Some interesting posts from the american Catholic evangeliser Sherry Weddell on the problems facing the US Churhc, which sound very familiar - though the problem of mass lapsation in a previously Catholic-dominated country is different, there are simialrites with the decline of the old US Catholic "ghetto" subcultures. I give extracts to whet the appetite:
www.siena.org/January-2011/the-exit-interview-discussion.htmlOver at America, William J. Bryan, wrote a thought-provoking piece about doing "Exit Interviews" for departing Catholics. Then Inside Catholic's Margaret Cabaniss picked up the discussion.
Bryan proposed a few basic questions:
He proposes a few questions that could be included:
•Why have you stopped attending Sunday Mass regularly?
•Are there any changes your parish might make that would prompt you to return?
•Are there any doctrinal issues that trouble you?
•Does your pastor or anyone on the parish staff know you by name?
•Are you in a mixed-religion marriage?
•Do your children go to church?
•Did you ever really consider yourself to be a member of a parish community?
I think the idea of asking questions is brilliant and that the suggested questions would provide a lot of important information. But these questions don't address the heart of the matter. We go over all these in great detail in Making Disciples but I'm in a hurry so I'll just work from memory.
Notice that none of the suggested questions mentions God. And that's the 800 lb gorrilla in the room. If we don't address this one, we will miss the heart of the matter. The Pew Forum, in their 2008 and 2009 surveys did ask alot of God questions and discovered that huge numbers of Americans don't believe in a personal God including nearly 30 % of Catholic of all generations.
A careful crunching of the Pew data shows that for anyone younger than a Builder (66 and under), Mass attendance goes up and down in direction relationship with the percentage of Catholics in a given generation that are certain you can have a personal relationship with God. Because the vast majority of people, 66 and under in this country, are post-modern in their worldview and they only engage in religious behavior that they find personally meaningful. These people aren't motivated by duty anymore, and the younger you are, the more cultural pressure you feel to not attend church. So you have to have a strong personal motivation. Why bother going to Mass if there isn't a personal God with whom you can have a relationship?
Pew found that the percentage of Catholics who are certain one can have a personal relationship with God drops with every generation. Only 40% of Millennial Catholics (the eldest of which has just turned 30) are certain that you can have a personal relationship with God. So it's no surprise that only 34% of Millennial Catholics said they attended Mass regularly. And when you correct for the well known tendency for people to tell surveyors what they think they want to hear, you find yourself down in CARA territory (CARA's methodology does correct for that distortion) with 17% of Millennials and 15% of Gen Xers Catholic at Mass weekly.
And the Pew studies also found that surprising numbers of people who consider themselves to be "atheists", "agnostics" or "unaffiliated" still often believe in God, still pray, still are registered members of our congregations, still attend services occasionally, and sometimes are even involved in congregational activities. So our concern can't just be with those who leave but also with the large numbers of Catholics floating in and out of our pews who may not even believe in God and the majority who are not yet intentional disciples.
1) First of all, let's have a real conversation, not an interview. The truth is we don't know why Tom or Hayley or Jose left the church or are struggling with the idea of faith at all. The assumptions of those of us who are deeply invested in the Catholic faith as to why people leave are often absurdly wrong. (For instance, the Pew studies found that the sex scandal and personal crisis like divorce were actually not major reasons why people leave.) Their journey is peculiar to them and their way back to God is sometimes just as unexpected. (I met a woman in LA recently whose spiritual turning point was being electrocuted!) We cannot know what the real issues are for this person until we are willing to invite their confidence and really listen.
And let's focus the conversation about people's lived relationship with God to this point in their life. Let's learn to recognize and respond helpfully to the needs of people who are not yet disciples so that they are able to continue the journey to following Christ in the midst of his Church. And let's give lots of Catholics at all levels this evangelical awareness and set of skills
That's why I had to write this in such a hurry. I'm packing for my first trip of the new year right now to fly to LA where Barbara Elliott and I will be teaching 500 Catholics how to have these very conversations with their friends, family whether or not they have darkened the door of a church in years.
Christ did not just send his Church to lapsed Catholics but to all people in all the world. Because the primary mission of the Church isn't institutional survival. The end for which the Church exists is for the ultimate salvation and happiness of every human being on the planet.
www.siena.org/December-2010/living-in-the-land-of-qnoneq.htmlI've said it before but since we're on the topic of numbers, I thought I'd point out again that American Catholics are standing on the edge of a demographic precipice.
1) The 15% of US cradle Catholics who leave and eventually become Protestants are motivated differently from those Catholics who simply become "unaffiliated" or none". Catholics-on-their-way-to-becoming Protestants tend to spend some years in "none" land before joining a Protestant congregation. They tend to be more religious altogether and are spiritually seeking. They become Protestant overwhelmingly because they have found a faith they like better. If we reached out to them creatively while they were in "none" land, many would return, but the quality of life in our parishes has to improve for them to stay.
2) "None" doesn't necessarily mean atheist or non-believer in the dictionary sense. A large number of "Nones" (millions) are religious, pray on a regular basis, move in and out of our congregations, even formally belong to congregations. So many don't even fall into the category of "unchurched" exactly. They just don't claim a particular "religious identity".
Religious "nones" or "religious unaffiliated" as Pew puts it are the closest group to Catholics in terms of their beliefs and practices. That's because so many are Catholics. But 1/3 say they are open to having a faith if they found "the right one".
3) Religious change is overwhelmingly a young adult thing. The majority of Americans leave the faith of their childhood (any faith) by age 23. 70% of Catholics who got directly to "unaffiliated" do so by age 23
But the majority of Catholics who become Protestant leave a bit later, and after a few years of wandering in "none" land, enter Protestantism in their mid 20's to mid 30's). Because Protestants reach out and evangelize, they are picking off large numbers of searching, formerly "none", Catholics.
I'm prepping for a parish staff day and was looking at the figures they gave me last night. 23% drop in attendance over the past 5 years. Check. Big drop in marriage and baptisms. Check. Downturn in RCIA. (Per figures released by the US Catholic bishops, the number of adults entering the US Church through RCIA has dropped 33% since 2001. See my series: Whither RCIA? for a detailed look at the numbers around that.) Check. Fewer young adults so candidates and catechumens tend to be middle-aged. Check. Their local issues were looking so familiar.
I checked these figures with CARA last year: An average of their findings shows that only 13% of 18 - 29 year old Millennials attend Mass on a weekly basis while only 15% of Gen Xers attend weekly. That covers all adults 18 - 45 or so right now. Gen Xers and Millennials already make up 50% of the Catholic adult population.
That means that if this does not change, In 10 years it will cease to matter that we have a priest shortage because the Builders will be largely gone, the Boomers retiring, and our institutions - parishes, schools, etc. will be emptying at an incredible rate. Sacramental practice will plummet at a speed that the will make the post Vatican II era look good and the financial support for all of this will be vanishing like Bernie Madoff's investment portfolio. The American Church will be de facto majority Hispanic because their young adults aren't leaving as fast (although as this new study and the Pew foundation both found, as Hispanics assimilate, they begin to behave more like Anglos. "Latinos have tripled their proportion among Nones from 1990-2008 from 4% to 12%". says this new study. )
Hopefully not even Catholics will be able to retain their dread of evangelization in such a situation.
As one exceedingly bright and theologically literate Millennial Catholic with a love for the Traditional liturgy *and* a passion for evangelization asked me last year, "My generation of Catholics isn't prepared to evangelize my generation, are they?"
Bingo. Because the vast majority of the small percentage of millennial Catholics who practice are so caught up in intra-ecclesial struggles and a profoundly different world view than most of their contemporaries that they just find them annoying. As I noted last year in Is the Millennial Generation Pre-Moral?
"One important caveat: not every American twenty-something is like this. In fact, many emerging adults have been reared into a world vastly different than the self-esteem culture. Some gravitate, instead, toward an Augustinian perception of the self and find their own contemporaries annoying." Which sounds like a pretty accurate description of the majority of the small minority (10 - 15%) of millennials who actually attend Mass on a weekly basis."
One brave, honest, and funny commenter on our blog put it this way:
"Because I am a complete cow, all I can think is how horrified I am by these people. Not that it's their fault - it's obviously about the way they were raised. But still, this is a generation I have (with a few exceptions) little empathy for."
And another on Mark Shea's link to my piece put it:
"I'm 23 and I'd hardly call myself immune from the rampant idiocies of my generation, but this may actually explain why I find so many of my peers illogical and infuriating when it comes to moral issues. It's like we are speaking entirely different languages."
The problem is, as Cardinal George pointed out a few years ago. "We will never evangelize what we do not love."
Distain is not discernment. And evangelism and mission outward is not Protestant. Protestant evangelization and missions that we are familiar with did not exist for the first three centuries of Protestant history. They are 19th century innovations. Before that, evangelism and missionary endeavors were all Catholic all the time.
Will we wake up in time? Will we recover our Catholic heritage of evangelization? Will we be willing and able to cross the immense cultural divide between the majority of our adult population and the current "Catholic identity insider culture" in order to reach them with the Good News?
Cause right now four times as many American adults leave the Church as enter it.
Or will we simply acquiesce in the loss of 80% of two generations of Catholics? And their children. And grand-children.
www.siena.org/December-2010/the-weight-of-my-neighbors-glory.htmlWhen I hear Catholics talk hopefully (or gleefully!) of certain groups of Catholics - whose theological or liturgical leanings they fear and despise - leaving the Church, I know that we cannot have grasped what is at stake. We cannot have grasped the nature of the immortal beings we are blithely hoping will leave the fullness of the means of grace. We must recognize that it is a form of profound disobedience, a kind of blasphemy, for us to wish for, in the name of purity, what Christ himself prayed with great intensity would never happen: that he would lose one of those that his Father had given him.
When Pope Benedict has recognized the likely possibility of a smaller Catholic church, he was merely reading the signs of the times - recognizing that European Christendom, as it has existed for the past 1200 years, (as opposed to European Christianity) is well and truly dead.
That the Church must look again, as she has in the past, not to institutions or societal favor but to the power of the Holy Spirit, the redeeming work of Christ, the truth of the apostolic faith, to the deep personal faith of her people, to the fruit of profound prayer and worship, to the intercession of the communion of saints. And to the charisms, vocations, saints, cultural creativity, and mighty deeds that arise out of such faith. The faith that gave birth to the structures and cultures of European Christianity in the first place.
But never, never that we should cease to pray for, long for, labor for, and call every man and women to encounter Christ in the midst of his Church. That we should accept, cooperate with - or most appallingly, rejoice in - events and changes that endanger the eternal glory of millions and millions of those redeemed by Christ's sacrifice and baptized in Christ's name is an abomination.