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Summer 2000
Proloquium
From its inception, New
Perspectives has been dedicated to spotlighting
the critical issues that have plunged the Church
into what we here have repeatedly termed "crisis."
As our own Bishop Raphael J. Adams points out,
however, one of the most disturbing aspects of this
crisis is that many people simply aren't aware of
it. Lest any of our readers, too, doubt its
existence, we've mustered a few statistics:
According to the Cara Report (as cited by The
Religion News Service at www.religionnews.com), in
a recent survey of Catholic adults over the age of
eighteen, between 1987 and 1999 weekly Mass
attendance dropped from 44% to 37%. The number of
those who said they "would never leave the Church"
declined from 64% to 57%. Those believing that "one
could be a good Catholic without attending Mass"
rose from 70% to 76%, a consistently high
percentage that frankly, astounds me. Would these
same people claim that they can be good spouses,
parents, or children without regularly
communicating with their families and participating
in and contributing to family life? Relationships
are built upon and grow through rituals of
communication, shared activity, and service that
both spring from and foster love and understanding.
Do Catholics really think that their relationships
with God and each other deserve less and further,
can grow despite habitual neglect? And if so, why?
How did the Church go from one unreasonable extreme
to another, from teaching that to miss Mass on
Sunday is a mortal sin to apparently sanctioning a
laxity that would be tolerated by no other
organization, familial, professional, or civic?
The survey also found that in
the twelve-year period covered, those who believe
that "one could be a good Catholic without obeying
the Church's teaching opposing abortion" rose from
39% to 53%. The abortion issue aside, what is
significant to me about this statistic is that now
over half of the American Catholic laity is in
disagreement with its Church's hierarchy on this
question, as undoubtedly well more than half have
long been on the subjects of birth control,
priestly celibacy, and the denial of the sacraments
and remarriage in the Church after divorce. (The
survey notes that prior to Vatican II, 88% of
Catholics were married in the Church. Today, only
59% are. Clearly, the Church needs to revisit its
teachings on marriage and divorce, and also review
the unnecessarily bureaucratic annulment process.)
This growing divide between the Church's official
positions and the private beliefs and behavior of
the laity is a particularly troubling indication of
the crisis of which we speak. As the ORCCNA has
always advocated, the bishops must listen to and
dialogue with the laity, and Rome to and with the
bishops in a return to the collegial model of
Church rule. Indeed, in the opinion of Father
Anthony R. Kosnik, writing in our Spring 2000
issue, the question of authority is the most
critical now facing the Church and must be
addressed if current rifts are to be healed and
further fragmentation prevented.
The portion of the Cara Report
cited here, however, provides a mere glimpse of the
visible surface of the crisis at hand. The issues
are many, both broad and deep, theological and
cultural. In his compelling new book, How We Got
Here: The 70's: The Decade That Brought You Modern
Life-For Better or For Worse (Basic Books,
2000), David Frum devotes a chapter to the
cataclysmic changes in American Churches and in the
religious habits of Christians that began thirty
years ago. Between 1965 and 1975, Northern Lutheran
membership dropped 5%, United Methodist 19%,
southern and northern Presbyterian 7% and 12%
respectively, United Church of Christ more than
12%, and Episcopalian, a whopping 16.7%. In 1957,
75% of American Catholics said they attended Mass
in the past week; in 1975, that number dropped
twenty-one points to 54%, barely more than half!
"Unfortunately for them," writes Frum,
the leaders of the big
northern Protestant denominations and the
American Roman Catholic church . . .convinced
themselves that they were losing adherents
because their religion was too authoritarian,
its doctrines too demanding, its moral edicts
too strict, its ritual too formal, its ministers
too aloof. They responded with the remodeled
churches we know today, with priests called
"Father Bob", and by jettisoning fusty old hymns
and replacing them with songs that sound as if
they were written by Joan Baez. Ministers hung
hand-knotted tapestries in the apse of the
church and delivered breezy short sermons in
conversational language.
The Episcopalians had
successfully updated Book of Common Prayer in
1927, retaining the familiar beauty of Cranmer's
language but clarifying some of his Elizabethan
linguistic obscurities. In 1974 they revised the
1927 version. This time, rather than clear the
dust gently away with an archaeologist's brush,
the church applied a massive sandblaster. One of
the world's most beautiful liturgies collapsed
into one of the world's silliest. Not content
with the renovation oftheir rituals and liturgy,
the mainline denominations also upended their
teachings on faith and morals. . . .To the
manifest bafflement of the mainline Protestants,
the bold reforms failed to halt the decline in
membership. Women bishops followed women
priests; acoustic guitars were replaced by
electric guitars; ministers ascended to ever
loftier peaks of groovieness; racism replaced
pride as sin number one; and still the pews
emptied, gifts dried up, and vocations
diminished. . .
Individual Catholics faced an
awkward choice. On the one hand, the leftward
migration of many local parishes offended and
alienated parishioners; on the othe hand, the
principal check on the excesses of local
parishes-the authority of the Vatican-was
equally offensive and alienating. American
Catholics did not like it when their priest told
them to support the Sandinistas and they equally
did not like it when the Pope told their priest
to cut it out. Parishioners were simply no
longer willing to be told what to do.
(150-152)
While the mainline Churches were
declining, Frum tells us, evangelical Protestantism
"boomed". He cites the differences between thriving
and shrinking Churches: 1) Thriving churches are
evangelical, that is, they emphasize the preaching
of the Gospel over sacramentalism. 2) They preach
love and forgiveness nearly to the exclusion of
exhorting members to lead upright lives. 3) They
eschew doctrine. Many of the largest of these
churches have no denominational affiliation at all.
4) They are politically conservative, picking up
those disaffected by mainline Churches that turned
leftward and virtually equated faith with social
activism. "Perhaps not fully consciously," he
writes, "the mainline churches were gambling in the
1960s that if they tilted to the left politically,
they could hold onto the young and disaffected
without alienating their more conservative
adherents. The gamble went spectacularly wrong"
(157).
The changes Frum so cogently
analyzes, of course, closely track those that
occurred in society at large during the 60s and
70s: the emerging dominance of the youth culture,
the arrival of radical individualism, relativism,
and the rejection of authority and tradition. What
followed? According to Frum, "The post-1980
American faith was more emotional, more forgiving,
more individualistic, more variegated, and often
more bizarre. It was less obedient, less
ritualistic, less intellectual. It concerned itself
more with self-fulfillment and less with social
reform. Americans . . .hungered for religion's
sweets, but rejected religion's disciplines; wanted
its help in trouble, but not the strictures that
might have kept them out of trouble; expected its
ecstasy, but rejected its ethics; demanded
salvation, but rejected the harsh, antique
dichotomy of right and wrong" (158). He further
claims that by the 1990s, the "old tripartite
scheme of Catholic-Protestant-Jew was retreating
before [a] new trichotomy: the secular, the
spiritual, and the traditional. The secular did not
go to church at all; the spiritual cobbled together
a lukewarm syncretic faith out of bits and pieces
of Buddhism, mysticism, and paganism; and the
traditional made new homes for themselves in the
evangelical churches, the more conservative
Catholic dioceses, and Orthodox Judaism"
(158).
And where are we now, in the
year 2000?
In crisis.
--
Valerie
Kane
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