![]() ![]() We looked, at every turn, for points of contact with other religions and with the secular culture. Defending or explaining the faith to a presumably hostile or skeptical audience was seen as retrograde, defensive, pre-conciliar. Relatedly, apologetics got a very bad name during this period. The end result was that our preaching and teaching seemed, more often than not, a faint echo of what the culture was already saying. And this usually meant a translation into moral and psychological categories. As a famous slogan of the time had it, “the world sets the agenda for the church.” The concern of those who formed my generation (I went to first grade in 1965) was to make Catholicism appealing to the culture, and they therefore softened the edges of the faith, producing what I’ve termed a “beige Catholicism.” There was an uncertain, hand-wringing quality to the Catholicism of my youth, because our intellectual leaders had lost confidence in the great Catholic story and tried, over and again, to translate it into terms acceptable to modernity. In the United States at any rate, the missionary impulse to transform the culture devolved into a program of cultural accommodation. But, as innumerable commentators have pointed out, the reception of Vatican II was, to say the least, problematic. It wanted to present the age-old faith to the modern world in a compelling way. Vatican II was, of course, informed by a formidable theological intelligence and its purpose, ultimately, was missionary. The second self-inflicted wound has affected, above all, the mind of the church. If Aristotle is right in saying that the “ethos” of the speaker is the most important element in the act of persuasion, we shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t find us persuasive. Fairly or not, official representatives of the church are seen by many as corrupt, dissembling, clueless, and indifferent. Though necessary and welcome institutional reforms have been made, the wound has not healed, not by a long shot. Our attempts to preach, teach, and evangelize-both within the church and without-are hugely compromised by this terrible fact. Through the wicked acts of a small percentage of priests and a small percentage of bishops who refused to deal with the problem, the church has been massively wounded, and this wound is still open, still festering and infecting the rest of the body of Christ. The first is the clergy sex-abuse scandal. ![]() Both are self-inflicted wounds from which the whole body of Christ continues to suffer. But I should like to draw attention to two causes that I believe are especially important. Now there are multiple causes for this decline, and in the context of this brief paper I could never begin to explore them with even relative adequacy. And their views on central moral issues, from war and peace to birth control and abortion more or less track with the general population. Christians don’t display a distinctive profile over and against the general culture instead they demonstrate the same allegiance to money, sex, and personal fulfillment as anyone else. ![]() And if one were to remove immigrants from that count-Filipinos, Vietnamese, and especially Hispanics-the numbers would be at European levels.įurther, numerous studies have indicated that there is very little discernible difference in general behavior and attitude between Christians and secularists. More to it, numbers in regard to attendance at Mass are not encouraging: somewhere between 20 and 30% of Catholics attend the liturgy on a regular basis. A Pew statistic that I found particularly telling is that 27% of Americans do not expect to have a religious funeral-a state of affairs unimaginable fifty years ago. In fact, many studies have confirmed that the second largest “religious” denomination in America is ex-Catholics. And 25% of cradle Catholics have left their childhood faith. ![]() Currently, one in six Americans are not affiliated with any religious organization. A 2008 Pew Forum study revealed that the fastest-growing religious group in America is the “nones,” that is to say, those who have no official religious affiliation. Even the most cursory glance at the statistics reveals that the church in the United States is in a parlous condition. ![]()
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