Alive -Illusion choking life out of Catholic Church in US

This is the text of a powerful article in Alive an Irish Catholic Monthly. This newspaper is free to 350,000 homes nationwide.

If US Catholics don’t confront the fact that “we are in desperate trouble” it could lead to the collapse of the Catholic Church in America, a leading commentator has warned. Russell Shaw, a former spokesman for the US bishops, rejected the view that “we’re doing okay”, describing it as the “happy-talk version of American Catholicism” and as “a central element of the liberal Catholic line".


Against this view he gave a list of statistics which suggested how great the crisis is. Only 30% now attend Sunday Mass, and Catholic marriages are down from 426,000 in 1970 to 200,000 last year. “Hundreds of thousands of American Catholics who marry each year don’t bother having their marriages blessed by the Church,” he wrote. “It is safe to suppose that most no longer practise the faith. I hardly need tell you what that means for the religious upbringing of their kids.” A survey in 2005 found that 75% of US Catholics said good Catholics need not observe the Church’s teaching on contraception; two-thirds said the same about the teaching on divorce and remarriage while nearly one in four held that a Catholic need not believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. In a 2003 survey of Catholics 86% agreed with the statement “If you believe in God, it doesn’t really matter which religion you belong to,” while “74% said yes to ‘The major world religions are equally good ways of finding ultimate truth’.” Writing in Catholic World Report, Mr Shaw, author of 20 books, called for honesty and candour in facing the crisis. “To begin with, our bishops need to face the fact that very many Catholics have lost confidence in them as a group,” he wrote.


“People just aren’t paying attention any more. If Catholic university presidents and pro-abortion Catholic politicians can get away with ignoring the representatives of the magisterium, why not ordinary folks?” Lay men and women must find their proper roles in the apostolate of the Church, as set out by Pope John Paul II in Christifideles Laici, and that does not mean becoming part of a neo-clericalism. “There is a desperate need for moral straight talk, too,” wrote Shaw. “Telling people who rarely or never go to Mass and take for granted their right to dissent that they’re good Catholics does a vast amount of harm.” A priest “who was brave enough to preach against contraception” reported afterwards, “the women got upset and the men got mad.” But the effort to communicate the Church’s teaching has to be made, he said. The commentator believed that “the healthiest development in American Catholicism in a long time was the action of a courageous bishop in Worcester, Massachusetts.”


He told Holy Cross College “it couldn’t go on claiming to be Catholic” if it persisted in acting contrary to Church teaching. Hoping Pope Benedict will address the issues during his brief visit to the US this month, Mr Shaw remarked, “today illusion—the illusion that we aren’t doing so bad—is choking the life out of the Catholic Church in the United States.”