WASHINGTON, D.C.—Good news. Alongside the statistics of
continuing Catholic decline in the United States, a new Catholic subculture is
visibly emerging that raises hopes for the future of the Church in America. But
there is a problem. Unless it is shaped by commitment to the new
evangelization, this emerging subculture could be a caricature of Catholicism—a
rigid throwback to the days of the immigrant Church.
All that obviously needs explaining, so let me explain.
Like Pope John Paul before him, Pope Benedict XVI has made
“new evangelization” a high priority of his pontificate. Last year he created
an office in the Roman Curia to promote the effort; next year “The New
Evangelization for the Transmissin of the Christian Faith” will be the theme of
a general assembly of the world Synod of Bishops. Recently, too, he proclaimed
a Year of Faith, beginning during the Synod assembly and extending to November
of 2013.
The new evangelization, Pope Benedict explains, is needed to
deal with the situation existing where “nations once rich in faith and in
vocations are losing their identity under the influence of a secularized
culture” (
Verbum Domini, 96). Plainly
that applies to European countries like France, Germany, Spain, and Ireland
where the light of faith has grown dim. But does anyone seriously imagine the
Pope isn’t thinking also of places like Canada, Australia—and the United
States? You can be certain he is.
The troubled situation of Catholicism in the U.S. was
spotlighted more than three years ago when a “Religious Landscape Survey” by
the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that one in every three
Americans who were raised as Catholics had left the Church, either joining
Protestant bodies or becoming religiously unaffiliated. After Catholics and
Baptists, those 22 million people make up the third largest group in the United
States identifiable in religious terms (i.e., as “former Catholics”).
In America as in other Western countries, secularization
provides the context, although hardly the full explanation, for what is
happening. And despite a tendency to suppose that secularization is something
new, it is not. Christianity has been a powerful force in America from the
earliest days, but it does not follow that the secularist worldview is newly
arrived on American shores. There is a more than passing resemblance here, for
instance, to the secularist mentality of some of the Enlightenment men who had
prominent roles in the American Revolution.
The features of 19
th century secularization can
be seen in that greatest of American autobiographies,
The Education of Henry
Adams. Speaking of religion as he perceived
it through the unexacting creed of Unitarianism when he was growing up in the
1840s and 1850s as a youthful member of Boston’s intellectual and social elite,
Adams wrote:
“The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to
read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild
deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his
brothers or sisters was religion real….They all threw it off at the earliest
possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church.”
Henry Adams and his siblings were hardly alone. Many
Americans before and since have followed the same path. As they did, the
contributed to the underminingof what Pope Benedict in his Motu Proprio for the
Year of Faith
Porta Fidei calls a
socio-cultural “presupposition” in a favor of belief. The result now is clear:
“Whereas in the past it was possible to recognize a unitary
cultural matrix, broadly accepted in its cultural appeal to the content of the
faith and the values inspired by it, today this no longer seems to be the case
in large swathes of society, because of a profound crisis of faith that has
affected many people” (
Porta Fidei, 2).
For a long time, the subculture of immigrant Catholicism
more or less successfully shielded Catholics (“ghettoized” them, some would
say) against this outcome. But, starting in the late 1950s and continuing
through the ‘60s and ‘70s, American Catholics, instead of reforming and
updating their subculture, dismantled this infrastructure of distinctively
Catholics institutions and programs, organizations and movements that, with all
its limitations, had for so long served them well. Historian Charles Morris
speaks of this a “dangerous and potentially catastrophic project” by which the
Church in America severed the link between faith and the subculture that up to
then had been “the source of its dynamism, its appeal, and its power.”
Partly it occurred for reasons no one anticipated—the impact
on American Catholics of higher education, socioeconomic advancement, and
suburbanization. But partly it was a result of deliberate policy decisions
urged by Catholic academics and intellectuals and adopted by Church leadership
cadres. The dismantling of the subculture in turn contributed much to the
crisis of the past four decades, as Catholics assimilating into an increasingly
toxic secular culture suffered the diminishment of their religious identity.
In recent years, however, a reaction has set in. Disgusted
with the secular culture, growing numbers of individuals and families, both
Catholic and non-Catholic, have begun taking steps to withdraw from what they
judge to be a morally destructive environment.
Some home-school their children to avoid the sex education imposed
in schools. Some have given up on television and take great pains to police
internet use. Still others have made the radical move of quitting big cities
and their suburbs in favor of smaller,
more tradition-minded and culturally homogeneous communities making
fewer assaults on their eyes, ears, and morals. (Thomas Monaghan’s Ave Maria,
Florida is a high-profile prototype of this.)
Meanwhile, the infrastructure of a new Catholic subculture
has begun to emerge. It can be seen in a handful of proudly orthodox Catholic
colleges and universities, media ventures like the Eternal Word Television
Network (EWTN) and rapidly expanding Catholic radio stations, a growing number
of websites and periodicals and a few publishing houses, and organizations and
movements dedicated to promoting Catholic spirituality—especially, a
spirituality of the laity. In other cases, older Catholic institutions and
programs have begun taking steps to reaffirm their Catholic idenity. Often,
these things happen with encouragement from a new generation of bishops and
priests who have gotten the message and taken it to heart.
This is all to the good—up to a point. But note that when I
speak of the desirability of a new Catholic subculture, I do not mean a
self-regarding, inward-looking ghetto. Unfortunately, signs of such a thing
already can be glimpsed here and there. They seem likely to spread if steps are
not taken to discourage that from happening.
Here is where the new evangelization comes in. It provides
rationale and motivation for
Catholics to set their sights on something far better than a Catholic
ghetto—the creation of a new, dynamic American Catholic subculture specifically
designed to be a source of creative energy for preaching the gospel far and
wide, with particular attention to former Catholics and nominal Catholics who
are teetering on the brink.
This is asking a great deal—a subculture able to nurture and
sustain a strong sense of Catholic identity without turning in on itself. Can
it be done? No one really knows because up to now it hasn’t been attempted.
Evangelization is the key. Meanwhile, one thing does seem certain: If it cannot
be done, or if no attempt is made to do it, the situation of the Catholic
Church in the United States is likely to become increasingly troubled in the
years ahead.