The American Religious Identification Survey has come out. Americans of European descent leave the Catholic Church at about the same rate that Episcopalians leave the Episcopal Church. The Catholic numbers stay the same because the gap is filled by Latinos. Because immigration in Europe is Moslem rather than Catholic, the decline of Catholicism is more apparent there.
A handful of Catholics leave for more liberal churches; more leave for conservative evangelical and Pentecostal churches, but most drift off into indifference. The decline of Catholicism in New England is especially striking. Phil Lawler has described it in The Faithful Departed.
Faith is not a matter of mere knowledge. But the sad state of catechetics for the past two generations must have contributed to the decline. My family offered to fund a study to see whether Catholic school children in Baltimore at least knew the basic vocabulary of Catholicism; the archdiocese did not even reply to our letters offering money; the bureaucrats did not want to know the truth.
The disruptive reforms also must have caused much of the loss. Catholicism was for many people a matter of habit – a good habit, but mostly habit. When the mass was changed and almost all popular devotions suppressed, the habit was broken.
Indifferentism was also a result of the renunciation of triumphalist Catholicism. Catholics were warned there was no salvation outside the juridical boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church. That certainty was eroded and then rejected, and the Church has not found a convincing way of presenting the doctrine that the Catholic Church is indeed willed by God, although He can work outside its visible boundaries.
The sexual scandals also helped undermine faith. William Lobdell lost his faith in God after he covered the sexual scandals for the Los Angeles Times. He recounts the painful story in Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace. I will have more to say about this book later.
The situation in Africa and the Far East is different, but America and Europe still provide the financial and intellectual leadership in the Church, and troubles here will eventually hurt the Church in poorer countries.
I think this is a pretty good summary of the factors that went into this decline. From my own experience, I can say that the Faith was pretty much a habit and not a profound conviction in those days. And then, in the days following the Council, it seemed as if every certainty from the Church’s patrimony was being challenged. Things were not handled well, and I don’t think the Church has ever recovered it’s balance.
Greetings! Saw your post in Google Blogsearch and came to read.
Isn’t “The Decline and Fall of American Catholicism” a bit pre-mature? I’m not yet convinced that Catholic numbers in America have fallen. There would have to be millions of deaths to offset the Hispanic immigration numbers. I see the survey’s drop as more a paperwork error than a crisis.
Regardless, it time to learn to pray the Mass in Spanish, just as my German ancestors eventually learned to pray the Mass in English.
God bless… +Timothy
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Until the end of the 19th century, catholics believed that the church was god and god was the church. I have spanish roots and was told of the other beliefs, eg middle class men could rape the prettiest girl in town, lured through false intensions and then was forced to marry her attacker as she was no longer a virgin. Millions of indescression were and are “undocumented” including child abuse in “TODAYS” society (Irland). This religion is not of a church. Peter and Paul renounce this in many places. PS, if we would just hand back our bible’s for “priests” only. (as was catholic law for 1600 years), we wouldn’t have to find the truth at all, and urban mothers could have us demented with insecurity and ignorance once again Catholisism runs contrary to the heart of origonal (Coptic Arab) christianity, and exists only for breading more for the “CLUB”. Goodbye to a dinosaur.
The Latino gap-filling may not last as long as you might expect. Mexican-Americans are already 30% Protestant overall, and this figure is much higher among those from the third, fourth, or fifth generation. Add to that the sharp decline of Mexican-born people living in America (fairly recent Chicago Tribune article)- masked, of course, by the continuing increase of the Mexican population as a whole- and you’ll find that American Catholicism is closer to a tipping point than you might think. It’s about 17 or 18% of the US population, provided that Catholics are counted using the same methodology as everyone else. It’s still slightly above 20% if you use a more generous methodology in this one specific instance. Immigration is not likely to help the cause at it has in the previous 20 years, and Catholicism continues to have the worst numbers of any major US religious group as far as net gains and losses via conversion taken together (Pew Forum report). So if you look ahead 10 to 15 years, you shouldn’t expect Catholic numbers in the US to hold steady. There will be a decline in the percentage, and there will probably be a numeric decline as well. We’re far more likely to see a percentage of 15 than 25 in the next decade or two. This could all change, of course, if an American is selected as pope for the first time ever. But if the US and Mexico are both passed over, it may be awhile before things look chipper for Catholicism in the US.