Should the Church Be "Leaner and Meaner"?

Not "mean" in the sense of "cruel," of course, but shooting for less numbers of benchwarmers and Cafeteria Catholics in favor of smaller numbers of the more orthodox and enthusiastic. The Holy Father seems to think so.

Here is the most recent e-letter from Catholic Answers founder Karl Keating:

TOPIC: IS THE CHURCH LIKELY TO SHRINK--AND SHOULD IT?

Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
The answer to that question is: It depends on where you live.In some places the Church is growing fast--Africa, for example, where Catholics were 12 percent of the population 25 years ago but now are 17 percent. The talk in such places is not about whether the Church will or should shrink; it is about how to manage runaway growth. It is a nice problem to have.

In other places Church participation is in decline, Europe being the most obvious example, but America is in this category too. A few decades ago three out of four American Catholics attended Mass regularly. Now the proportion is one out of four. It is a little hard to brag about having 65 million American Catholics when only 16 million of them show up on Sundays.

Catholics are 23 percent of the U.S. population. If you subtract the nominal ("Christmas and Easter") Catholics and consider only regular Mass-goers, you can say that active Catholics are a mere 6 percent of the national population. Using the same formula, forty years ago they were 18 percent.

Once upon a time Hollywood feared the Legion of Decency because the studios could not afford to have priests instruct tens of millions of Catholics not to attend particular movies. There is no such fear today. There are proportionately fewer Catholics in the pews to hear such instructions, and no such instructions are given anyway.

Older Catholics can remember a time when American bishops were paid attention to not just by Catholics but by the general public, even by political leaders. If you were a politician, you may not have agreed with someone like Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, but you didn't cross him either. He had clout.

Does any American prelate have clout today? I can't think of one. They have no clout partly because they do not try to exercise any but also because to have clout you need to have a committed or sizeable constituency behind you. Six percent is not sizeable and does not suggest much commitment.

How did we come to this pass? Ironically, the Catholic Church's present-day unimportance in the U.S. is largely a consequence of a "big tent" mentality: Church leaders have not wanted to lose anyone, no matter how marginally Catholic. The result has been a Church that is big and flaccid and almost without influence. (Who pays attention to USCCB position papers?)

For the Church in this country to regain influence, it needs to shrink first, on the principle that if you want a fruit tree to grow and to produce good fruit, you must prune it aggressively.

This is precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been quoted as saying about the Church as a whole: A smaller Church is more likely to be a "creative minority." A Church from which the heterodox take an early retirement will be internally more cohesive and can set itself some modest goals, such as getting back to the business of converting the whole world.

A smaller, more orthodox, and more cohesive Church, one relieved of the burden of people who maintain membership in it primarily in order to oppose it (as some people remain registered in a political party only so they can vote against certain candidates in the primary elections)--such a Church is free to grow. It is free to be itself. It will end up doing more good for more people than it could have while paralyzed through internal bickerings.

In last week's E-Letter I mentioned Rosemary Radford Ruether, whom admirers describe as "a pioneer Christian feminist theologian over 30 years." Her current shtick is "female divinities." Christianity, she says, was constructed for the benefit of men and therefore presents God as male. What is needed is a parallel construction for the benefit of women. She is a great fan of "goddess spirituality."

This is not new thinking--in one form or another it has been around since the sixties, and it certainly is not Christian thinking. If Ruether's theology were spread out before you, without your being told which religion, if any, she subscribed to, you would not guess that what was limned was Catholicism.

Why do people such as Ruether cling to the title but not to the content of the faith? Partly it is because of clout. What little they have is a consequence of their being thought of as Catholics. If Ruether described herself as "a non-Christian New Ager," would her writings be taken as seriously as they are? Of course not. Where is Starhawk now?

I have no insight into what Pope Benedict will do to make the Church a "creative minority." I think the Church in this country will trend that way no matter what.

Someone like Rosemary Radford Ruether may stick it out until the bitter end, but over time many nominal Catholics will conform to truth-in-advertising principles and will start calling themselves something else. They will give up pretending to be what they manifestly are not. More importantly, they will give up trying to make the Church into what it is not. They will find another sandbox to play in.

Even though things will go this way regardless, the Pope is positioned to give real momentum to the shift, and I hope he does, for everyone's sake. He could invite some people, particularly those with notoriety, to find their religious home elsewhere, but I hardly expect him to do that. I don't think he needs to.

All he needs to do is to remove their wiggle room by defining and reiterating Catholic teaching ever more strongly.

The people who attend Call to Action conferences still push for women's ordination, arguing that the male-only priesthood is a cultural artifact, not an irreformable dogma. They pay scant attention to "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" or to the later dubium, signed by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, which affirmed the infallibility of the Church's teaching that woman cannot be ordained.

But what if Pope Benedict issued a decree, couched in the plain and traditional language of infallible teachings, saying that it is now and always will be impossible to ordain women, take it or leave it?

I think a fair number would leave it, and in the long run that would be good for them and for the Church. It would be good for them because they no longer would be living a lie, and there would be hope that, at length, they would wake up, see the wisdom of the Catholic position, and come home--as fully Catholic. I've seen it happen.

Until next time,
Karl

What do YOU think?