Crossroads Podcast: The Catholic Trads Are Coming!

If you paid attention to American Catholic trends in recent decades, then you’ve probably noticed some depressing numbers. Let’s start with material from a scary 2015 Pew Research Center report (it’s safe to say the statistics have not improved):

Nearly one-third of American adults (31.7%) say they were raised Catholic. Among that group, fully 41% no longer identify with Catholicism. This means that 12.9% of American adults are former Catholics, while just 2% of U.S. adults have converted to Catholicism from another religious tradition. No other religious group … has such a lopsided ratio of losses to gains.

Now, leap ahead to the much-discussed Associated Press feature — “A step back in time': America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways” — that served as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast.

Note that, in this case, the research quoted by AP focuses on trends in the decades that followed the ecclesiastical earthquake called the Second Vatican Council:

In 1970, more than half of America’s Catholics said they went to Mass at least once a week. By 2022, that had fallen to 17%, according to CARA, a research center affiliated with Georgetown University. Among millennials, the number is just 9%.

Even as the U.S. Catholic population has jumped to more than 70 million, driven in part by immigration from Latin America, ever-fewer Catholics are involved in the church’s most important rites. Infant baptisms have fallen from 1.2 million in 1965 to 440,000 in 2021, CARA says. Catholic marriages have dropped by well over two-thirds.

This Associated Press feature is framed with bad news — that progressive Catholics in the United States are experiencing pain because of the rising numbers of young priests and young adults (especially parents with, wink-wink, lots of children) seeking a more pro-Catholic Catechism approach to faith. The feature’s thesis statement:

Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.

The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world.

Wait a minute: Are the Catholic conservatives out of step with the growing churches of Africa, Asia and much of the Global South, or are they clashing with the shrinking churches of Europe and parts of North and South America?

Also, the AP team never asked if the documents of Vatican II actually mandated “casual indifference to church doctrine,” parishioners skipping Confession and a modernized approach to worship that ditched centuries of Catholic tradition and music. And is it accurate to say that traditional Catholics reject “parish food pantries”? Catholic orthodoxy rejects efforts to help the poor?

The big question: Is the AP story arguing that it was traditional forms of worship and doctrine that drove off millions of Catholics during the past 50+ years?

Back to the Associated Press. Consider the sad story of the once-progressive parish in Madison, Wisconsin, that is described at the beginning and end of the feature.

The choir director, a fixture at St. Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone. Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe.

So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned.

At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell.

This conservative tide has caused lots of pain and, at the end of the story, AP suggests that this trend hurt this parish (and thus will hurt many others).

That leads to this conclusion:

For decades, many traditional Catholics have wondered if the church would — and perhaps should — shrink to a smaller but more faithful core.

In ways, that’s how St. Maria Goretti looks today. The 6:30 a.m. Friday Mass … is increasingly popular among young people. But once-packed Sunday Masses now have empty pews. Donations are down. School enrollment plunged.

Some who left have gone to more liberal parishes. Some joined Protestant churches. Some abandoned religion entirely.

Thus, it was traditional doctrine — preaching sin, confession, repentance, etc. — that drove off millions of Catholics. Now, young Catholic priests and families are dragging parishes “a step back” into those dark times, sending progressives out the exit doors.

Oh, and who suggested that the Catholic Church may need to “shrink to a smaller but more faithful core”?

Ah, the AP editors missed a chance to quote an important Catholic leader who made that point in 1969. This former liberal even became pope. Thus, consider his words (drawn from this “On Religion” column):

"From the crisis of today the church of tomorrow will emerge — a church that has lost much. … As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members."

That was Father Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, long before he became a cardinal who served as the theological partner of St. John Paul II. Eventually, of course, he became Pope Benedict XVI. My column added:

The future pope predicted a "crystallization" process creating a "more spiritual church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the left as with the right. … It will make her poor and cause her to become the church of the meek."

Maybe the AP feature should have quoted Pope Benedict XVI by name?

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