For example [a numbers of years ago]…, American stores were never open 24-7 and few women were doctors, lawyers or ministers. The birth-control pill had not been invented and American society was generally intolerant of casual sex or births outside of marriage. Nudity and profanity were forbidden in movies — even married couples were portrayed in twin beds. Americans were generally respectful of authority and tended to trust what they were told by people who should have known.
Catholics thought of themselves at the time as a minority in a generally Protestant country. Although they paid taxes to support public schools, they were likely to send their children to parochial schools to develop a better sense of Catholic teaching and practice, especially since the public sense of “religion” was largely a watered-down version of liberal Protestantism.
All of which changed, sometimes dramatically, sometimes incrementally, in the next 50 years. Pope Benedict now faces an American Catholic Church different from the traditional minority church of Francis Cardinal Spellman and Elizabeth Ann Seton. Roman Catholics have become, in every sense of the term, American insiders. There is no reason for them to feel insecure about their social or political status, and they generally do not.
The downside of full inclusion in American society is that there is no American problem that is not a Catholic problem: drugs, crime, teenage pregnancy, divorce, loss of members, or the alienation of youth from the church. In short, whatever troubles their non-Catholic neighbors troubles them.
Moreover, there has been a steady attrition of native-born Catholics, whose places in the local parish have been taken by Hispanic immigrants. The Pew Foundation discovered that one in 10 Americans now considers himself or herself an ex-Catholic.
Some of the losses may be due to Catholic failures…
Short as it is, this article contains some useful ideas to ponder. One is the profoundly significant fact that some 10% of the American population is made up of ex-Catholics. Ten percent. That’s huge.
Surveys show that only HALF of them have migrated into a Protestant church, or some other religion. The other half are simply lapsed Christians who are completely unchurched. With roughly 300 million people living in the U.S. that means there are about 15 MILLION ex-Catholics who are unattached to any church. Think about it. 15 million is a lot of people. It’s more than the population of most states, including Virginia where I live. That is an incredibly important mission field, and it presents a special opportunity for Anglicans.
Second, Dr. Steinmetz highlights a problem that is not unique to Roman Catholics by any means, but is even more true for so-called “mainline” Protestant groups. That is, Catholics have assimilated all too well into American culture, to the point that there seems to be little difference between Catholics (about one fourth of the national population) and the rest of the country. Catholics are not exempt from all the problems that afflict Americans as a whole, even including such matters as divorce and abortion about which the RC Church has been so strict and emphatic.
My point is that this provides one more illustration of a basic problem that all the “mainstream” Churches have been very slow to face, i.e., the disappearance of the old Christendom social context throughout the western world. The American “separation of church and state” has now evolved into the virtual divorce of Christianity and the dominant culture. Whether Catholic or oldline Protestants, we desperately need to come to terms with this harsh new social reality, and find ways to adapt our inherited patterns of operating. The challenge of the early third millenium, post-Constantinian Church is to recapture the dynamism and strength of the early first millenium, pre-Constantinian Church.
To his credit, the Pope has shown that he understands this. Alas, most leaders of the Episcopal Church (or the ELCA, PCUSA, UMC etc.) still don’t get it.
David Handy+