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Saturday, June 8, 2019

Christianizing barbarians


One of my professors in graduate school once said: “Every generation of infants is a horde of barbarians needing to be civilized.”

I thought of that remark when I was looking at the small size of the congregations at all the Sunday Masses in a church where I recently presided, and especially at the lack of young people in those congregations. I thought of the comment of one of our parish priests who said that he estimated that half of the children in his parochial school do not go to church on Sunday.

It could probably be said that the history of Christianity has been the story of generations of spiritual barbarians needing to be Christianized. During some historical periods, missionaries thought that all you had to do was baptize people and they were Christianized. We now know that their solution was too easy.

But I am afraid that we are guilty of another solution that is too easy. We pride ourselves as Catholics that we are the largest denominational group by far in the U.S. These days we are wringing our hands at the number of people who respond to the question “What is your religion (or religious denomination)?” by answering “None.” They are the “Nones.” Catholic “Nones” are the second largest U.S. denomination.

This is not a sign of spiritual failure on our part. Let me explain.

The forefathers and foremothers of most of us came from Europe and found themselves in a hostile U.S. Protestant environment. The gatherings that they created in this country were by necessity heavily based on kinship. Migration tends to be based on kinship ties. Most people come to a new land because they have relatives already there who provide a soft landing for them when they arrive.

I speculate that back in Europe these immigrants were not particularly Christianized, because in  most times and places the number of really Christianized Christians is a small minority of people who call themselves Christian.

A Christianized Christian is a person who has a real relationship with God, or, to use a more generic term, a Higher Power.

Revivals (Catholics called them “parish missions”) aimed to help people have a real relationship with God. “Conversion” was the term they used. People who attend revivals or parish missions are not unchurched, they are pre-churched or de-churched. (Priests who heard confessions at parish missions had stories of people who had been away from the Faith for 40 or 50 years.) The preacher’s goal was to church them.

When pre-churched European immigrants came to the United States, their parish church became a focus of group unity. Catholic rituals gave structure to their new world, by means of its liturgical seasons and its sacramental rituals. Immigrant groups built impressive churches, often within blocks of other immigrant churches. Some of these churches were so large that their builders surely expected parish Masses to have hundreds of worshippers far into the future, maybe forever, though more realistically, the large church was too often a tribute to the ego of the pastor.

I grew up in the climactic years of immigrant Catholicism. I knew who the Catholic movie stars were, and the Catholic athletes, and saw Notre Dame as evidence that the Church was on a roll. Movies like Bing Crosby’s “Going My Way” presented an idealized  priesthood. The end of World War II with its millions of returning veterans and the resultant baby boom gave rise to an explosion of priestly and religious vocations.

But, even as a child I recall parishioners saying that when parish young people went to college, they never returned. The election of John Kennedy, a Catholic, as President was just one more indication that the walls that had nurtured immigrant culture were down. The Second Vatican Council, the Vietnam War, revolutionary openness about sexual issues, and the availability of contraception uncovered the differences between Christianized Catholics and pre-Christianized Catholics.

For several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s I was a “team priest” in Worldwide Marriage Encounter. During those years the movement was very successful--we would have weekends with 20 or 30 couples every few months. Looking back, I think its success was due to the fact that it welcomed some of the new societal developments like the sexual revolution, and in the name of the Second Vatican Council, provided a spirituality that many couples had never experienced--a truly Christianized spirituality. Those couples had grown up in a pre-Christian Baltimore Catechism Church and Marriage Encounter helped many of them experience a true religious conversion.

Today, here in Quincy, Cursillo continues to have that effect. There have been over 230 Cursillo weekends at the Retreat Center here on campus since the movement began in the 1970s. Each weekend involves new candidates, sometimes as many as 30 or 40, and a team that spends months preparing for their weekend. Like the old parish missions, it is Christianizing pre-Christians.

Pre-Christianity rides on the coattails of kinship. Where kinship ties remain strong, the church remains significant in people’s life spaces. When kinship ties break, church affiliation breaks too. The reason for the attrition from church membership is that kinship has been less important in people’s lives. There are several reasons for this. One is the increasing prevalence of divorce. As families dissolve and become reconstituted, the wider networks of kinship ties become fragmented. Another is increasing geographic mobility. Perhaps the most important factor is the smaller size of families. The fewer relatives you have, the fewer relationships you have that tie you to your kin group.

We should quit grieving over the membership attrition we see in our churches. It has always been thus, The only reason it was not thus is because of the artificial support of kinship and geographic stability, neither of which are essential features of Christianity.

This is another way of saying that the Church requires constant re-evangelization. A personal religious conversion requires person-to-person contact. Whenever a Christian community is not fed by individual conversions resulting from individual contacts and conversations, whatever numbers appear on membership lists or even in church on Sunday are poor indicators of Christian life.

It has always been thus. The harvest is great but the laborers are few.