up the baton
and preserve and develop that identity?
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this passage from leadership
by the ordained and the vowed to that by the laity is the emergence
of lay pastoral ministers. Today there are over 30,000 lay parish
ministers paid for at least 20 hours a week working in over two-thirds
of the nation’s parishes. Seventy percent work full time.
They are running religious education programs, parish liturgy and
music, youth ministry, home care for the sick and elderly, community
and social justice programs, prayer and Bible study groups, marriage
preparation and family support services, and a myriad of other
pastoral activities. Some have specialized fields, like the directors
of religious education or liturgists. Some are general parish ministers
whose work, with the exception of administering the sacraments,
covers almost the full range of responsibilities traditionally
carried out by priests. Some are pastoral coordinators who oversee
parishes that no longer have a resident pastor.
In the five years after 1992 alone, the ranks of this new category
of church leader increased by 35 percent. By 1997 the numbers of
these lay ministers in the parishes had surpassed the number of
active parish priests. Almost three-quarters of these ministers
view themselves as engaged in a life’s work. Half feel they
have received a call from God, and at least another quarter appear
to be motivated more by some concept of religious service than
personal fulfillment.
The face of the Catholic parish of the future is not the male
pastor. It is more likely the female Director of Religious Education
or parish administrator.
There are a whole lot of fascinating and important questions about
this new category of church leader. Who are they? How are they
recruited? What is their preparation? What is their compensation
and their security? Who assesses their work and on what basis?
Who nurtures their spiritual lives and how?
But if anyone asks whatever became of limbo, the answer is that
this group is in it. Are they going to be treated as second-class
substitutes for coping with a supposedly temporary shortage of
priests and nuns? Or are they going to be treated as a genuinely
new phenomenon that deserves to have a regularized place in the
church?
Eight centuries ago, a new phenomenon arose in the medieval church—mendicant
friars who went preaching from town to town instead of staying
in one place like proper monks. As preachers, as university scholars,
as new models for Christian living, the Dominicans and Franciscans
and other groups created all sorts of problems for bishops and
for traditional church structures. But a few wise, or at least
shrewd, popes recognized their significance and incorporated these
movements into church structures. Will today’s lay pastoral
ministers be treated as wisely?
As for the generational shift, that too hardly needs illustration.
Whether you are younger or, like me, older, it only takes a quick
survey of one’s family members to realize the differences
between those shaped, whether for good or for ill and probably
for both, by the preconciliar Catholic subculture and those shaped
in the exciting but tumultuous years afterwards.
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