This is the darkest time in Catholic history . . . the collapse of religious life, the dearth of vocations, the lowering of ecclesiastical discipline, particularly vis-à-vis false teaching and moral teaching, the general confusion, the apostasy of the Catholic universities, the loss of the sense of the divinity of Christ, all these conspire to make this the most difficult time in Catholic history.

— Father Benedict Groeschel, Office of Spiritual Development,
Archdiocese of New York

André Malraux was certainly right when he said that the twenty-first century would be the century of religion or it would not be at all.

— John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope

THERE IS A CHURCH I have been going to, on and off ever since I was a boy, in the heart of London's Covent Garden. Its congregation is composed in the main of people who work locally in the hotels, restaurants, theaters, bars, and nightclubs; there are office workers, too, who come during their lunchtime on working days, and occasional tourists and well-dressed guests from the nearby Savoy Hotel. This is an area of the city dedicated to leisure and entertainment; it is also replete with social problems: drugs, homelessness, prostitution, pornography. I believe the parish counts some sixty different nationalities; there are asylum seekers and immigrants of every status; there are people here of most ages, from infants to octogenarians. In a sense it is like the whole of the Catholic Church.

This Covent Garden church is dedicated to Corpus Christi-the Body of Christ-and it has a special ministry to actors. Our priest is a good man and tremendously active, but he is no longer young. He keeps his sermons short, he is good-humored, and he has preserved some of the Catholic sacramentals that have disappeared from too many of our churches: a Lady Chapel, statues of Saint Patrick, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and Saint Genesius, the patron saint of the stage; an offering box for candles for the Holy Souls in Purgatory (some of us Catholics still believe in companionship with our dead). There is a lunchtime Mass every day and the church, unusually for today, is kept open for locals to come in to pray.

At Mass we sing together, and pray together; we ask forgiveness, and tell God that we are unworthy to enter under his roof; we sit and stand and kneel and give each other the sign of peace with a handshake or a kiss; we take that little white bread wafer with a sip of red wine, in amnesty and mercy for the time being-which is the only time we have. Our church is no New Jerusalem, but we believe Christ is with us in the priest, in the people, in the Word, and especially in the Eucharist-that piece of bread. His presence in the bread is a kind of language; like building the New Jerusalem, it is not a language we shall manage to learn in time.

There are congregations like ours on every continent. Looking around the congregation one can see in the faces the far-flung places of our homes of origin: the jungles and pampas of South America, the frozen north of Canada, the teaming cities of Asia and the conurbations of North America, the Mediterranean regions and the industrial heartlands of Europe, the war-torn nations of the Balkans, the towns and villages of Africa, and the islands of the Caribbean. Going to a church like ours on Sundays and feast days you would think that our Catholic communities of faith are thriving. Most of our parishioners, I am sure, would be surprised to learn that the Catholic Church is in crisis.

Anyone who undertakes to traverse even a small part of the vast and complex realities of Catholicism is struck by the paradox of the persistence of flourishing local communities and the general fragmentation and decline of the Church as an organic whole. Such is the deep connectedness of Catholicism, in belief and practice, our church in Covent Garden cannot for long escape what is happening in the Church at large. It will not be long, for instance, given the graying of the priesthood and the decline in vocations in England, before the parish will have a part-time priest, or no priest at all. Within ten years, half the priests in Britain currently will have died (and we are better off than most parts of the world). Few teenagers are to be seen in the congregation, and hardly any marriages survive to flourish as Catholic families. The pews, full for the main masses on Sunday, give no impression of the countless defections of the marginalized and discouraged who have lost heart and turned away. In Britain, according to statisticians, there should now be fifteen million Catholics if all those members of the faithful who had come from Ireland, and their families, had kept the faith. Due to defections there are just over four million. Since the mid-1960s regular Mass attendance has dropped from two million to a million, now representing only a quarter of the nominally Catholic population.

Familiarity with the wider constituency of those who call themselves Catholics and those who have abandoned their Catholicism reveals a series of interconnecting fault lines and crises throughout the Church. In the United States, which boasts the fourth largest Catholic population in the world, marriages by Catholics before a priest have practically halved since the 1960s. In 1960 there were one and a half million baptisms: forty years on, and in a Catholic population almost six times greater, annual baptisms have dropped to below a million. In 1958 three-quarters of all Catholics in North America attended church regularly; by the year 2000 the figure has dropped to about a third, and ordinations to the priesthood have declined by more than two-thirds.

In Europe, the home and birthplace of Catholicism, the faith appears to be in accelerated retreat. In January 2001, reporting on the most recent surveys of Catholic worship and belief, the international Catholic weekly The Tablet commented that the first year of the third millennium opened with "the mainline Churches in the European countries, traditionally the heartland of Christianity, experiencing staggering declines in attendance and affiliation." Between 30 and 50 percent of parishes have no resident priest in West Europe. Even in Italy, where almost 90 percent of the nation professes Catholicism, regular Sunday attendance stands at only a quarter of the Catholic population, down 10 percent since the early 1980s, while seminary enrollments have halved during the same period. In Catholic Ireland, according to a survey conducted by Maynooth College, new vocations have dropped from 750 in 1970 to 91 in 1999 and ordinations from 259 to 43.

Nor do the indices bring great hope from East Europe and the developing world. Europe's leading statistician of religion, the Jesuit Jan Kerkhofs, declared in 1999 that "since 1987 all kinds of vocations have been decreasing in Poland." According to the National Catholic Register, by as early as 1993 between half and two-thirds of Catholic Poles did not assent to the Church's teachings on abortion, contraception, and premarital sex, and only a quarter of Catholic children and youth were attending church regularly. Meanwhile, in the Third World the ratio of priests to faithful continues to plummet, the worst decline in South America where in two decades the proportion of priests to people has declined from one priest for every six thousand Catholics to one priest for every seven thousand. Mass attendance in the region stands at about 15 percent of the population and, according to the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, some 600,000 Catholics leave the Church each year to join fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant sects.

But these figures of decline and departure are merely symptomatic of deeper, structural shifts. Catholic people-bishops, priests, religious, laypeople-are asking, as never before, who they are and what is to become of their Church. They are asking not just how they can survive the current decline in practice, but how they are to relate both to God and to the world. Is it Catholic to bring down the divide between the religious and the secular? Or is it Catholic to be counter the culture and stand out against the ways of the world? Catholics are separating into rival camps, and the disagreements are increasingly marked by indignation, anger, and despair.

The Papal Cult

John Paul II is enthusiastically revered by most Catholics for his evident personal holiness and iron will. He is highly esteemed by non-Catholics the world over for his stand on moral principles, although many who praise him on this score are not bound by his strictures. But for progressive Catholics, and a vast marginalized faithful, he is a stumbling block and a contradiction.

Under John Paul II, Catholicism has become a one-man show: the Vatican's publicity machine and large sections of the Catholic media ensure that his voice and words, his opinions and verdicts, are broadcast daily and amplified throughout the world. The modern cult of papal veneration, aided by new media technology, has reached new heights and breadths during his papacy. For two decades nonstop instructions, directives, interventions, and initiatives have flowed from the Apostolic Palace ("ten whole linear feet in shelf space"), punctuated by hundreds of journeys to the ends of the earth. He is "the Sentinel" and he sees it as his task to protect the entire Church. Such is the torrent that sustains the cult of his personality, even the figure of Christ appears to be cast in the shade. His message, invariably, is to accuse the faithful of sinfulness in the conduct of their sexual and marital relationships. In the process, countless millions of Catholics have become demoralized, discouraged, and made to think less of themselves. Not infrequently his declarations are contradictory as he tacks and veers, playing fast and loose in response to public opinion: one week he calls non-Catholic faiths "gravely deficient" and the next exhorts the people to respect other religions; one month he insists that for all time women will be denied ordination, and the next exhorts the faithful to respect them; one day he forbids AIDS sufferers the use of safe sex, and the next extols compassion for all. John Paul has taken the Church in the direction of hardline conservatism, but he has regularly exploited the media to give the opposite impression.

Yet loyalty to the Holy Father is the one issue that unites Catholics, whatever they may think of him. To criticize him is to offend the most crucial taboo; love him or loathe him, every Catholic knows that he remains our best and only option for future unity. Meanwhile, Catholic conservatives assert that Catholic progressives are destroying the Church through moral and doctrinal relativism, and Catholic progressives lament the neglected virtues of pluralism, urging a greater measure of decentralization and devolution of Catholic authority. Both sides of the divide appeal to the authority of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. The Catholic Church is evidently a conservative institution. It does not pander to the latest fads and fashions: it is vigilant over its traditions of belief and practice. It does not fall into the trap of believing that, unaided by grace, human nature is perfectible. Convinced of the deep stain in our nature, Catholics believe that a better world involves the conversion of individual human hearts over and above the restructuring of society.

And yet Catholicism is nothing if not social, committed to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, antagonistic to the status quo. Catholicism is radical, communitarian, open to all cultures and ethnicities-hence "catholic," universal. Christianity's historic message of unconditional "love," or agape, moreover, sustains a viable rationale for universal respect and hence a philosophical and theological underpinning for pluralist communities and societies. Agape, the love of all-including our enemies-is the singularly Christian commandment without which no virtue or discipline or sacrifice makes sense. Agape is sustained by the conviction that all without exception are destined toward God. It is arguable that the more or less democratic and pluralist institutions which protect Catholicism's right to exist alongside other religions owe more to the unconscious survival of Christian agape than to the principles of Locke and Jefferson, or the philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome.

So there are respectable reasons for questioning both sides of the conservative-progressive Catholic divide, respectable reasons, too, for endorsing them, although it is difficult to state their contrasting differences without betraying a bias. Witness Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's version of the tension:

There are the modern circles, and we all know that for them every reform is insufficient, that they set themselves against the papacy and papal teaching. But even the others, the "good Catholics," find themselves less and less comfortable in the Church . . . they suffer and grieve over the fact that now the Church is no longer a place of peace . . . but a place of constant conflicts, so that they themselves become uncertain and begin to protest. Sociologists of religion, however, are not so pessimistic as the men in the Vatican about the decline and defections in the developed world. Recent surveys indicate that Catholics have not turned their backs on God; the faithful, say the sociologists, are accommodating the expression of their beliefs and values to the societies in which they are obliged to live. Most young practicing Catholics have little regard for the virtue of obedience. They make their own choices, especially about sexual morals. And even those who attend church regularly are relocating their sense of the holy in environmental and social concerns: the hungry, the poor, the homeless, the fragility of the planet. They have adjusted their moral imperatives so as to consider consequences and the unique pressures on individuals rather than intrinsic "absolutes." The young generation of active Catholics nevertheless retains a voluntary attachment to sacramentals and sacraments-the visible signs of God's presence in the world that are special to Catholicism. But the old outward and inward control systems, the guilt cycle that linked regular confession to the Eucharist, no longer have any bearing on their practice or even consciousness.

The official Church, however, sees these accommodations as flights into secularism. The Pope and the Vatican read the decline in Mass attendance, the virtual disappearance of confession, the decline in marriages, the increase in divorces, the rampant "relativism" of Catholics in the north, as signs of a coming Dark Age. Contraception, homosexuality, and premarital sex are lumped together with abortion and reprotechnology as "the Culture of Death."

Progressive Catholic spokespersons who stand up for the large and growing constituencies of pro-change, marginalized, struggling, lapsed, and experimenting Catholics interpret the trends with a more open mind, with a deeper sense of trust in the strengths and advantages of pluralism and the operation of providence in the vicissitudes of history. In consequence, unbearable tensions have arisen between powerful sectors of the Church.

Dissent

Since the mid-nineteenth century theorists of modernization have argued that economic development is attended by widespread cultural change. But this does not mean that sets of beliefs and values perish inevitably and entirely. Cultural values, according to other theorists, have a continuing influence in society despite modernization and development. Data from many surveys show that despite the decline in religious practice in advanced industrialized societies at the end of the twentieth century there is a persistence and even a rise in spirituality. Released from the pressures of traditional practice imposed by ethnic immigrant communities, people in advanced and pluralist societies see their religious lives more as personal quests than familial and ethnic ritual obligation. Discovery, trial, curiosity, a willingness to mix and blend influences-as for example Eastern spirituality with Western-mark the religious journeys people make in prosperous industrial societies. Religion in everyday life is not, nor can it be, promoted or received top-down; religion in these contexts survives or dies as a result of the choices made by individuals and groups of individuals. The apparent privatization of religion appears to be a condition of its survival in a late modern environment, but to the orthodox this smacks of self-help consumerism, "cafeteria" Catholicism.

The Mother Church of Christianity, steeped in tradition and memories of holiness and suffering, insists that the Church, not the individual, must be the ultimate guide. Who could possibly propose that an individual knows better than the 2,000-year wisdom of the Catholic Church, infused, as Catholics believe, with the Holy Spirit?

But what is the Church? And where, and in whom, does the Holy Spirit dwell? Does God's presence in the Church permeate downward and outward-as nowadays it seems-exclusively from the Holy Father in Rome? Or does God dwell in all the faith communities of the world? In the early 1960s the Second Vatican Council attempted to resolve the paradox between the greater and the local Christian communities by restoring an ancient understanding of the meaning of the Church-affirming that each group of Christians gathered around its bishop is in that place, "the fullness of the church, the Spirit's temple, sacrament of Christ." Every Catholic knows instinctively that the latter is true, I certainly feel that to be true in my church in Covent Garden, and yet today it appears all too often that inspiration, guidance, and truth is supposed to flow only from the Roman center.

At the heart of the divisions and fragmentation among Catholics today are running disputes over centralization and devolution, inclusiveness and closure, pluralism and fundamentalism. The issues differ from country to country, from society to society, from culture to culture while the underlying source of conflict remains constant: is human flourishing, through spirituality and religion, better served by freedom or control?

John Paul II has made his position abundantly clear on dissent, whether it comes from individual bishops, theologians, or the voices and actions of the laity. In response to a call from Archbishop John R. Quinn of San Francisco for greater encouragement to moral theologians in September 1987, John Paul said:

It is sometimes said that a large number of Catholics today do not adhere to the teaching of the Church on a number of questions, notably sexual and conjugal morality, divorce and remarriage. . . . It has also been noted that there is a tendency on the part of some Catholics to be selective in their adherence to the Church's moral teaching. It is sometimes claimed that dissent from the magisterium is totally compatible with being a "good Catholic" and poses no obstacle to the reception of the sacraments. This is a grave error . . . bishops should encourage assent to that which is given both to those who proclaim the message and to those to whom it is addressed.

The uncompromising terms in which dogmatic teaching on sexual morality is stated, against the background of the realities of mass "dissent," suggests a denial of the extent and power of the forces driving the spread of secularism. But the "them" and "us" dichotomy, the proclaimers and the receivers, betrays the pyramidal top-down model of centralized Church authority, with the faithful-including the bishops-as passive receptacles of teaching and guidance issuing from the Roman pinnacle, branch managers responding to the orders of the chief executive at the head office.

The faithful, however, are proving to be anything but passive; and whether the Pope likes it or not they are voting with their feet. As a recent editorial in The Tablet puts it, "Some authorities in the Catholic Church fear that societies in which this occurs are lost. In fact it is the Church which is lost unless it can recover and foster true Christian pluralism, while maintaining its ability to draw the lines."

The predicament presents a state of crisis for the coming papacy. Is Catholicism headed for sectarian breakup?

Much depends on the next Pope. An ultra-conservative Pope would likely move to exclude those many millions of Catholics who refuse to abide by the Church's teaching. A recklessly progressive Pope could prompt the voluntary self-exclusion of many groups of traditionalists. Meanwhile, even a neutral Pope could find himself presiding over a Church which is splintering into myriad congregationalist groups.

There are no easy solutions to the divisions within the Catholic Church. What seems clear, however, is that Catholics must rediscover the imperative of Christian love between themselves if they are to avoid breakup.

Tags: Catholicism