Some years before he was elected pope, Joseph Ratzinger was asked what he thought about the health of the Church. He answered that she was doing very well; she was just a lot smaller than most people thought. He was exactly right. We need to think of the Church in our age as a seed of life embedded in layers of dead tissue. We also need to distinguish the Church in the emerging world from the Church in developed nations.
In the emerging world, the Church has few material resources. She rarely has adequate money for education, development, or ministry. She faces well-financed and aggressive Islamic growth, and cults and competing religious groups of every sort. And she suffers various forms of state harassment and persecution in China, North Korea, Vietnam, across the Islamic world, and even in India.
The situation in developed nations is more ambiguous. In some places the Church has ample resources. She supports a wide variety of important educational institutions and service ministries. She often has an effective public voice.
But Catholic and other Christian influence on daily life in the developed world is rapidly diminishing. In western Europe, the number of Catholics who attend Mass is very low, and the number of people who identify as Catholic is declining. While American religious belief and practice remain high by European standards, these facts are changing. Roughly seventy-five million Americans claim to be Catholic, but less than a quarter of them attend Mass on most Sundays. Some 69 percent of American Catholic adults say they would not encourage someone to become a priest or religious sister. The implications of that one piece of data for the sacramental and apostolic life of the Church in the United States are enormous.
How did this happen? I can only speak for my own country. The American Founders were far friendlier to religious faith than their French revolutionary counterparts. Well into the 1940s, American government and religious bodies often worked in a mutually supportive way—and very effectively—to serve the common good.
But there’s a flaw in the American gene code. The Jesuit scholar John Courtney Murray named it more than seventy years ago. Murray said that America is simultaneously a land “of immense material comfort” and “immense suffering of a peculiarly soul-destroying kind”—a nation driven by the anxiety for money and the fear of life without it.
From its founding, America has always been a paradox: a country of fierce individualism and hunger for material success, tempered by widespread Christian faith and community. If the churches decline, selfishness and greed rise—which is exactly what’s happened in the United States since the end of the Second World War.
Father Murray, writing in the mid-twentieth-century, hoped that Catholics would provide a Christian soul to American life in a way that Protestants no longer could. We know how that turned out. Notre Dame social researcher Christian Smith and his colleagues have tracked in great detail the spiritual lives of today’s young adults and teenagers. The results are sobering. So are the implications for Catholic life in the decades ahead.
The real religion of vast numbers of American young people is a kind of fuzzy moral niceness, with an easy, undemanding God on duty to make people feel happy whenever they need him. It’s what Smith calls “moralistic therapeutic deism.” To put it in the words of a young woman from Maryland, “[Faith is] just whatever makes you feel good about you.”
This is the legacy that my generation has left to the Church in the United States. For all practical purposes, American Catholics are no different from everybody else in their views, their appetites, and their behaviors. This isn’t what the Second Vatican Council had in mind when it began its work fifty years ago. It’s not what the council meant by reform. Left to itself, the life of the Church in my country is not going to get better. It’s going to get worse.
Unfortunately, what happens in my country affects everyone else. The developed nations lead not just through the “hard power” of military, economic, and political strength. They also lead through the “soft power” of their mass media; media that tell us what to desire; whom to believe; what qualifies as news; and when to laugh. The developed world creates the appetites, aspirations, and dreams of the planet. And those dreams—even today—bear the stamp “Made in America.”
From the outside, the Church in my country often looks strong. We have buildings and ministries and programs—but these are misleading. Catholic life is weakening from the inside. The pace of that weakening increases as young people detach from Catholic culture. My own city of Philadelphia is a prime example of how this is already happening.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Tens of thousands of young Catholic men and women do take their faith seriously. They do try to live it vigorously. More than seventeen million American Catholics worship at Sunday Mass every week. Double that number attend Mass at least once a month. Millions support the Church financially. And many are active in their parishes and in other ministries outside Sunday worship. These are good facts to build on. In the United States, the faith is not just a memory. It’s still alive. But there’s no way we can go back to the “glory days” of the past as a model for the future.
Catholic life needs to be reignited. American culture is a new kind of mission territory. It’s a cocoon of marketing, entertainment, and manufactured appetites; a narcotic of noise, distraction, and relentless propaganda for self-absorption and confused sexuality. Being in the United States in the weeks before Christmas is an education in what the culture really worships. It worships commerce.
Real Christian discipleship rejects and resists the kind of radical personal license and acquisitiveness that animates a consumerist society. So when the Catholic Church teaches about the dignity of the unborn child, the purpose of human sexuality, economic and immigration justice, the rights of religious communities and believers, and the nature of marriage and the family—she’s not just unpopular. She’s hated as the enemy of individual privacy and personal freedom. That shapes the way the Church is treated in the mass media.
For Catholics in my country to recover their vocation as a Church, they need to be awakened; they need a reason to be zealous again about their faith. They need to hear the witness of people who live the Catholic faith with confidence and joy. They need to see their Church growing and fruitful, and young again, instead of constantly retreating and in decline.
This is the value of the new ecclesial communities and movements. They’re alive in Jesus Christ, and their new life and energy spill out into the whole Church. What they can bring to the Church is a clear and honest view of our pastoral realities—including the failures and flaws of the Church herself; a view tempered by love, ruled by fidelity, but unencumbered by legacy, habits of the past, or an investment in keeping things the way they are.
The essence of these communities is a new spirit of Christian equality rooted in the mandate of baptism, honoring each vocation in the Church for its unique task and importance, but recognizing that the call to holiness is universal, and that the mission to “make disciples of all nations” belongs to all of us in equal measure—ordained, consecrated, and lay.
A holy impatience; the passion of youth; a sober understanding of the culture that shapes us; a zeal for Jesus Christ guided by deep intellectual formation; and a demand for excellence in all things for the sake of God’s glory—these are all marks of the best of the new ecclesial communities. And they’re the tools God uses throughout history to make all things new. The fruitfulness of these communities and movements comes from living the new evangelization without compromise and at personal cost, instead of planning for it and talking about it, but never actually doing it.
Nothing is more powerful than the witness of Christian men and women loving God and serving God’s people; working together; and sharing lives of courage, joy, and friendship. In an age of aggressive individualism and the isolation it breeds, the new ecclesial movements offer two absolutely priceless gifts: community and purpose.
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the Archbishop of Philadelphia. This column is based on an address he delivered in Lima, Peru, on November 29 to the leaders of Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a Society of Apostolic Life of pontifical right.
RESOURCES
Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate
John Courtney Murray, S.J., “The Construction of a Christian Culture,” 1940
Christian Smith, et al, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood
Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers
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Comments:
Much of what you condemn in your essay (and rightly so) is intrinsic to the fabric of capitalism. With respect, I think if you were to allow yourself to think through fully many of the points you have raised to their logical conclusion, you would wind up agreeing with me in condemning the economic system in this country as inherently anti-spiritual to the same extent that 20th century communism was. And above and beyond its amorally pragmatic and spiritually deadening character, capitalism also brutalizes those who are weak - whether materially, financially, emotionally, or spiritually.
Just consider the vast enterprise of advertising and marketing that you rightly bemoan in several places in your essays. It is ugly, vulgar, mendacious, devoid of any genuine depth or value, emotionally manipulative, and spirtually corrupting. Yet American capitalism cannot possibly function according to its inherent purpose without it.
@Brenda from Brooklyn: I think the archbishop is probably referring to a very diverse group of efforts like Communion and Liberation, the Christian Life Movement and its related consecrated communities, the Neo-Catechumenal Way, etc. Some of the new charisms are more likely to survive than others, but the energy in the Church is disproportionately located in them.
One could venture a guess, but why not name some names? If it were a question of attributing something bad to the groups being named, I could understand not wanting to accuse them. But his Excellency clearly imputes good to them, so why not name them? Makes no sense, really.
Perhaps because the address was given in Peru, and naming names there might have been somehow inept? It's tough to know why these "new ecclesial communities" remain a well-kept secret.
And when does the Church do this teaching “about the dignity of the unborn child” and “the purpose of human sexuality” in a manner that has any hope of effectively countering the “relentless propaganda” that aggressively promotes “radical personal license” and “confused sexuality”? The vast majority America's seventy-five million Catholics only receive the Church's teaching on these matters after it has been filtered and distorted into anachronistic silliness by the secular mass media. Most of the quarter of them still attending Mass on Sunday will tell you they have never in their lives even heard a sermon on contraception.
That is not an exaggeration. Consider this excerpt from a March 31, 2012 interview with Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto:
/ / / / / / / / / /
What about the argument that vast numbers of Catholics ignore the church's teachings about sexuality? Doesn't the church have a problem conveying its moral principles to its own flock? "Do we ever!" the archbishop replies with a hearty laugh. "I'm not afraid to admit that we have an internal catechetical challenge—a towering one—in convincing our own people of the moral beauty and coherence of what we teach. That's a biggie."
For this he faults the church leadership. "We have gotten gun-shy … in speaking with any amount of cogency on chastity and sexual morality." He dates this diffidence to "the mid- and late '60s, when the whole world seemed to be caving in, and where Catholics in general got the impression that what the Second Vatican Council taught, first and foremost, is that we should be chums with the world, and that the best thing the church can do is become more and more like everybody else."
The "flash point," the archbishop says, was "Humanae Vitae," Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical reasserting the church's teachings on sex, marriage and reproduction, including its opposition to artificial contraception. It "brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the church, that I think most of us – and I'm using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself – kind of subconsciously said, 'Whoa. We'd better never talk about that, because it's just too hot to handle.' We forfeited the chance to be a coherent moral voice when it comes to one of the more burning issues of the day."
/ / / / / / / / / /
Yes, “Catholic life needs to be reignited.” Yes, “Christian discipleship rejects and resists the kind of radical personal license” that is at the heart of the use of artificial contraception, which radically “rejects and resists” God's plan for human sexuality. This is not without consequence. We now know with certainty this rejection leads to all that Paul VI prophetically stated it would lead to in Humanae Vitae: the current situation.
To even begin to bring just the Catholics back to the Catholic view of human sexuality (forget society as a whole for now), what is needed is aggressive teaching by the Church – from the pulpit – that rejects and resists this kind of radical personal license. This teaching has to be from the pulpit because, quite frankly, most Catholics do not read diocesan newspapers or avail themselves of orthodox Catholic media. Those that do are, for the most part, Catholics who already know the Church's teaching on these matters. A significant segment of those who don't still show up at Mass on Sunday, Mass the very purpose of which is to reignite Catholic life. That is the place to proclaim God's plan for human sexuality. Whether or not that happens is entirely up to the American Bishops.
I don't think God opposes advertising, you can't get much better than angelic hosts proclaiming the good news to a small crowd of shepherds....or the sustained ad campaign of a bright star leading those wise men to the young Savior's home.
I left for several reasons and to be brief, here goes.
Bishop Chaput talks about the church as a 'she'. Yet, women have no authority in the church. We are barred from even becoming Deacons. Our churches are suffering from a clergy shortage, yet many women are eager to serve and could bring many gifts,wisdom and experience to the church. We are not welcome. We have NO say in any decisions made at any level of the church.
If you are a man, I'm sure that you have no problem with this. But from my point of view and many other women, it is insulting and demeaning. There are many other denominations that welcome women. They embrace what women have to offer and see a value in what women have to contribute.
As a mother and a former school nurse, I was appalled at the attitude and the actions of the Church in handling the sex abuse crisis. The higher authorities that made these decisions are also the ones that guide the daily actions of the church.
After much prayerful thought, I realized that I could no longer accept the thoughts, words and instructions from these same bishops as my moral guides.
For me it was a combination of the moral failures of the hierarchy of the Church and the attitudes towards women that solidified my decision to leave the church.
I know many men and women that do not like the direction of the church and ignore most of what is said and try and follow the words of Christ.
That is what I am doing now. I did not have a choice to become a Catholic and I am very grateful for the wisdom and guidance I received all those years.
But I do have a choice now and I am happy in my choice. I am accepted and if I want to I can study and go further then being a Lay Minister.
To say that this is how the Church always was, is and always will be is wrong.
Jesus Christ founded this church on the premise that we were all children of God and equal in his sight. That we are loved by him.
I hope that the Church will change. I hope that it will earn back the respect of it's clergy by the people. I hope that the Church will one day accept women as equals.
I could not wait any longer.
I would like to refer you to a comment that Sherry Weddell made on the First Things website May 9, 2012 in reference to the article "More Evidence of the Vocations Reversal"
Thursday, May 3, 2012, 1:00 PM by Matthew Cantirino.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/05/03/more-evidence-of-the-vocations-reversal/
She writes at length about the vocations at Christ the King Catholic church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Vocations are a sure sign that something is going right in parish life. She gives her take on why vocations are happening with such great numbers there (30 priests and 20 in seminary). The secret? "a powerful, lived experience of God which is then nourished and supported by a very vibrant community of adult disciples."
Sherry also has a spectacular book out called Forming Intentional Disciples that you can get on Amazon or for an even better price, you can go to the Siena Institute website at www.siena.org. She has a great blog on the site as well at www.siena.org/Blog
I recommend the book very highly. It's must read for anyone who is in faith formation/religious ed/RCIA/parish leadership. it's even a great read for us non-teaching non-leader types who want to take seriously the great commission to each of us, to go make disciples!
Jesus has things well in hand and has given us a great shepherds in Archbishop Chaput and the Holy Father. I pray that all of us here will heed the Lord's call and head into His vineyard. The harvest is plenty and the laborers are few...
God may not oppose advertising as such, but he does oppose much of what constitutes it in a capitalist system. He opposes the emotional manipulation - the kindling of feelings of lust, emotional insecurity, social competitiveness ("keeping up with the Joneses"), greed, etc. - and he also opposes the vacuous content and outright mendacity that is inherent to most of the advertising in our culture.
And lest anyone think that the morally and spiritually degrading character of advertising in our culture is aberrant, he should consult textbooks on marketing - these are exactly the techniques that are taught as their stock in trade.
Occasionally, the teachers of marketing techniques even affirm outright in their writings that the purpose of their techniques is principally to sell products by creating a sense of desire for things that are not inherently needed. All the manipulation and mendacity have this artificial stirring of desire for the sake of selling things as their primary end.
Yes, there is no doubt about it - this multi-billion dollar industry is hateful to God.
Your position with regard the Church and women is a large part of the problem...based on your age and experience I shouldn't have to remind you that women, religious sisters, have traditionally been very involved in the Church in important positions...they ran the schools and hospitals and in many cases the parishes themselves. That role and the tremendous influence of women has unfortunately been replaced by women such as yourself denying the teachings of the Church with regard to the role of men and the priesthood and claiming there is no role for women when the historical record is quite clear.
Diane, please come back.
Corey, you make good points, sad as it is for this conservative RC to say. His Excellency alludes what I see as a huge part of the problem: we are what we think (more than what we eat) and our thinking is guided more (by a ratio of at least 25/1 in terms of time spent) by amoral or immoral mass media than by Truth. In the snippet of time they have, our pastors *must* tell the Truth straight; and if this "wind of Truth" causes many branches to break off and fly away that must be accepted, tragic as it really is, so that as-yet healthy branches (the innocent) are not corrupted.
Are you speaking of your god, the state, because it's multi-TRillion dollar industry hateful to God.
Perhaps you'd tell us how the micro-targeting of voters by Obama and books on how Government should manipulate people quietly ("Nudge", By Thaler and Sunstein") serves God.
How about politicians using the tax code to foment envy and covetousness?
And after that, you can tell us about how benevolent the gulags, concentration camps and brainwashing are and how they please the Almighty.
God's ways are not our ways. The longer I live, the more I see this. As far as the abuse crisis goes, you should also leave most public school districts. Most have hid and transferred abusers, yet nothig is being done. Humans make stupid decisions at times. We are not perfect. Bishops are not perfect.
The question would be: What does the individual in such a system do with the excess of his/her earnings over necessary food, clothing and shelter?
Jesus tells us (Matthew 25:31-46) that we have a responsibility to brothers and sisters who are less well off materially than we are. Also (Luke 16:19-31), we are not excused from caring for the less well off simply because we didn't take the time to NOTICE him/her.
The argument between Capitalism and other forms of economic organization can be summarized in that the supporters of Capitalism as moral hold that the obligations expressed in the cited passages in Luke and Matthew are primarily duties of the INDIVIDUAL, not the governmental bodies. Supporters of other organizational forms would hold that all their obligations to care for those less well off are taken care of by their voting for governments who will take care of the poor.
A great deal of current advertising - TV and otherwise - uses sex to sell goods and vacations. It is folly to pretend that such technique is moral; but the trouble is, it works. Conversion of the heart occurs one person at a time. One can have sermons on TV delivered by Fulton J. Sheen or Mother Angelica; but only committed Christians are likely to listen. Others will change the channel.
Our response must be prayer; and material support for such charities as Catholic Relief Services. Use of your Time, Talent and Treasure are good indicators of where your heart is.
TeaPot562
The Washington Post discussed an AP study, almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media, (AP: Sexual Misconduct Plagues US Schools; Oct 21, 2007) that clarifies that for every child molested by a Catholic priest, there were more than one hundred molested by public school employees. Other research has demonstrated that between 3% and 5% of priests abused children. That is well below the 8% of men in general society and Protestant ministers. Yes, Protestant ministers have the same statistic as the general population.
"Equal value" does not mean "same function". You and I are not equal in that sense since you can bare children, I can't. Our Blessed Mother is the mother of God incarnate. What higher status could any human every achieve? The loss of status of women in the Church (in my opinion) is directly correlated with the determination of modern Nuns to adopt the worldly feminist standards of trying to become just like men (bad men). For the record the Playboy philosophy won out over feminism. Feminists capitulated by embracing sexual permissiveness. The Playboy's dream came true.
Of course the Archbishop is enamored of the new girls in town. The old girls, the Jesuits, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, are too head-strong, too independent. Better to dance with one's own creations, no?
As a fellow woman, I would encourage you to deepen your research on the Church's "view" on women. Check out some resources that you haven't before. A place to start, if you're open to it, might be the short book by Alice von Hildebrand, called "The Privilege of Being a Woman." Another great read is John Paul II's Letter to Women, which is available on the Vatican's website or via a simple google search. These resources show the honor and respect shown to women in the Catholic Church. Our role is different but equally as important as the role of men. Just because we "can't be priests" doesn't mean that the Church does not value the input and service of women.
I'm a woman in my mid-20s and I think in quite a bit different way in regards to the role of women in the Catholic Church. I would challenge you to name an institution that does more to promote the true dignity and beauty of all women. The Church elevates women to a place that no other religion, organization, or government does. I see it in so many women my age that are being fed the lies that their value is in the way they look, or in their career, or in how cute and clean they keep their house, or in a hundred other things. I see it in myself--I have at one time or another believed all of those lies. The Catholic Church is the only organization that promotes MY dignity to such a high degree and teaches me that my value is in the fact that I am a cherished daughter of God, not in anything the world has to offer. No other institution or organization makes me feel so truly empowered or "whole" as the teachings of the Catholic Church. Quite the opposite of not respecting women, if you ask me.
Further, the person who is most highly honored in the Catholic Church next to Jesus Christ Himself is--you guessed it--MARY. A WOMAN! It could even be argued that she is "more honored" than Jesus (not worshiped--honored--big difference there) because HE HIMSELF honors her and tells us to do the same.
Women play a role in the Church--and in life--that is different than the role of men, but no less important. It's time that women realized this and started to live up to their calling.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen articulated the Church's respect for women when he said this: To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.
Peace and prayers to you, Diane. I pray that you will see how LOVED you are as a woman of God by Jesus Christ and His Bride (the Catholic Church) and that you will return home soon!
If you turn to his first pastoral letter as Archbishop of Denver (Dec 1997), you will see his recommendation to pastors "to open their parishes to all which the Holy Spirit desires. New ecclesial movements and charisms are works of the Holy Spirit and signs of Jubilee; it is my hope that pastors will welcome these groups and movements so that our people, families and parishes may blaze with the fire of the new evangelization."
This "radical availability to the Holy Spirit" has been the hallmark of Archbishop Chaput's episcopal leadership, and its fruits are apparent in the renewal of the Church in Denver and in the radical renewal launched in Philadelphia.
Chaput's strong commitment to ecclesial communities, movements and charisms mirrors that of Pope Benedict and Blessed John Paul II who gathered these new expressions of the Holy Spirit in Rome at Pentecost in 1998. JP II's remarks to the hundreds of thousands assembled there should be recalled often. He said in part:
"In our world, often dominated by a secularized culture which encourages and promotes models of life without God, the faith of many is sorely tested, and is frequently stifled and dies. Thus we see an urgent need for powerful proclamation and solid, in-depth Christian formation. There is so much need today for mature Christian personalities, conscious of their baptismal identity, of their vocation and mission in the Church and in the world! There is great need for living Christian communities! And here are the movements and the new ecclesial communities: they are the response given by the Holy Spirit, to this critical challenge at the end of the millennium. You are this providential response."
Archbishop Chaput has listened and learned well.
If so, it might have been from careful consideration of the effect of the Episcopacies of people like Bernardin, Weakland and Hunthausen.
I think it also to important to comment about John Courtney Murray himself and his way of thinking. I recommend an article by David l. Schindler to understand a bit more about his thinking.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/MURRAY.HTM
According to Schindler, Murray may have been well-intentioned in his effort to find synthesis between democratic values and Catholic thought, especially in the key issues of personal freedom and freedom of expression and religion. Yet in his effort to unite the two visions of reality he fails to clarify several ambiguities, including the relationship of the society to Truth, and thus was interpreted by many in a kind of relativistic tint, supporting a religious pluralism at the expense of orthodoxy.
I think it is interesting that the Archb. tries to rescue some key aspects of Murray, and I think we can too, but I think one must further develop a relationship between the Constitutional concept of individual freedoms and true Human freedom that stems from the vision of man as a truly religious being if we want to truly appreciate his thinking.
That is certainly true, but the vigour showed by the remaining nucleus is often remarkable. People in France have talked of the “Catholic turn” in French philosophy. Some of the county’s most original and provocative thinkers are working within the Catholic tradition: the philosophers René Girard, Pierre Manent, Jean-Luc Marion, Rémy Brague and Chantal Delsol, along with the writers Michel Tournier, Jean Raspail, Jean D’Ormesson, Max Gallo and Denis Tillinac.
They are the heirs of the preceding century, that, in the face of anticlerical persecution, produced Blondel, Claudel, Péguy, Maritain, Mauriac, Brémond, de Lubac, Yves Simon, Daniélou, Congar, Chenu, Bouyer and so many more.