At The Catholic Thing there is a piece about Catholic demographics. The writer uses new information from the Pew Research Center. As he says, the results are shocking but not surprising. You can imagine the highlights. Self-identifying “Catholic”, down. Mass attendance, down. Support of abortion, up. For those attending Mass at least once a week, reverse the numbers.
One interesting bit is the observation that the Catholic core of these USA seems to be shifting to the South from the Northeast and Mid-West.
I note this passage:
But Burke points to a bright spot. Or at least, to a reprieve in the bad news. The portion of Catholics who say that their religion is “very important” in their life and who attend Mass at least weekly has not changed much in 15 years. Roughly a quarter of American Catholics – 23-25 percent – fall into this category.
If I were a bishop, I’d want to know a lot more about that slice of my flock and why they are the way they are. What are the conditions most conducive to promoting and maintaining a deep and abiding practice of the faith? What are the habits of living – at home, school, work, prayer, in the community – that help make such integrity of faith and practice possible? And how do we make such habits of life more easily accessible to more people?
I know a sector of the Church which is vital, young and committed. Hey! Let’s persecute them!
All the questions raised in the piece can be answered with a simple fact: the Church screwed up her sacred liturgical worship. It has been a downhill slide into the demographic sink hole every since.
We are, collectively and individually, all bound to fulfill the duties of the virtue of Religion. Justice governs what we owe to human persons. Religion governs what we owe to divine Persons. The primary act we owe to God is worship. We fulfill this individually, in smaller groups like families parishes, and in larger groups like dioceses and the whole Church. Screw up the Church’s formal sacred liturgical worship, the quintessential way by which we collectively fulfill Religion, and everything else will be screwed up too. It is shocking but not surprising that the demographic sink hole is yawning, that Catholics support evils along societal trends.
We are our rites. Change the rites, you change the “us”.
As the demographics change, I suspect a few groups will remind fairly strong in their identity, including converts, charismatics (who aren’t these days as goofy as they once were), and traditionalists. These groups will have to find each other as the numbers and institutions of the Church collapse. There will be frictions at first, but something amazing could emerge from the contact.
Now, more than ever, we all have to stand up for each other… in the manner described by Benjamin Franklin.
Finally, I recommend, again, an important book.
The Faith Once For All Delivered: Doctrinal Authority in Catholic Theology is a daring selection of essays by prominent orthodox Catholic scholars recently published by Emmaus Academic Press.
The book includes a Foreword and Introduction written by Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, and an Afterword authored by Robert Cardinal Sarah. The book is edited by Father Kevin Flannery, SJ.
The essays in the first part of this collection seek to answer the question, “What went wrong with Catholic theology since the Second Vatican Council?”
Following a brief account of the movement in modern theology from its philosophical basis in Kant and Hegel to the nouvelle théologie and later progressivist theologies of the twentieth century, the writings of Karl Rahner, Walter Kasper, and Bernhard Häring are treated as representative of principal problematic trends, and the concept of heresy is surveyed as it has been understood in the past and as it operates in the Church today.
The essays in the second part indicate the way forward for Catholic doctrinal and moral theology, examining and distinguishing the orthodox use of the sources of theology of magisterial teachings, the deposit of faith in its development, the “sense of the faithful” (sensus fidelium), Sacred Scripture, and Church councils and synods.
Edward Feser’s treatment of the Magisterium is deeply instructive and challenging to the present pontificate. The same is true of John Rist’s masterful commentary on contemporary heresies. These essays are especially valuable in debunking the current German synodal way and stand as a warning about the upcoming Synod on Synodality.
