The
Bad News
I am looking at the demography of
my Franciscan province: we peaked in 1961 with around 800 men, and have been
going down to our present number of just under 200. Our median age is 70.
About one-fourth of people who say
they were raised Catholic no longer claim membership in the Church. Except for
immigrants coming to the U.S. from Catholic countries, our Church would be in
the same boat as mainline Protestant churches: sinking.
The sociological explanation for
the decline in membership in churches and religious orders is the individualism
of modern culture. Facebook and its allies in the internet world have caused
that individualism to metastasize. So many of us say we are spiritual but not
religious. That means that we do religion on our own, without reference to
other people.
The
Good News
In the midst of this discouraging
landscape, I read two encouraging things. One was an article in Sojourners
magazine by a woman who described how nature brought her back to God, and
indeed, to a church community. The other is my reading of Amoris Laetitia,
Pope Francis's letter written in response to the fall 2015 Synod of bishops in
Rome.
So I conclude: two things
counteract our individualism: nature, and children.
Nature does not of itself call us
back to community, but my sense is that if a person really spends time
experiencing nature, that person cannot but feel drawn to a closer relationship
with other human beings. Too many people, I speculate, spend a few hours in
nature, feel uplifted, and then return to a rat-race of everyday tasks that
allows them no time to reflect on anything. So the nature experience starves.
A love for nature finds a powerful
ally in the environmental movement. As people struggle to save parts of the
natural world, they come to appreciate the beauty of that world, and beauty is
God's middle name.
But children are another story.
Children are truly the prophets in our world. They get through to us at moments
when we are not ready to listen to anyone else, if we let the door open even
slightly. I think of Jesus' parable about the seed sown by the roadside. It
only takes a tiny bit of good ground to produce fruit a hundredfold.
Unfortunately, too much of the seed
falls on rocky ground and too many children are left adrift in a world without
love.
In earlier ages, sexuality was
natural bait for producing children. Contraception cut that link. That cutting
is an important argument in Pope Paul VI's 1968 Humanae Vitae encyclical
that outlawed contraception for Catholics. Before contraception was so easy,
sexuality could function as a hook that drew many people--not all, of
course--into involvement with a spouse and children. Without that hook,
children have become an optional accessory, and accessories are a cost, not a
source of life.
Amoris Laetitia (translation:
"The Joy [or Happiness] of Love") tries to point out ways that
children and families can lead to true love. Everyone wants true love. So many
of us have forgotten how to experience it.
The headwind against which Francis
is pushing is a prejudice against the words "marriage" and
"family."
Marriage suffers from too much
history of oppression of women, and too little acknowledgement by religious
people of that oppression. It does not help that many feminists found themselves
battling religious people, and that many religious people found anti-feminism
to be a motivator for political advancement, including priests and bishops in
the Catholic Church.
It is unfortunate that people see
gay marriage as threatening. The advocates of gay marriage are the only
defendants of marriage accepted by the wider secular culture. Probably they
would not be so accepted except that the churches, the whipping boys of the
secular world, oppose them. If the churches come to accept gay marriage,
secular culture will oppose it.
"Family" is an even more
despised word. I speculate that the prejudice goes back to attitudes toward
Catholic immigrants in the early part of the 20th century, largely Italian and
eastern European, most of whom were Catholic and who had large families. That
prejudice is long gone, but the Catholic hierarchy, organized as the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has cemented itself to the
Republican party. Since much of the leadership of the secular world leans
Democratic, the tension between secularism and Catholicism has become
politicized, with the result that the USCCB is in no position to speak
convincingly to the larger U.S. culture. Francis's encyclical offers an
opportunity to change that, but I fear that the opportunity is being
squandered.
But "family" can be an
important word in reviving our culture. Men and women released from prison
often want nothing more in life than a family--a spouse and children. These are
people--mostly men--who have experienced life without family, both before and
during their imprisonment. Released from prison, they have none of the trinkets
that can distract most people from seeing a family as a precious gift. Now that
our society is coming to see that too many such people were imprisoned in
unconscionable ways, and are releasing them, we may have just been handed a
powerful influence favoring family life. We could draw such people into our
communities. We probably won't. Too many ex-convicts are Black, and racism is
alive and well in our churches.
Membership in a church is good. It
can provide powerful social support, and it enriches much human experience. A
love for nature, pushed along by efforts to preserve our natural environment,
can lead people to community. If the church were to ally itself with
environmental groups, the church could be that community. Support for family
life, before, during, and after courtship and marriage (see Amoris Laetitia
for details), could also draw people to community.
Mega-churches are communities with
enough resources to support courtship, marriage, raising children, and enjoying
old age. From my standpoint as a Roman Catholic, such churches could be
enriched by our Catholic experience of ritual, and our Catholic tradition of
intellectual exploration of faith issues. The exchange could be helped by the
large number of former Catholics who attend these mega-churches. Exchange
between Catholicism and the mega-church might be the beginning of a new
ecumenical movement.
