Catholicism at a Crossroads: The Present and Future of America's Largest Church [Part 2]

I promised to continue reflections on Catholicism at a Crossroads [2025], the results of polling and analyzing thousands of Catholic responses from across America, and I began in the previous entry on the Book Stream for March 23, 2025, posted below [scroll down]. I learned today that Crossroads is now in the top 3% of Amazon new book sales, so the subject is attracting attention. Again, if you missed the opening post, a cluster of professional sociologists takes an exhaustive read of U.S. Catholics on multiple subjects, with an instrument called “The American Catholic Laity Survey.” This inventory is undertaken every seven years, beginning back in 1987. Having the raw data in hand, the authors then summarize their findings in an eminently readable volume in a way that assists our own understanding and practice of the Faith and the administrative authority and leadership of the national and diocesan churches. The fact that there are successive polls dating back in this case to 1987 allows for a longitudinal view of Church trends.
 
Picking up with Chapter 2 of Crossroads, “Authority,” there is considerable discussion of the relationship of Catholics to American bishops as teachers and shepherds of the Faith, and whether the bishops stand higher or lower in the estimation of the faithful in the present day. The question of whether Church teachings are taken seriously in everyday life management is obviously a global one, not restricted to the U.S. On the other hand, each country, culture, or region sees Catholicism through a different lens where social justice and human life priorities are concerned; in the U.S., that is often a regional/political lens. Boston is not Lincoln, Nebraska. Illinois is not Idaho. Since the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973, the USCCB has opted [1] to convince Catholics to undo the legal abortion ruling of the 1973 Supreme Court decision by voting for anti-abortion national and statewide candidates, and thus logically [2] to form an allegiance with the Republican Party on the matter of abortion, as the GOP has historically included some form of this position in its party platform. [Note that tax free non-profits, including churches, cannot blatantly endorse specific candidates.] The drift of the American hierarchy to the Republican right has precedent in American history. In 1960, running for the presidency as a Roman Catholic and Democrat, John Fitzgerald Kennedy took pains to distinguish papal and episcopal authority from a U.S. president’s civil authority. [History does require that I include here John F. Kennedy’s remark to the press during the 1960 presidential campaign: “Everybody knows that all bishops are Republicans, and all nuns are Democrats.”]
 
Whether as cause or effect, an issue that raises its head throughout this book is an observed tendency of American Catholics to think and act by political party affiliation rather than Gospel teachings or, more specifically, the leadership of their bishops, when engaged in everyday life, including civil participation such as voting. During every presidential election season the USCCB issues a Catholic voters’ guide, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” and distributes it in parish churches. [2023 edition highlighted] Frankly, I had never read a bishops’ voter guide until preparing this post, and I was pleasantly surprised at the wholesale inclusion of the emphases upon the poor and suffering, clearly reflecting the teaching of Pope Francis [and the previous popes of the Vatican II era.]
 
That said, it is also clear from the USCCB document that the bishops have a hierarchy of public morality. See, for example, this excerpt from the 2023 C guide:
 
[Para. 22] There are some things we must never do, as individuals or as a society, because they are always incompatible with love of God and neighbor. Such actions are so deeply flawed that they are always opposed to the authentic good of persons. These are called “intrinsically evil” actions. They must always be rejected and opposed and must never be supported or condoned. A prime example is the intentional taking of innocent human life, as in abortion and euthanasia. In our nation, “abortion and euthanasia have become preeminent threats to human dignity because they directly attack life itself, the most fundamental human good and the condition for all others.”
It is a mistake with grave moral consequences to treat the destruction of innocent human life merely as a matter of individual choice. A legal system that violates the basic right to life on the grounds of choice is fundamentally flawed.
 
Going back to Crossroads, the authors [and other polling services] attempted to determine how many Catholics believe they are free to vote their consciences on matters of abortion and/or euthanasia if such votes run counter to Church teaching. Chapter Five of Crossroads, “Love,” focuses on the wider sweep of family life and specific sexual and gender issues. Chapter Two, today’s subject, examines general respect for the teaching and administrative authority of the Catholic Church, bishops. Thus, it is not surprising that Chapter 2 opens with a narrative of an actual clerical sex abuse case dating to the 1980’s and its subsequent mishandling by an American diocese. The “Spotlight” crisis—national news coverage of the issue of Church personnel and child abuse—pressed the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [or USCCB] in June 2002 to adopt a series of protective and preventative policies known as the ​​Dallas Charter.
 
The first surveys after the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” expose, basis for the 2015 movie, showed laity concern about the bishops’ management of their dioceses vis-à-vis child abuse committed by clerics. An early outlier, an April 2002 poll from Quinnipiac reported that 64% of Catholics favored the resignations of bishops who did not report child abuse to local law enforcement agencies. Later, the CARA-Georgetown Catholic surveyors ran several polls which found a critical stance against bishops which grew progressively worse as more and more malfeasance was discovered. “Favorable” sentiments toward bishops fell from 34% to 22%, meaning that three quarters of the Catholic public--including priests--had major doubts about the apostolic leaders of their dioceses.
 
What is statistically and pastorally troubling today in 2025 is the consistency of the strained relationship between priests and bishops. I think there is a direct relationship between the implementation and fine-tuning of the Dallas Charter that, hard to imagine, is making priests more tense and discouraged. I have seen this quote dozens of times in print in recent years, uttered by a diocesan priest: “My bishop no longer regards me as a spiritual son; he looks upon me as a legal liability.”
 
The unanswered question, though, is whether the recent negative polling regarding American bishops is showing up for the same reasons as it was in 2002+. Times may have changed, and not for the better. I tend to look at the abuse scandal in three phases: [1] the revelation of youthful abuse and the scope of the problem; [2] the discovery of episcopal conspiracy; and [3] the money phase. The third phase might last the longest and send more people out the doors. I was typing and researching yesterday when a news story broke that the Diocese of Albany, N.Y., was divesting one-third of its diocesan holdings to survive. If my math is correct, about 25% of American dioceses have opted for bankruptcy and/or other radical strategies to meet the therapeutic and legal obligations resulting from generations of episcopal neglect.
 
Earlier we talked about the authors’ observations that many Catholics experience Catholicism no further than their parishes, and only the 30% who attend weekly or monthly, by multiple surveys, would know much about such things as the Dallas Charter. [CARA found that in 2003, for example, 50% of Catholics were unaware of the Charter.] Consequently, if your parish did not have a scandal, there may have been an understandable relief that you had somehow “dodged the bullet,” with sympathy for parishes laboring under grief and anger due to the suffering of its vulnerable members there. But given the twenty or more years of media coverage, courtroom testimony, and processing of victims’ claims, settlements, attorneys’ fees, etc., the time has finally come to settle accounts. Given that the bishop of a diocese owns all funds and properties--churches, schools, everything—by virtue of the legal principle of corporation sole, all diocesan entities bear responsible for financial obligations of the diocese. [France, by contrast, does not have this arrangement; churches, including Notre Dame in Paris, are owned by the state.]
 
I think you can see where we are headed here. No one knows precisely how much the American Church has spent and how much it owes, Our Sunday Visitor reported earlier this year: “The Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ $880 million abuse claims settlement, announced Oct. 16, brings the total payouts of U.S. Catholic dioceses for abuse claims since 2004 [italics mine] to more than $5 billion — and possibly more than $6 billion.” Remember, too, that these numbers represent only public settlements. When intense coverage of the crisis began in 2002, investigators learned of previous settlement or compensations dating back forty years or more. If you told me the number was closer to $10 billion, I could believe that.
 
I have been following several dioceses closely, especially those I have particular affection for, such as my home diocese of Buffalo. The crosses of Buffalo priests and laity have been long and bitter, and the shortages of clergy and funding [Buffalo is on the hook for $100,000,000] has led to a wide range of parish closings and sales, including the projected dismantling of my family’s parish, St. Bernadette, in Orchard Park, N.Y. On Christmas Eve last year WKBW-TV interviewed three St. Bernadette parishioners about their predicament, i.e., that their parish sits on desirable real estate if sold.
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[1] Why are we paying for their sins? That’s my first question. It’s their sins, why would you destroy a family of faith? It’s just an ongoing faith-filled community that we built.
[2] I have never been part of a community that is more loving and spiritual than St. Bernadette…Honestly, I wish I could move elsewhere, so that I could be in a diocese that would listen and will respond when we have concerns.
[3] We feel very strongly that St. Bernadette is a strong, vibrant parish. [The Diocese] wants the land it’s plain and simple.
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I can understand that for professional researchers it would be very difficult to create a question or sequence of questions to tease out the resentment of Catholics about perceived and real consequences to their parishes and schools over the misdeeds of priests they never knew or bishops who were woefully slow to protect their dioceses. Crossroads goes on in Chapter 2 to assess the level of trust in the Church and bishops on a wide range of questions regarding moral teachings and authority, including abortion. But I fear that the office of episcopal teachings has been battered in the United States to the degree that it may take fifty years to repair. It will be up to the authors of Crossroads to research and then deliver this message over the next 6-7 years before we can take the elementary steps to restore trust in the office of the successor of the Apostles.

We will take time to discuss issues raised by Chapter 3, "Race," in about three weeks.