Catholicism at a Crossroads: The Present and Future of America's Largest Church [1]

I started reading Catholics at a Crossroads this past weekend, and I can see already that this may be one of the most intriguing and colorful analyses of Mother Church to come down the pike in a while. Released by New York University Press earlier this year [2025], Crossroads was written by five noted analysts of Catholicism who examined several major polls of Catholics taken since 2017, analyzed their questionnaires and proceeded to interview Catholics across the country. They then used the results to project strategies for the “New Evangelization” for future generations: how to become Christ to the world without tripping over your own two feet. Call them philosopher-pollsters if you like.
 
A few points to bear in mind here. Crossroads was published by New York University Press, which is not conjoined to a Catholic institution of higher learning as opposed to, say, Catholic University Press to Catholic University. Second, polling and listening to the Catholic faithful is a dicey business; you never know quite what you are going to hear. My impression is that polling and research into American Catholicism is moving more to the public sector—i.e., universities and research centers unaffiliated to Catholic authority and financially not dependent upon fiscal support of the hierarchy. Bishops do not like to hear bad news, which is also the reason that many American dioceses and/or parishes provided very minimal or no support of Pope Francis’ call to Synodality, where laity would have had opportunities to meet and offer insight, criticism, and possibly roadmaps for the holiness and mission of the Church, to be forwarded to Rome. And finally, poll research is not an exact science, as Crossroads readily admits.
 
You probably have heard of two recent examples of “embarrassing research” still talked about [even anguished about] today. In 2018 the Catholic “Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate” [or CARA, as it is known], teamed up with a Catholic publisher, St. Mary’s Press, to produce “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young People.” [2018]. This study, with a target population of young adults aged 15-25, discovered that youth make the decision to disengage from Catholicism as early as age ten, and 18% report making such a decision between the ages of 5 to 9. I know one child in the 5-9 cohort who is refusing to make First Communion this spring.
 
I cannot recall an episcopal-institutional response to the St. Mary’s—CARA study aside from the usual sidebar tut-tutting on social media about deficiencies in parenting. One thing I am enjoying about Crossroads is its commentaries on other related studies, including the St. Mary’s findings, to clarify the strategies and interpretations of other pollsters. Crossroads interviews a wide range of church officials and laity and its efforts to seek the views of other professionals in the Church with a critical eye. The executive director of the National Black Sisters’ Conference offered this: “Children really are just incredibly bored with Mass and liturgy and just don’t understand the rituals that go along with it.” [p. 36] In my parish church—and most others—if you are a seven-year-old kid standing further back than row three or four, you spend much of the Mass looking straight into the posterior of the adult in front of you. And let’s face it: we adults are rarely set on fire by the rites, either. Crossroads pairs the childhood affiliation question with statistics on adults who attend Sunday Mass infrequently due to work conflicts and “busyness,” judging correctly, I believe, that church worship is impacted by the pace of family life in society. Tired parents are not going to fight the attendance battle.
 
Nothing was done by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop in response to the St. Mary’s Press/CARA study. However, another study riled American Bishops to a hurried and extensive/expensive response because it addressed a core doctrinal belief of Catholicism: The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In 2019, PEW Research, ironically, an independent firm unrelated to any religious tradition, reported its findings that only one-third of Catholics believe in Transubstantiation, the doctrine that defines holy communion as the reception of the real Body and Blood of Christ. Many Catholics, per PEW, believe the Eucharist is a symbolic Catholic fellowship of bread and wine only, by a ratio of 70%-30%.
 
The study was not targeted at Catholicism per se. The PEW study reviewed the knowledge and practice status of Americans in general by drawing up four “flagship beliefs” of each religion. [Another question in the survey revealed that many Catholics believe in Purgatory.]  The best Catholic news summary of the study’s release I could find comes from the Brooklyn Tablet/Crux news services, whose editors did not sound overly surprised.
 
The U.S. Bishops, however, were stunned. I spent much of this week wading through diocesan lamentations on-line from the time of the PEW release. At its next scheduled meeting, the USCCB budgeted for a three-year Celebration of Eucharistic Devotion, culminating in a national Eucharistic Congress and solemn Mass at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The projected cost was announced at $28 million, but the actual outlay and promotion are described here. CARA, meanwhile, sprung into action with its own study of the Eucharistic question with deeper analysis that examined PEW’s methodology and conclusions, but CARA’s findings and analyses of such profound questions would take a long time, and the bishops felt they could not wait several years for a public reaction and renewed mission in regard to the Eucharist. CARA’s conclusion was a correlation between weekly Mass participants and positive outcomes of faith on doctrinal questions such as Transubstantiation.
 
In its commentary on this episode in recent American history, Crossroads draws several conclusions about the structure of the Church in the U.S. Practically speaking, the recent Eucharistic Congress was probably a helpful rejuvenation for the deeply committed, but its publicity and events would have been know only to “church regulars.” Inactive Catholics and the unchurched were untouched by the Eucharistic Congress. This, the authors point out, is a critical issue for the American Catholic Church; we are myopic and local, and our gestalt of the faith is our local “support system.” What happens in Rome, or one’s home diocese, rarely crosses the radar at the basic affective level where we live.
 
Another point of analysis is the value of “difference” in social structures. A good case in point: those who denied or did not know the doctrine of Transubstantiation did not reject the idea or the importance of a common sharing of a meal based upon the unity of Christ around the table. As an evangelizer, I look at this population as siblings in faith, waiting for embrace. No one’s belief in Real Presence is perfect. When I receive communion, I pray: “I believe, Lord. Help my unbelief.” Having had years of Catholic education, I know enough to realize that Eucharistic bread and wine is the touchpoint of the Incarnation—God entering the human dimension. Full understanding of this mystery is not possible in this human life. The doubters among us keep us honest, steering us clear of a religious “knowledge” akin to the Pythagorean Theorem. Faith is not mathematics.
 
Two other points in Chapter One examine the issues of preaching and what the authors refer to as the relationship of the structured Church to the “loosely tethered.” [pp. 53-56] Regarding the latter, “poor first dates” are a major roadblock to our witnessing of Christ’s love and welcoming the “loosely tethered.” I cannot put a number on the people who approached the Church for help or a request and were treated, frankly, with suspicion, bureaucracy, personal questions about their moral lives, sacramental history, or my favorite word here, “hoops.” Crossroads does not, in any sense, denigrate the need for divinely inspired order in the Catholic Church. But it notes that there is an appropriate time and an order for everything approaching the Church, and that pastors need an exquisite skill in discerning the best order of interventions in assisting an individual into the full community of faith, or in keeping a struggling believer in the family. Questions on the use of church envelopes is not the first step to “welcome to the family.”
 
We will pick up this book review/analysis in two weeks. Chapter 2 deals with bishops and their relationships to their people, particularly after the child abuse scandals and the various dimensions of its impact upon the Church