Younger American Catholics express slightly more real agreement with Church teaching and slightly less respect for its shepherds in a new poll by the New York Times/CBS News. Women’s ordination was favored by 72 percent of Catholics between 45 and 64 and 68 percent of Catholics between 18 and 44. Support for birth control remains constant at 82 percent but opposition firms up, increasing from 11 to 15 percent at the expense of those who are unsure.
The above changes are relatively small and perhaps best explained by the rise of the “nones.” People who would have identified as Catholic a generation ago no longer are. More dramatic is the difference on the issue of allowing priests to marry. Lifting the celibacy requirement is favored by 76 percent of older Catholics but only 61 percent of younger Catholics—a 15 point dropoff.
Perhaps most interesting is that even as we saw slight (and in the case of priestly celibacy, more dramatic) increases in expressed agreement with church teaching among young Catholics, those same Catholics showed less respect for clerical authority. When asked, “On difficult moral questions, which are you more likely to follow—the teachings of the pope, or your conscience?” 13 percent of older Catholics went with the pope but only 9 percent of younger Catholics. Younger Catholics were also more likely to say that one could “disagree with the pope” on matters like abortion and gay marriage and still be a good Catholic.
Young Catholics are, somewhat ironically, more likely to express agreement with Church teaching and less likely to express deference to the pope. The sexual abuse crisis along with the general decline of public piety have strained Catholics’ inherited attachments to mother Church. Ties that once led many to identify as Catholic even as they rejected Church teaching are fraying.
Those who remain are increasingly there not because they identify with the Church’s leaders and institutions (the pope, the ethnic parish, the Catholic school) but because they assent to its teachings. Here comes Evangelical Catholicism.
Responses for Catholics age 45 – 64
Responses for Catholics age 18 – 44
March 6th, 2013 | 12:23 pm
Interesting that a plurality of younger people claim to accept infallibility in the abstract, but not particular infallible doctrines.
I’d also quibble a little over the pope vs. conscience dichotomy. As I understand it, listening to one’s conscience is mandatory:
Accompanying that obligation is the equally important obligation to correctly form the conscience. This may well involve submitting to the instruction of one’s superiors in the Church, and so forth. Catholics are supposed to both follow their conscience and the pope.
March 6th, 2013 | 12:46 pm
We’re going to become Lutherans?
March 6th, 2013 | 1:58 pm
Opposition to clerical-authority in the wake of scandals is unsurprising. Likewise, considering trends toward episcopalism and congregationalism–common in much of Catholic life in the West before and after Vatican II–a slackening of fidelity to the Pope is unsurprising. (The eventual Pope Paul VI recognized such trends toward autonomy within the Church before the Second Vatican Council).
Furthermore, in such an environment–in which the papacy is viewed as a political/administrative office rather than the guarantor of the organic unity of the Church–parishioners are more likely to de facto associate scandals with the papacy.
Nonetheless, I’ve notice a very concrete and tangible devotion—a non-sentimental fidelity– to the papacy, especially the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, among high-school and college age Catholics. Such devotion is perhaps less prevalent among younger Catholics who, while they may adhere to orthodox Church teaching in the strict sense, largely see the Church as set of ethical principles or a piety. Coupled with an autonomous bourgeois-culture, a purely ethical-orthodoxy can accommodate certain trending social causes (really old mistakes), especially ones popular among younger generations that appeal to “inclusivity” rather than reality.
Nonetheless, a fidelity to the papacy is evident among the young who recognize the Church as the life of the Body of Christ on earth, an experience–rather than an ethics–in which the adventure of orthodoxy is an Incarnate encounter and window into reality. For example, poll young men and women between the ages of 15-22 with Communion and Liberation and I’m certain that nearly 90% or more will hold a favorable opinion of the papacy. These aren’t self-pious young men and women–they are outwardly similar to others their age except interested in things that matter.
March 6th, 2013 | 2:05 pm
pgk! You cheated! You looked at the Cathechism! Didn’t you know that actually having a clue about actual Church teaching is frowned upon when commenting on what the Church “should” do?
March 6th, 2013 | 2:05 pm
@Joshua: Perhaps many among us already are Lutherans…
March 6th, 2013 | 2:07 pm
I tend to see this as bad news. Whereas older cradle Catholics still identify as Catholic long after they’ve given up on the faith, younger cradle Catholics are probably more likely to make a clean break. The last generation’s nominal Catholics are this generation’s agnostics. That’s a step in the wrong direction.
March 6th, 2013 | 3:55 pm
It is orthodox Catholicism that you can disagree with the Pope on faith and morals, depending on the level of authority with which he was speaking.
It seems like quibble, but when the question bears on infallibility it is an important quibble, because not even everything the Pope says even on those subjects is infallible, but only when what he says and how he says it meets fairly narrow and stringent–but well-known–conditions. Of course, most people know the difference on some level, but it always seems to get left out of the discussion… by those anxious to defend the Pope’s authority as often as those on the other side.
(Note, this is not mean to be a comment on the last question about abortion, &c. where authority is clear, but on the third from last question on infallibility.)
March 6th, 2013 | 4:15 pm
These results are not surprising when you consider that the issues involved are never, in my experience, touched on in any way from the pulpit. I go to Mass almost every day where highly educated and extremely articulate Dominicans never use the pulpit to teach what the Church teaches on sexual or ordination issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if an extraordinary number of people who call themselves Catholic don’t have a clue to what the Church teaches let alone have any understanding of why. When asked about this, the very charming pastor responds that “people can read about those things.”
March 6th, 2013 | 4:42 pm
“On difficult moral questions, which are you more likely to follow—the teachings of the pope, or your conscience?”
Ambiguous there. If someone thinks the teachings of the pope include such things as his judgment whether a war is just, it may be his duty to follow his conscience instead. (One notes that the Catechism puts the final judgment about the justness of a war on the head of state responsible.)
March 6th, 2013 | 5:28 pm
@ Jushua Allowing priests to marry is not make you Lutheran, that would more accurately make you Orthodox. There are other issues, particularly the doctrine of justification, that separate orthodox Lutherans and Catholics.
March 6th, 2013 | 10:25 pm
Allowing priests to marry would not make you Orthodox. For the umpteenth time: in Orhtodoxy, married men may be ordained to the priesthood but a man may not marry once he is a priest. In Catholicism, married men who are ordained to the priesthood under special indult (such as the Anglican provision) may not re-marry if their spouse dies.
In sum, married men may become priests, but priests may not marry. So the question asked should not me :”Should priests be allowed to marry.” And bishops are always celibate in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
March 7th, 2013 | 9:23 am
pgk wrote”Interesting that a plurality of younger people claim to accept infallibility in the abstract, but not particular infallible doctrines.”
Not really surprising when, as Lord Macaulay observed, “We know through what strange loopholes the human mind contrives to escape, when it wishes to avoid a disagreeable inference from an admitted proposition. We know how long the Jansenists contrived to believe the Pope infallible in matters of doctrine, and at the same time to believe doctrines which he pronounced to be heretical.”
March 7th, 2013 | 9:52 am
Pope vs. conscience is a badly-worded question. It makes it sound like one calls up Pope whenever a moral choice threatens and asks, Hey Papa, what do I do?
The real choice these days us between Church Doctrine and Personal Appetites. It is so easy to confuse an appetite with conscience.
March 7th, 2013 | 10:36 am
For those who no longer believe and don’t practice, a clean break is the better thing all around.
March 7th, 2013 | 12:22 pm
As the survey indicates most if not all the precepts, religious and secular, on which the West was built are being discarded in order to build a new culture and society demanded by people who who by large majorities value, abortion, contraception and increasingly euthanasia. How do you think that will work out?
As the author David Goldman said “It’s not the end of the world just you.”
March 8th, 2013 | 7:41 am
580 American “Catholics” were interviewed. Did those people self-identify as Catholic? Were they all weekly-Mass-attending Catholics? The Times has a long history of opposition to the Church. It would be so easy to define “Catholic” for their poll in such a way to get the results they want. That’s why I hate polls like this. I don’t trust them at all.
March 8th, 2013 | 7:59 am
The exposition of our desires is always messy. It’s kind of like having a few drinks with friends. You might find out things you would rather not know. How do we get people to desire the beautiful, truthful, or good? How do we get people to follow the Church instead of the world?
March 8th, 2013 | 9:44 am
Good point Joy. I’d be curious to see how the responses of weekly Mass attendants compare to the current polls result; I’d also be curious to see the same result of kids 14-21.
March 8th, 2013 | 10:18 am
At the more traditional parish I belong to, I doubt that you could find 3% of Catholics disagreeing with the Church on contraception, women priests, or any other Church teaching. BUT our priests are very pointed in their sermons. They tell us like it is, they talk about sin, hell, satan. They tell us that we better straighten out or face the consequences in purgatory or hell. Oddly, from those I have met, a full 90% have a College education. These folks are not ignorant, they know that they need to be reminded that we need to keep our desires toward God and our lusts controlled. Most importantly, we have two things that most parishes don’t have today, the priests tell us ways that we can do what is right and we have an extremely reverent Mass (the Extraordinary Form).
God Bless the Catholic Church and may it give all her people the gifts our parish has received.
March 8th, 2013 | 11:10 am
Joy
580 American “Catholics” were interviewed. Did those people self-identify as Catholic? Were they all weekly-Mass-attending Catholics? The Times has a long history of opposition to the Church. It would be so easy to define “Catholic” for their poll in such a way to get the results they want. That’s why I hate polls like this. I don’t trust them at all.
If you were conducting a poll of atheists how would you ID them? Probably by asking them if they were atheist.
I suppose you may have some people who attend weekly mass who are not Catholic (perhaps going along with a spouse?) but probably not many. There’s a huge number of people who don’t go to Catholic mass. But if you asked most of those people hwy they don’t go to mass they will say “why would I? I’m not Catholic!”. The portion who say they are Catholic and don’t go to mass almost certainly have some connection to the Catholic Church hence why they self-identify as Catholic.
Besides almost all of these types of polls break down in detail the responses of people who go to mass often to never as well as other details so I’m not really buying into the objection that is often raised that the only valid Catholics to ever poll are the ones sitting in mass every sunday.
March 8th, 2013 | 1:05 pm
Why do people insist on calling themselves Catholic and then proceed to list all of the things with which they disagree? Find yourselves the appropriate Protestant sect and take a pew.
March 8th, 2013 | 1:46 pm
Sad to say, as a young man, I stopped attending weekly mass myself, but I still considered myself Catholic. I felt there really wasn’t a reason to go to mass, the priests didn’t seem to think it was important. The sermons were not encouraging since they were always talking about how I should show love for the poor instead telling me how to worship God with my whole being and as a RESULT, showing love to the poor. (Can’t put the cart before the horse.) So I stopped going to mass, and showed a sort of love for the poor (donations, pick up hitchhikers, etc).
I still considered myself Catholic. Most of the priests I knew didn’t agree with the Church, so why should I agree on everything either.
Of course, now I know that it doesn’t matter what a particular priest believes, all that is important is the teachings of the Church. Satan will use anyone to pull away for worshipping God correctly, even a priest.
March 8th, 2013 | 3:33 pm
I would be interested to see the results broken down more by age. 18-44 is a huge age range. I want to know if the Catholics in their late teens and 20s are more or less orthodox than those in their late 30s and early 40s.
March 8th, 2013 | 8:37 pm
Any poll conducted by New York Times/CBS News is very suspect. I am a Catholic in a Mid-West City with a large Catholic Population. To my knowledge no one that I know was contacted for this poll. As a mater of fact, liberal media groups have been contact these polls for years and no one that I know has ever been contacted. I have never been contacted.
March 9th, 2013 | 9:35 am
That this comes from the nyt and abc renders it moot at the outset.
March 9th, 2013 | 11:33 am
It is hard to take much from polls these days. However, it seems typical these days for Americans to associate themselves with a label and then take issue with the tenets that form the basis for belonging to that label. Are people who call themselves “Catholic” but reject Church Teachings really Catholic? Certainly not in substance regarding their opinion. One must follow their conscience but it is also clear that one must take the time to have an informed conscience. The Catholic Church is not a club, it’s mission, among others, is to minister to the people according to Christ’s teachings.
March 10th, 2013 | 8:25 am
So again the way you do a poll generally is to ask people what they are. For example, you ask people if they are Democrats and then you ask them who they voted for in the last election. It’s not ususal to go about it the opposite way, ask people if they voted for Obama and then assume they are Democrats if they did.
This avoids having to get into very nitpicky arguments about what defines a person as this or that, letting them define themselves. I doubt many of those advocating not counting dissenting Catholics as Catholics here are well versed enough to apply this exercise with polls of Baptists, Methodists, Reform Jews, Sunni Muslims etc. It also makes for useful and interesting polls. For example, I’ve interacted with people who claim no true atheist could think believe ethics could ever be something objective. Yet I’ve never seen a poll of atheists that began by asking “Do you believe ethics can be objective?” and then exluded all who said yes from the results regardless of whether they claimed to be atheist.
I don’t know what the appeal would be of a poll that said 100% of Catholics agree with the Pope about abortion, except for the type of mindset that found Presidential elections in Iraq under Saddam Hussein very compelling.
March 10th, 2013 | 11:54 am
I find “appeal of a poll” an interesting thought. Polls, in my view, are supposed to indicate a trend among some interest group etc. How many people agree with “?” etc. If you wish to suggest that many Catholics (or any faith group) have an opinion of the Pope or some religious issue, it tells you more about that group than it does about what “Catholics” think as you must then define what is “Catholic”. In any case, as with most things, garbage in, garbage out.
March 11th, 2013 | 5:05 am
Here in the UK, the question of who is or is not a Catholic is oneof legal and, indeed, constitutional importance – For example, under the Act of Settlement 1701, no Catholic, or anyone married to a Catholic, can succeed to the Throne. The definition is a simple one: a Catholic is “one who holds communion with the See or Church of Rome.” All lawyers agree that here “See” and “Church” are synonymous
March 11th, 2013 | 2:17 pm
Poll by the New York times/CBS News? Who did they asked in this so called survey, lapsed Catholics and non-Catholics. Basically any surveys done by one or two of these left wings media outlets are NOT reliable. Why don’t they let Catholics do “Catholic business” and stop meddling. Please refer to the attached link for an article with more reliable and realistic numbers on Catholic vocations.
http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/benedicts-men-u.s.-vocations-rise
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