Chapter # 7 Honest Criticism of Christianity

[Billy Rojas]

 

 

 

 Chapter # 7

Honest Criticism of Christianity

 

Crisis in the Catholic Church

 

 

The statistics about Catholic decline in America are undeniable.  There are different

measures, not all surveys focus on the exact same problems, but however you

look at it, the numbers are catastrophic.

 

 We can start with a Mark Silk article published by Religion News Service on

November 19, 2018, under the title: "What’s wrong with American Catholicism."

In so many words:

"Self-identified Catholics were 25 percent of the U.S. population when Vatican II

wrapped up in 1965 and they remained so until 2005, keeping pace with a growing

U.S. population. Between 2000 and 2005, however, native-born Catholics

(overwhelmingly white) began leaving the Church in droves, declining

from 21.5 percent of the population to 19.7 percent."

Other surveys still peg the number at 21% plus-or-minus but the idea is the same.

The article noted that research results of the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate

at Georgetown University tell us that  church marriages declined 18 percent in the 1970s

and 36 percent in the 2000s.  Similarly, while baptisms (for all ages) remained about

the same each year until 2005;  from that point on they have basically fallen off a cliff.

 

Another study reported that a Pew survey from 2015 informs us that while 32% of

Americans were raised as Catholics, a third of that number walks out at some point

in their lives. In 2015, actually  a few years earlier based on most recent available

statistics, just 21% were still Catholic.  Not that Protestants don't have problems,

they do, its just that their rate of membership loss is only half that of Catholics.

Another study put things this way:  Back in 1965 some 55% of Catholics attended mass

on a regular basis. As of the year 2000 the number had dropped to 22%, less than

half as many. Also cut in half is the baptismal rate, from 1,300,000 baptisms in 1965

to 670,000 in 2016.

A USC AnnenbergMedia study discussed by Mia Speier tells us that in 2017 the

exodus of the young from the Catholic Church was in full swing: "Nearly 12.8%

of Americans between 18 and 25 are former Catholics."  Like defections from

Protestant ranks, the great majority quit the Church before they turned twenty.

Self reporting says that significant numbers 'knew' by age 10 or 11 that

they would not be staying.

For a while mass 'deconversions' could be more-or-less shrugged off; from about 1995

until 2005 or so, there was a flood of mostly illegal immigrants from Mexico and

other Spanish speaking countries into the US. Thus for each white Catholic who quit

there was one Latino to take his or her place. Then, increasing each year since that time,

more and more whites left and fewer and fewer Mexicans, etc, took their places.

By 2015 there was a full blown crisis.

What is going on?

There are several kinds of answers to the question.

Mark Silk offers this explanation:

Beginning in the 1990s, increasing numbers of Americans have disengaged from religion,

across the board  —Jew and Gentile, black and white, rich and poor. Just as regional

differences persist, so do the circumstances in particular religious communities.

The recurrent abuse crisis has not done American Catholicism any good. Nor has

the priest shortage. Nor has conservative resistance to the agenda of Pope Francis."

But one important factor is simply that "American Catholics have been like

other Americans in losing interest in religion."

Its not only Americans and American Catholics.  See the Rod Dreher article

for January 3, 2019, "Ireland's Catholic Collapse," published at

The American Conservative website.  In 1979 Pope John Paul spoke

before a million Catholics in Dublin, a huge percentage of the population

of the entire nation. The Church was Ireland, it was approximately as Catholic

as the Vatican city state. Now the country is about a non-Catholic

as any nation can get. In just four decades a thousand years of history

was swept away.

What happened might best be described by a journalist Dreher quoted,

Gerard Howlin of the Irish Examiner. A big part of the problem, said Howlin, was that

"in Catholic Ireland, nearly everyone practised a religion that, there is reason to suspect,

almost no-one really believed in."

Another reason cited by Howlin was that the Catholic clergy were  "so  busy....

running vast organisations that not just overlapped the State but outbid it,

it is understandable that the clergy had so little time for religion." Plus the bishops

"were local chieftains. They were, in so far as there was one, the only

social project in existence."

But such theories only scratch the surface.  The fact is that "mass apostasy" is endemic

to European culture and, while this was not the case for the United States until the

1990s, it now is also true here. Besides Ireland, by the way, the Catholic Church

is in serious trouble in the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, even Italy itself. Not

even to mention Brazil and various other Latin American nations. Almost the only

bright spots on he map are Poland, possibly the Philippines, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Also gone are the once dominant Catholic establishments in Quebec and Boston.

And forget about Mexico, too.

This is a massive disaster.

As Howlin put is apropos of Ireland, but an observation that applies

to many Catholic countries:  "Catholicism will continue, but the panoply

of the institution will collapse within a decade, under the demographic pressure

of an aging clergy."

But it is crucial to face another major problem. He did not cause this mess, a lot of

the blame must be laid at the feet of John Paul II, especially in the last five years of

his papacy as the ravages of Parkinson's disease turned him into an invalid

unable to carry out the responsibilities of his office, and Benedict proved himself

to be a ridiculously ineffective ideologue without the smarts or the courage to

reverse the rot, but now there is Pope Francis and he is making matters even worse.

This is the thesis of a major article by Andrew Brown from the October 27, 2017 edition

of  The Guardian newspaper entitled: "The war against Pope Francis." A few highlights:

• Many influential Catholics in the United States are converts from various Protestant

denominations. A good percentage were motivated to switch "by the shallowness

of the intellectual resources they were brought up with, but much more by a sense

that liberal Protestantism was dying precisely because it no longer offered

any alternative to the society around it"

• There is no question that the Church needs to change; the 21st century is structurally

unlike any previous time and its challenges are unprecedented. But how far can the Church go?

As one bishop has put it, partly in reaction to various proposals made by Pope Francis:

"What comes from the Enemy cannot and must not be assimilated. You can not join Christ

and Belial! What Nazi-Fascism and Communism were in the 20th century, Western

homosexual and abortion ideologies and Islamic Fanaticism are today."

• On social issues like immigration,  gender feminism, race relations, etc., the Vatican
  

hierarchy needs to respond to the concerns and criticisms of  the intellectual class

in the Church.   This means headliners like Pat Buchanan,  Bill O’Reilly, Michael Novak,

and Steve Bannon. In Bannon's case he has emphasized a fact that the papacy would

much prefer it could ignore, his contention that we  -all of us in Europe and America-

are “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism "

• There is a huge problem that Francis simply cannot grasp. In his view, immigrants 

are hapless victims of "rapacious and destructive capitalism, which has set catastrophic

climate change in motion."  However, while this characterization of capitalism

has some merit, (1) it is hardly the whole story and overlooks the many benefits

of the capitalist system, and (2) most of the displaced people are Muslims.  This

is not much different than saying they are Fascists, and in the worst cases saying

that they are latter-day Nazis.  In what way is it sane to admit a flood of immigrants

who live by values that are antithetical to everything regarded as sacred by the Church

and regarded as necessary to Western democracy? Of course, you would not know

this if you have never studied the critical literature about Islam,  but that is

also the point. This pope, like his predecessors, is woefully uninformed

about an issue of vital importance to the future of his Church.

• There is also the issue of divorce and remarriage. For most Protestants this is not an

issue at all. Or at most is a peripheral issue. Nobody likes divorce but sometimes

it is the best of bad alternatives, especially in the case of abused women.  And in point

if fact, in actual practice it is fairly common (it depends on local dioceses) for communion

to be given to divorced and remarried Catholics. Just about everyone winks at this.

But the minute that anyone  -especially the Pope-  raises the possibility that a new

official policy would be a good idea, all hell breaks loose, so to speak. And some

of the loudest protestors against changing the policy are people who, themselves,

have benefited from de facto toleration of communion for the remarried.

As the Guardian article put it:

"The rich and powerful have always exploited loopholes. When they want to shuck off

a wife and remarry, a good lawyer will find some way to prove the first marriage

was a mistake, not something entered into in the spirit the church demands,

and so it can be wiped from the record – in the jargon, annulled. This applies especially

to conservatives: Steve Bannon has managed to divorce all three of his wives, but perhaps

the most scandalous contemporary example is that of Newt Gingrich, who led the

Republican takeover of Congress in the 1990s and has since reinvented himself

as a Trump ally. Gingrich broke up with his first wife while she was being treated

for cancer, and while married to his second wife had an eight-year affair with Callista Bisek,

a devout Catholic, before marrying her in church." Callista has since become the

US ambassador to the Vatican, hubby in tow.

• Further, the Guardian discussed the finances of the Catholic Church. This is also a very

serious matter. There is much more to be said but as an overview of a few of the

worst problems here is a synopsis:   "The Vatican bank was infamous for the services

it offered to money-launderers. The process of making saints  – something John Paul II

had done at an unprecedented rate –   had become an enormously expensive racket.

(The Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi estimated the going rate for a canonisation

at €500,000 per halo.) The finances of the Vatican itself were a horrendous mess."

• All of which has led to sometimes open calls for Francis to resign or face charges

of heresy. As The Guardian reported:  "Last year one cardinal, backed by a few

retired colleagues, raised the possibility of a formal declaration of heresy

– the wilful rejection of an established doctrine of the church, a sin punishable

by excommunication."  That was followed by an open letter signed by 62 prominent

Catholics that accused Francis of seven specific counts of heretical teaching."

• In so many words, while it took Americans eight years to realize what a terrible mistake

• it was to elect a ridiculously unprepared social worker as president, the Catholic Church
• did not learn the lesson and at the first opportunity elected it own favorite social worker
• to the papacy.  The results are similar  -and just as disastrous.
• 
  

No wonder that an archbishop from Kazakhstan said that this pope has allowed

Satan to enter the Church.

It isn't that Francis has nothing worthwhile to say.  The guardian summed up

one example quite nicely:

"In December 2015, Francis gave his traditional Christmas address to the curia,

and he pulled no punches: He accused them of arrogance, “spiritual Alzheimer’s”,

“hypocrisy that is typical of the mediocre and a progressive spiritual emptiness

that academic degrees cannot fill”, as well as empty materialism and an addiction

to gossip and backbiting  – not the sort of thing you want to hear from the boss

at the office party."

But this is a war and the Pope  -as his critics see it-  instead of seeking to invade Normandy

has chosen, instead, to focus his energies on reorganizing supply depots in North Africa.

If, that is, he is capable of understanding this metaphor.

As the article concluded: "To guarantee Francis’ changes will last, the church

has to accept them."

So far, no dice.