Morning Read: Catholic church crisis
The North Country remains a predominately Roman Catholic region, with the Church filling niches in our cultural and social lives that go well beyond the pews.
Which is why this article from Commonweal is so fascinating, placing in context the struggle of the Diocese of Ogdensburg to sustain its important insitutions.
It’s not just the sex scandal, or the declining number of priests.
Author Peter Steinfels points out that one-third of Americans who grew up in the Roman Catholic tradition have drifted away from their faith, or rejected it outright.
This record makes the percentage of bad loans and mortgages leading to the financial meltdown look absolutely stellar.
It dwarfs the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler.
Thomas Reese, SJ, the former editor of America, recently described this loss of one-third of those raised Catholic as “a disaster.”
He added, “You wonder if the bishops have noticed.”
It’s a lengthy but fascinating read. Check out the full article here.
Tags: religion
Brian,
In the article you link to, the following is probably the greatest problem that has risen in the Catholic Church in recent years: “and the even more combustible demand that Catholic citizens and civic leaders be answerable to episcopal judgments about laws regarding these matters.”
To me, this is a deep theological problem. It contradicts the teachings of Jesus which form the basis of the separation of church and state. It heads the Church down the path of making the Catholic Church the religion of Paul, rather than Jesus.
The problem is an old problem. It seems as though the Church misses the days of the Holy Roman Empire. It would like to operate in a manner similar to the way Islam operates in Muslim countries. It wants to make Church law secular law. It is as though the Church has given up in its efforts to force people to follow its laws by threatening them with eternal damnation, and has opted to get secular laws to threaten them with the blunt force of the criminal justice system – which is proudly blind to the circumstances of an individual person and cares only about the letter of the law.
I see none of this attitude in the teachings of Jesus.
I think that for many people, and not just Catholics, it is almost impossible to follow the teachings of Jesus and be a Christian in any of the Christian denominations.
I think maybe the Catholic Church needs to be smaller. The mainline Protestant denominations have all gone through the same process of decline in the US and the West in general. In some ways a smaller Catholic Church that actually believes and has faith, is better than a larger Church that goes through the motions for social reasons or cultural reasons or habit alone.
I was astounded that in another survey they found that close to 1/2 of Catholics did not even know what happens in Communion! This is a failure of the local Church to really express and teach the faith itself. To me the problem is not the faith itself but some pretty poor leaders in some areas. Its time for them to go its time to get people who are in fire for the Church and we have many of those today. I do think we get distracted with politics and would like to see a little less emphasis on that, although the faith itself calls for us to express Christian teachings and values in our society, even if it itself does not follow its own teachings many times.
Anyway I don’t really think this is a bad thing. It may be a very healthy thing for the Catholic Church in America in the long run, of course we need to remember that the vast majority of Catholics and the vast majority of Christians don’t live in the US or the West in general, we are a small part of the global Church of Christ and indeed we may decline.
Final thought.
I have heard many Catholics say, “I didn’t leave the Church. The Church left me.”
I think this is true for both conservative and liberal Catholics who have left the Church.
The basic problem you have here in the USA is how Americans believe they should have a voice in who governs them. The Church is a dictatorship and most Americans don’t like being dictated to. As this idea spreads throughout the world, all religions will have a bigger and bigger problem. It’s one thing to tell your kids, “Why? Because I said so.” It’s an all together different problem when you try the same thing with educated adults.
Hopefully people follow Christ and Christianity because they honestly believe it is true and voluntarily choose to be a small part of that revealed Truth. The Catholic Church could learn some things from the Evangelicals in how to make people feel welcome that is for sure. But I think it is healthy for Catholics who don’t believe their faith to stop the charade of going through the motions it will only make them bitter. This is something we must do because we honestly want to do it.
As part of the 1/3 of Americans who’ve left the Church, I found this article interesting.
I think ultimately, the clerical child abuse scandal was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Not so much that there was clerical abuse (in any institution that size, there will be bad individuals), but rather the institutional coverup. The idea that the Vatican was more interested in protecting its own image than in the well-being of what it calls the flock.
I couldn’t bear the fundamental hypocrisy of the Church saying that a loving, consensual relationship between a man and another man was evil and sinful and deserving public condemnation while looking at a predatory relationship between a man and a boy under his influence and deciding that the man deserves institutional protection. Disgusting!
Brian when you left the Catholic Church did you join another Christian Church?