The other night we had guests for dinner, a young couple in their late 20’s or early 30’s. Topics ranged all over the lot. Towards the end of the meal we even got into politics and religion, two areas we normally stay away from. On the subject of religion, the husband volunteered that he had been raised Catholic but no longer considered himself Catholic. His wife told the same story.
In neither case was it anything traumatic, nor one single issue, that drove them away; it was just a slow disillusionment with the Catholic Church and so eventually they quit going to Mass and stopped practicing altogether. A “long goodbye,” in other words, the title of a recent article in Commonweal magazine by Cathleen Kaveny, which typifies the experience of a large number of Catholics who have left the church over the last four decades.
In a companion article, Peter Steinfels, who also serves as a religious editor for the New York Times, cites a February 2008 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which found that one of every three adult Americans who were raised Catholic have left the church. If these former Catholics were “to form a single church,” observes Steinfels, “they would constitute the second largest church in the nation.”
What went wrong? Some say it’s the church rigid stand on abortion and sexual matters, including homosexuality. Others cite the church’s treatment of women as second-class citizens, and the refusal to even think about women priests or a married clergy, despite the steady drop in a celibate male clergy. The sexual abuse scandal was a major factor, of course, but the steady erosion of Catholics began way before the sexual abuse scandal came to light. So, my guess is that in many cases, it’s all of the above and none of the above.
Many former Catholics that I have run into over the years told me the Catholic church, no longer “did it for them.” It didn’t provide them the spiritual sustenance and uplift they were looking for, so they left and joined other Christian denominations which better met their spiritual needs. Others, including members of my own extended family, found what they were looking for in Buddhism. Still others are no longer affiliated with any formal religious body.
On a personal note, I’m still a Catholic for reasons spelled out in a confessional piece I wrote recently (“Why I’m Still a Catholic”) and shared with family members and friends, but I can totally understand and respect those who have come to an opposite conclusion and have chosen another path.
As I recall my own journey as a Catholic over the last several decades, I too have become disillusioned with the church hierarchy, with its authoritarian approach and rigid focus on a few moral issues, such as abortion and homosexuality, its treatment of women and its steadfast refusal, as a result, to consider the issue of women priests. Much of the hierarchy, it seems to me, including the majority of U.S. Catholic bishops, has become a nest of Pharisees, running around in their funny hats and dresses issuing excommunications and refusing the Eucharist to those who don’t toe the line. In so doing, they have become the very kind of narrow-minded legalists that Jesus so roundly condemned in his ministry here on earth.
That said, even if much of the hierarchy has lost touch with the church’s vision of striving to be a source of love and compassion and a beacon of hope for the broken and the hopeless, that spirit still burns brightly in many Catholic organizations. Coming to mind are organizations like the Catholic Relief Services, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, Catholic Relief Services USA, communities of priests and nuns, and countless other individuals and organizations that are doing the real work of the church in their tireless promotion of social justice for the poor and dispossessed around the world. They are working shoulder to shoulder with other humanitarian organizations to help people of all faiths, or no faiths, in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and here in America’s schools and hospitals and inner cites.
That is the Catholic church I admire so greatly, hoping and praying that over time the official, hierarchical church will wake up and catch up with our dedicated Catholic workers in the vineyard who are responding every day to the core Christian call to love and care for one another, especially our sisters and brothers most in need.
Gerald E. Lavey
Here, here. As a Catholic who married an Episcopal woman, and who is raising two daughters as Episcopalians, I remain Catholic. People who are my age generally assume that when someone says Catholic, it means they were raised Catholic. They seem surprised that I actually am Catholic. I am, too, sometimes. But this helps express how I feel, good, bad and ugly. Thanks, Dad.
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