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.
