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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