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Sunday, July 3, 2022

Abortion is tearing our country apart

 

Abortion is tearing our country apart.

Few people see abortion as a positive good. That includes many of the women who choose to have an abortion. Yet our politics have forced us into two camps. Both sides of the issue are to blame.

Those of us who are Catholic Democrats do not see abortion as a good thing. The issue is not whether abortion is wrong, but whether it is a good thing for the state to make it illegal.  It is possible to argue that some behaviors are evil but that getting the state to punish them creates more problems than we wish to accept.

There are countries that make prostitution legal. There are countries that make use of any kind of drug legal. There are excellent arguments on both sides of those issues, but countries have made the decision that the lesser evil is on the side of permissiveness.

Our own country experimented with making alcohol use illegal. Few people saw alcohol addiction as good, but eventually the country decided that the lesser evil was to permit alcohol use. We have gradually developed ways of dealing with alcoholism better than making alcohol use illegal.

There are better ways of dealing with problem pregnancies than making abortion illegal. We can support women, and men, who find themselves pregnant. We can support them socially and financially. Many  groups such as Birthright have been doing heroic work in support of such people. But when a problem is so massive that private initiative cannot effectively deal with it, we use government support, no matter what it costs. We do that with floods and fires and hurricanes, and now with Ukraine. We need to do it with our own people who are pregnant. Whether the pregnancy is their own fault or not is not the issue. They and their unborn children are ours, and we take care of our own.

We are not heartless people who care only for fetuses but not about women after their children are born. We are not heartless people who see fetuses as a form of maternal disease. We are people who have gotten ourselves into polarized camps by leaders who are too willing to fight rather than to talk. We need to talk, and talk some more, and recognize that our opponents are human just like us, moral people just like us, and not as cocksure about their rightness as our leaders are trying to make us believe.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Lattices

 

Lattices

    A lattice is a structure around which climbing plants can grow. The image suggests an inanimate thing, the lattice, providing a means for a living thing, a plant, to flourish.

    Churches are lattices.

    A church provides a structure within which people can experience God. The life is in the people and their experience, not in the structure.

    Take the Catholic Church. It provides places where people can gather, and gathering is essential for experiencing God. It provides a script for behavior when the people gather (liturgy). It provides resources that can enrich the experience (Scripture and theology). It structures experience around life events: baptism, Eucharist, burial.

    Within the structure, all kinds of different experiences occur. Some people experience God through mysticism, some through concrete acts of service to others, some through a regular routine of prayer. Many withdraw from the lattice but continue to find God through faint memories of the stories of God.

    People who have never had the experience of the structure never benefit from what the structure can provide. They are like athletes who grow up without coaching, and whose abilities may or may not ever fully develop, or like musicians who have not had people around them who will nurture their musical abilities. Some such people will overcome their disabilities and develop a relationship with God in their own way. Many, perhaps most, will not.

    That is the cause for regret on the part of us religious people. We are like people who love music and regret that some people never get to experience the goodness of musical experience.

    The regret is the motive for what we call evangelization. We do not evangelize for the sake of numbers—statistics about church membership and ritual attendance are misleading. We who manage the structures are managing wood and nails, not living things. God is moving in our structures, we hope, and sharing abundant life. Our role is to let plants grow.

    We of the structure are human beings, which means that we are sinful. We develop pathologies of structuring. We fall in love with controlling other people, or with pride in creating beautiful buildings and objects. We love creating rules, because rules are one way for us to gain power over other people. Rule breakers get ruled out of conversations. We get into fights with other religious people, sometimes even to the point of using violence. This is especially true when we merge our lattices with political lattices, whose function is to keep us at peace with one another. Church and state merge, and the structures smother life instead of promoting it.

    For some reason we church people got the idea that we have to control the world in order for people to come to God. No. We just have to provide the lattice and get out of the way.

 

A poem

 

Weeds

 

have sympathy for weeds

            flowers out of place

true, not so pretty

            don’t look like flowers

            have to look close

but persistent

            even in sidewalks

 

God works that way

            life out of place

often not so pretty

            have to look close

we church people are sidewalks

            weeds are life



Monday, February 14, 2022

Our Stories

Notice I titled this “OUR” stories.

MY story is important. It is who I am. But OUR story is also important.

The problem is that our society, and most “modern” societies are so individualistic that people no longer have stories that give them a sense of belonging. People grow up being told that they can do and be anything they like, without reference to other people. They are not given stories that locate them in a larger context.

Two events are grounding this reflection of mine. One is the blockade created by truckers on the Canadian border of the U.S. There is fear that the idea will be picked up and replicated all over the country. Truckers are the ideal carriers of such a vision. They occupy a special place in popular imagination. They pilot huge rigs, symbols of American power, and they are loners, on the road alone day after day—the American dream.

But if they have no group story that can locate them, that can give them a sense of belonging, something like this protest will provide that. It is a cause beyond themselves. The Canadian truckers are crusading against an oppressive Canadian government forcing people to accept vaccination. They now have a story, a cause. Finally, life has meaning.

The other event grounding my reflection is a book I have just begun to read. It is by two Mennonite people struggling with the stories of their peoples. The story of one of them begins in Ukraine, when the Russian government, in the early days of the Communist revolution, forced their Mennonite ancestors to flee the country. They “settled” in western Canada. The word “settle” is important in their narrative, because their settling displaced other peoples who occupied the land before them. Their story is a combination of personal history and place—Ukraine and Canada—and the “songs” that have given meaning to the journey of all the peoples. Their book is a plea for taking seriously physical places, the physical surroundings from which one has grown, as well as the stories of other peoples who occupied those same physical spaces.

Places are important. Much of the energy behind Trumpism is resentment against an economy that destroys the places that give people roots. Rural America is being hollowed out, and with it, the family stories that tell people who they are. People left behind see Donald Trump as leading a protest against the system.

The authors of the book use three tag-terms to keep all this together: “landlines,” the physical places that have grounded their stories and the stories of their ancestors; “bloodlines,” the physical and cultural histories of their peoples; and “songlines,” which they describe as “liberative traditions that inspire practices of justice and compassion.”

What intrigues me about this book, which I have just begun to read, is its grounding in the experience of indigeneous peoples. The recent “Amazon Synod” which Pope Francis convened, made us think about the importance of people all over the world who have been thrown away as useless relics of the past, including the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rain forest. But those peoples have not gone away.

The book is Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization, by Elaine Enns and Ched Myers. I got it on Kindle.

Back to the truckers.

Too many of our fellow Americans are spiritual truckers, driving all over the landscape without a story to tell them who they are.

This morning I was praying Psalm 105. The psalm is the story of a people who began with an enslaved person, Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, and continued through Moses, who led the people from Egyptian slavery into freedom in the promised land, where they, sadly from our Christian perspective, benefitted from appropriating the places and properties of the people who were living in those places before. The story of the conquest of the chosen land by the chosen people is a story of genocide.

But it is our story. Our own American story is a story of genocide, and our American forebears carried it out with the same ideological fervor that must have inspired the biblical actors, or at least the bibical authors who told their story. “God willed it” they would have said, and even if they did not have God in mind, as most of them probably did not, the term “God” functioned just as successfully for them as for any pious believer. Our truckers probably also would say “God wills our action,” even if they do not have God in mind.

In this context, it is useful to think about the term “God,” and to reflect on the merits of having a more disciplined story about God than the wild and unbridled gods that inspire truckers and so many others in our country, such as predatory investors who crush local cultures all over the country. Surely those investors too will say that the gods want them to do it.

We as a people need to take seriously the physical places where we live and have lived, and the stories of the people who have made us who we are. Then we need “songs” that will inspire us to create greater justice in the midst of the chaos that we have created.

Not a new situation. That is why generations of our ancestors kept telling the stories to their children. We need to take up that custom again. Our people wander in a wilderness of loneliness and hunger for meaning.

Our churches are a place that should be telling these stories. Evidently our churches have gotten away from doing that. The stories are not being communicated. No wonder church membership numbers are down. We are not reminding our people who we are.


Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Thoughts on Afghanistan

     “There is no military solution to the problems of Afghanistan. Only a political solution will give good results.”

That is what I have been hearing for some time now.

What have our few remaining troops been doing in Afghanistan these past few months? We have been continuing to facilitate violence. We have been using all of our famed technological skill in helping Afghan soldiers kill and destroy the Taliban. Why should we continue to do this?

The Afghan military, trained and supported for these many years by our courageous military, just “melted away.” Were they cowards?

I don’t think so. I think they used the departure of U.S. forces as the occasion to make their own low-level political solutions to their country’s problems.

The Afghan government fighters probably joined their military for the same reasons that our young people join our military: it seemed like the most promising way for them to make their way forward in a world that did not offer them many other alternatives. They took orders from leaders who had only their own welfare in mind. The war was a place to make lots of money. Billions of dollars were sloshing around. Those leaders had every incentive to keep the war going. More billions would come. Once the U.S. pulled out, they could flee the country with their billions.

It is true that our presence in the country opened up opportunities for many people, especially women. Hopefully those gains will not be totally lost. But the gains were being propped up by fruitless violence.

If anyone outside the Taliban knows what is going on in Taliban circles, it has to be Afghan people. Are the Taliban a totally foreign invasion, spawned in Pakistan for Pakistani political purposes? Or are they partly Afghan citizens disillusioned with their government’s unwillingness to promote a truly political solution to the country’s problems? We can hope they are the latter.

If the Taliban turn out to be just another organization grounded in violence, the Afghan people face a grim future. But if the Taliban have some grounding in the Afghan population, the removal of U.S. support of violence might open the way for more nonviolence.

One policy mistake that the U.S. is likely to make is the same mistake that we have made for the last hundred-plus years in Haiti: make sure the country’s new government gets no outside support. If we do that, we will contribute to the creation of another failed state. Or we will create another Cuba. China and Russia will move in with support that is not likely to promote the kind of society we wish for everyone.

Surely one of these days we will learn that the technology of killing and destroying is not the cure-all that our STEM-focused culture finds so tempting. There is much profit to be made in inventing and producing new forms of violence. It takes just two things to keep the system going: a military-industrial complex geared to inventing and producing more clever ways to kill people or to defend our people against being killed by other people. This trend keeps going in spite of evidence that our technology can be frustrated by the simplest of technologies (e.g. improvised explosive devices). It also requires a public that accepts, without question, the principle that anything that threatens our country’s existence requires unlimited financial support. Anything in the budget is negotiable except defense.

And then there are our nuclear weapons. We are still spending billions to “upgrade” our nuclear weaponry, with the knowledge that coming generations will have to spend billions more to get rid of what we create. In the meantime, one error and humankind could be destroyed.

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Certitude

    “People need certitude.”

    Certitude is a mirage. Maybe it started with Descartes. He thought the only thing he could be certain about was that he was able to think. “I think, therefore I am.” But ever since, some people have gone off on the crusade to acquire certitude. Some of those people call themselves “scientists.” But there are other kinds too, who call themselves “religious people.”

    Science is based on observation. We use one of our five senses to observe something closely. What we look for are correlations.

    A correlation is a situation where when one thing happens, another thing tends to happen. We would like to say that when one thing happens, another thing always happens. When one thing happens and another thing always happens, we say that the first thing causes the second thing.

    But we can never say “always.” We can observe something 10,000 times, but the 10,001st time the correlation can fail. Because we can never say “always,” every scientific statement is a fiction, a story that we make up. The story is probably true but could be false. To claim that one thing causes another is creative writing.

    We keep on observing. We keep trying to find causes, even though we know we can never be sure our stories are true. We string together statements about causes and make the string into a theory, which is just a higher level fiction. We have to do this because otherwise all we have is a basket of correlations, and correlations without a theory are useless.

    Science is story-telling qualified by observation. Careful observation, like what we can do with a microscope, leads us to modify older stories we have told. They used to say that cholera was caused by bad air. When they could observe water with a microscope, the story changed: cholera is caused by microscopic bugs in the water. The effect of the changed story was miraculous—cholera disappeared. The miracle led people to look for certitude through science.

    Religious people look for certitude too. Some religious people look for certitude in a text, like the Bible or the Q’uran. Catholics look for it in Scripture and Tradition. Tradition is when the community always says something.

    How do we know that the community always says something? We don’t. The community may have said something 10,000 times, but the 10,001st time it may say something different. The history of Catholic doctrine is a history of the story changing as people observe things more closely.

    I was taught in my courses in theology that when an ecumenical council says something, we can be certain the saying is true. The First Vatican Council in 1870 said that when the Pope says something about “faith or morals,” we can know the statement is true.

    When the First Vatican Council made its declaration, there were people who thought the saying was a mistake, that the Council Fathers were trying to please an aging Pope Pius IX. Since Vatican I, popes have been locked into the statements of their predecessors. The locks have become increasingly strained. Pope Paul VI said in 1968 that the use of “artificial” means of birth control is immoral. He had appointed a group of people—all presumably faithful Catholics—to look into the question. The majority of the group did not think contraception is always immoral. But Paul VI apparently thought he did not dare go against what Pope Pius XI had said back in 1931, so he decreed that contraception is always immoral. Every pope since then has declined to say anything different, but the birth rate among Catholics in the United States has dropped dramatically since the 1950s.

    Conservative U.S. Catholics point to a correlation: when Catholics considered contraception immoral, the churches were full. Since they quit seeing it as immoral, the churches have emptied. The conservatives say that the cause of the decline in religious observance is the abandonment of the doctrine on contraception. The word “cause” is just as much a fiction here as it is in science. The conservatives are using a scientific argument to defend a religious statement.

    Catholics also look to “natural law” as a source of certitude. Scientists regard statements about “nature” as suspect. How do we know something is “natural”? Because people have always said it is? Because it seems self-evident? The authorities in Saudi Arabia apparently thought it was self-evident that women should not drive cars.

    Both science and religion operate on “faith,” which is to know things without being certain about them. That seems impossible—how can I know something without being certain about it? But we do it all the time.

    I know someone loves me. But I cannot be certain that the person really does love me. Yet without the “knowledge” that someone loves me, love is impossible. Love is based on faith.

    Science is based on faith. Scientists know that organisms have evolved from non-organic structures. But their knowledge could be wrong, because no scientific statement is invulnerable. The observation that falsifies the entire theory of evolution could be out there, waiting for someone to find it. What is more likely is that someone will frame the story in a new way, the way Einstein re-framed Newton’s story of how matter and energy operate.

    Both science and religion have people who know that we cannot have certitude. Such people acknowledge that even if they cannot have certitude, they believe that what they are doing can be good for people. They both operate with the assumption that faith can live side by side with questioning.

    For the last couple of hundred years, ever since people began applying scientific observation to the Bible, it has seemed that science corrodes faith. Seminaries turned out sceptics, who went about destroying religious faith and emptying the churches. The skeptical clergy made two mistakes: they thought that science can give us certitude, and they thought that religion should give us certitude. By making certitude a pre-requisite for the good life, they distorted science and destroyed religion.

    We are all human beings who live by the worlds that the people around us create. We live by the stories that our tribes believe. Scientists cannot work without a community of fellow scientists—we call them “peer reviewers,” and their very existence tells us that the truth of what we publish has to be verified by the community. Religious people cannot operate without a community of fellow religionists. Religion without community is magic.

    The fragility of knowledge does not lead to chaos. There is no way for coaches to develop foolproof ways to win games, yet we continue to play games. Games are rewarding. When they cease to be rewarding for players or fans, we modify the rules.

    The experience of “reward” in games is a good analogy for what Jesus called “life” when he said “I came that they might have life.” Games are rewarding when the players treat each other with respect—disrespect can get you thrown out of the game. They are rewarding when the players can lose—the players are vulnerable. When one side always wins, we change the rules. Games are rewarding when people continue to play even after they lose—they are faithful to the game and its players. Respect, vulnerability and faithfulness are the components of love.

    Games do not offer certitude. Science does not offer certitude. Religion does not offer certitude. Yet all three are worth doing. All three can help us love.


Friday, February 19, 2021

What we need in order to do religion

 

The most financially successful Catholic enterprise in the U.S. is EWTN, the Eternal Word Television Network, which has hundreds of radio stations, dozens of TV stations, the National Catholic Register, and who knows how many other media outlets. EWTN has money. The official U.S. Catholic hierarchy, the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops), is below the poverty line compared to EWTN.

Some young priests are wearing cassocks and Roman collars. There are not many of them, but there are more of them than there are of young priests who live the kind of Catholicism that the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) proposed. Our local bishop of Springfield as much as admits that Vatican II was a mistake. He presides at Mass with his back to the people once a week. Bishop Paprocki is on the advisory board of the NAPA Institute, a conservative Catholic think tank.

Since 2016 here in Quincy we have an official Latin-Mass church, St. Rose. Every day Mass is offered in Latin, the old way, just like before Vatican II. The 2018 and 2019 diocesan October Counts, annual tabulations of people attending Mass throughout the Diocese on one Sunday in October, gave the following figures for church attendance at Quincy parishes (I omitted 2020 because the pandemic distorted the counts):

                                       2018            2019

Blessed Sacrament           517             554

St. Francis Solanus       1,341           1,617

St. Joseph                        110              102

St. Peter                         1,497           1,456

St. Rose                            184              169

The combined 2019 total count minus St. Rose was 3,729. St. Rose accounted for 4% of the Catholics attending Mass in October 2019. St. Rose has never had a count more than 190 since 2016 when the Latin parish began.

3,729 people in Quincy attended a post-Vatican II Mass on a typical October Sunday in 2019. Why? Why were they there? 

What people need in religion

We human beings need three things in order to do religion: we need to be involved with other humans, we need to be involved with God, and our involvement with God has to include involvement with other people. The third involvement is what we call “religion.”

Pope Francis has been producing “encyclical” letters every few years with one theme that keeps recurring: too many people are not involved with other people. Too many of us are hyper-individualistic—we are loners. Hand-held devices do not substitute for face-to-face involvement with other humans.

The Pope has also been emphasizing another theme: our shared involvement with God, our religious practice, should grow out of our own culture. Since there is a wide variety of cultures in the world, there should be a wide variety of ways to express our common involvement with God. 

 Involvement means spending time

I use the term “spending” deliberately. In white middle-class American culture, money plays a central role, and we spend money. We get into the habit of treating time like we treat money—we spend it. When we combine time frugality with our individualism, we end up not spending time involved with other people, and even less time being involved with God. We spend time with things: with information, with entertainment, with work.

 There is a psychological theory labeled “cognitive dissonance.” The theory says that when we sacrifice for something, we come to value it. The sacrifice comes before the value, not after it. We have to spend time with other people and with God or we will never value involvement with others or with God. The reason so many people do not take God seriously is because they do not spend time with God.

This is not a new problem. Why was so much Old Testament history a story of estrangement from God, with prophets challenging people to take God more seriously? Why did Jesus talk about seed falling on paths, rocky ground, and among thorns?

 I like to believe that God gets after most of us, and maybe even all of us, before we die, so that we snatch just a tiny bit of involvement with God on our way out of this life. But that is up to God, and we are human beings trying to develop a loving relationship with God in this life, over time, through years We are trying to do religion. That takes leadership. 

Leadership

Leaders are people who motivate other people to do things. We need people who can lead us into the behaviors that will deepen our involvement with each other and with God. In Catholic middle class U.S. culture leadership lives in the parish. 

 The parish is a group of people, usually located in a shared geography, who are called together physically on a regular basis and motivated to do things that strengthen their involvement with God. One slogan describing what a parish leader does is a series of three phrases: “Gather the people, share the stories, break the bread.” 

You first have to gather the people. People are like sheep--they like to wander. You have to trick them, just like university professors have to trick students into experiencing new wonders such as art or literature. Food helps. It is no accident that the third phrase is “break the bread.” Even the tiny Eucharistic host satisfies. People like to get something physical. People who are not even Catholic line up to get ashes on Ash Wednesday.

 “Tell the stories.” We need stories, and we have stories, tons of them. The whole bible is full of them. It doesn’t take much—all you need is a bible and somebody to read it aloud. When a bunch of us share a story, we become a people. We share all the stories beginning with Adam and Eve, down through Abraham and Moses and David and Jesus and Paul and Augustine and Francis and Pope John XXIII and Pope Francis. And as we share these stories, our involvement with God grows, slowly, imperceptibly, like a fungus. 

The parish is where we Americans gather, hear the stories, and break the bread. The parish is not the only place where this can happen. I live in a Franciscan community that does the same thing. The Catholic Worker houses have their own style of doing the Catholic religion. Black Catholics in my country gather, listen, and break the bread a little differently from white Catholics.

 The parish is more than just a priest and a church building. The parishes in Quincy also involve some form of schooling. When the school is a physical building, just financing and running the school draws people into involvement. Parish picnics, celebrating feast days, creating weddings and funerals and baptisms all draw people into involvements. The buildings to be maintained, the parish staff—a typical parish in my world can have several employees besides the priest, or even employees without a priest—all these require time and money. Sharing time and money leads to involvement.

And all the while, as these processes go along, sometimes poorly, sometimes with great success, the gathering and the story-telling and the bread-breaking keep feeding the participants toward involvement with a loving God.

 The Church in the United States is suffering from some disabilities stemming from the wider Church’s inability to adapt to changing cultures. The primary disability is our U.S. Church’s inability to motivate its own young people to lead it. An increasing proportion of parish clergy in my country is from other countries—Nigeria, India, Poland. That is a fine thing for leading us to appreciate the oneness of the human family, but it is not helping us do religion in our own culture. This is not the place to discuss what might be done to remedy the situation. I will just say that Church leaders in Rome who hinder us from developing leadership from within our own culture are following the example of the Judaizers in the Acts of the Apostles. They think we need to follow the Old Law before we can be true to Jesus. 

Paul and Barnabas accepted conflict as the cost of freedom from the Law. Conflict simply means one party taking a stand and another party opposing the stand. We have learned that communication and negotiation can work through conflicts. Even in a conflict we practice respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness—we practice love.

 

Monday, February 8, 2021

Abba, Father

Father Bill Burton, one of our professional scripture scholars with a real gift for making scripture intelligible to people, used to get indignant: “’Abba’ does not mean ‘Daddy!’”

He didn’t say what it meant, but it clearly means someone Personal. And that is the crux of the issue.

The world can be divided into two classes of people: those who see the Source of All Being as personal, and those who don’t. The second class includes all those thoughtless folks around us who just don’t get around to thinking about God.

St. Paul says we cannot say “Abba, Father” unless we are helped by the Spirit. Being able to see God as Personal is not something that can be engineered by creative catechesis. Being able to see God as Personal is a gift, a gift of the Spirit.

This week the bishop of our diocese, Thomas John Paprocki, wrote in his diocesan magazine that the Second Vatican Council has destroyed the Church. He cites all the statistics: numbers of Catholics in church on Sunday, numbers of priests and nuns—all down, drastically. He has an engineering solution: go back to the way things were before Vatican II. He now presides at the Eucharist in his cathedral at least once every Sunday with his back to the people (“ad orientem”). Recently he forbade Eucharistic ministers, whether ordained or not, to bless children and non-Catholics at Communion. They are not even to touch the people, even after Covid is gone. There is only one blessing at Mass, and the priest is the one who gives it, and he gives it at the end of Mass and nowhere else. People who are not authorized to receive Communion should not even be in the Communion procession—they should stay in their pews. Mothers of small children raised so much objection to this that he backed down. They can bring their children with them, but the children are not to be blessed.

I am reminded of a joke I heard years ago. “What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.”

But Bishop Paprocki is not so different from the way most of us have thought about the Church. I too have crowed about how Catholics outstrip other groups in church attendance. We Catholics are the best in everything. We have the best athletes (Notre Dame of course), the best entertainers, and now even the president and six of the Supreme Court justices, though the president’s credentials are suspect to the Republican half of the faithful.

Into the mix is another recent episcopal decree: Confirmation is to be celebrated along with First Communion. Confirmation is not a rite of passage to Catholic adulthood, which is how much of our catechesis has presented it.

Religious ed teachers use Confirmation preparation as a valiant effort to get young people to see their faith in a more adult way. Every year classes of such young folks come to our friary to get an informal lecture on what a friary and its inhabitants look like. I admire the effort, but I wonder how much impact that has on the faith of these young faithful.

Because adult faith, which I think means seeing God as Personal, and as Personal in a way that really impacts one’s life, cannot be engineered. We need to admit that, and accept the fact that the majority of people baptized and growing up Catholic, even if they attend Catholic schools, are likely to be indifferent saints. In this view I am not so different from Pope Benedict when he observes that the Church is likely to be smaller, more like a faithful remnant in a hostile world, than a world religion calling the shots to secular politicians.  

We need to quit wringing our hands at numbers. What is important is when each individual, young or old, opens his or her heart to the Lord. That is going to happen at all kinds of moments in our life cycles, maybe at the birth of a child, maybe at the loss of a child, maybe only when we are in hospice. All we can do as religious grocery clerks is to keep the shelves stocked, the doors open, and someone at the checkout counter to speak in person when we are approached. And then ask the Lord to send the Spirit to help each of the people we meet to be able to say “Abba, Father.”