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FIRST, LET’S BRING SCIENCE TO THE TABLE…
I am an advocate of integrating the social sciences into the ministry and general life of the Church. Science is not perfect and carries on in perpetual trial and error, but we cannot live what the ancient Greeks called “the good life” without the best understandings available of who we are as human beings. Failure to understand how the human species works has and will continue to hamstring our sacramental lives as we attempt to deliver the Good News in our faith formation efforts with young and old. In the opening lines of his epic, The Gift of Therapy, [2002], Irwin Yalom recalls the contribution of Karen Horney, M.D., [1885-1952] who articulated the early goals of psychoanalysis nearly a century ago: “If obstacles are removed, Horney believed, the individual will develop into a mature, fully realized adult, just as an acorn will develop into an oak tree.” [p. 1] Last January, sitting through days of state psychology recertification workshops, I was struck by the shallowness of so much of the present-day mental health landscape. My fellow practitioners have ceased to be scientists in the true sense of the word, and our patients have come to expect truly little from us. When I was practicing full time, the men patients would often begin immediately with the request/demand: “Teach me some techniques.” [For psychiatrists, the requested shortcut remedy is “write me a prescription for Valium.”] Clients often had little interest in richer introspection, and third-party insurance companies would reimburse about 5% of the process anyway. [Freud saw his patients every day; he only saw rich patients.] Much the same can be true of sacraments. I harkened back to my confessional days of years ago. “Skip the advice and get to the absolution, father.” During my January study blitz—which I passed, by the way--I was feeling grateful that I was born into the Catholic tradition which so strongly emphasizes the dignity of life from conception to the grave. Our prolife creed is indeed the heart that beats in the body of the Church. To be born and baptized means that every word, every action, is an extension of God’s love and life within us; a main reason we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation, by the way. The challenge, though, is creating a unique and continuing support and growth environment for every baptized person, recognizing that every baptized person of any age carries a unique psycho-spiritual DNA. What is missing in our Church—and in our society, for that matter--is the will of leaders and members of the Church to listen to each other, a breakdown which lies at the heart of many mental health pathologies, too. Consider faith formation at any age and in any form. If we are teachers of the Faith, we often come to this ministry with our briefcase of authority, and we talk. True, we use “group formats” as in the catechumenate, but with nothing approaching a medical/psychological appreciation of what a group is empowered to achieve. To return to Dr. Horney’s metaphor of the acorn, we talk too much and listen not at all, making of ourselves obstacles, not facilitators, of the search for self. You can kill a young oak tree with an overabundance of manure. If we believe in the sacredness of life, and if there is truth to the theology of the sacraments of initiation—that we are born of God and receive the living presence of the Holy Spirit in our very being—our role as fellow Christians and teachers, as Yalom might put it, is removing the obstacles and cultivating the full bloom of the “trees” in our midst. The studies I posted on March 23 in that day’s Café “Books” post, reveal a highly active religious discernment among young people. Several readers expressed surprise to me that a significant number of former Catholics told pollsters they decided to leave the Church between the ages of 5 and 9. [Quite coincidentally, the Archdiocese of Baltimore just announced it is moving the age of Confirmation back to…you guessed it…9.] What’s going on here? “I AM NOT MAKING FIRST COMMUNION!” Meaning? I don’t mean to overwork the word “unique,” but each of us is, in the sacramental realm and the scientific world, unique. The Bible puts it well: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” [Psalm 139:13] I wonder if we err by talking about sacraments in the collective, as in “first communion classes,” or even “ordination classes.” Or, for that matter, even Sunday parish Masses. In fairness, since Vatican II, our catechetics and liturgy books have stressed the importance of “community,” as a counterbalance to the older terminology of the Mass as a sacrifice, as I learned 70 years ago. But each sacramental encounter is a very personal drama, a duality of God’s personal grace and my human situation in that moment. Looking at a first communion candidate, a spouse on wedding day, or a candidate for Holy Orders on the floor of a cathedral, we can never say that each is a clone of the candidate next to them. Each is living out a personal drama, a template for future life or a wrestling match with the present. Even more reason, then, for my curiosity when I learned that a young child—whose family is known to me—put her foot down and announced that she is not going to make her First Communion this spring. I would give $100 to sit and listen to her reason[s]. Given that First Communion occurs in the first or second grade, most commonly around the age of 7 or 8, and having read the studies that children opt out of the Catholic Church as early as 5 to 9 years old [CARA-St. Mary’s Press study, 2018], I went to my bookcase and blew the dust off my human development library to find the works of the father of modern human development theories, Erik Erikson. He is famous for his theory of the eight stages of human development, that life is a progression of crises which must be solved before moving to the next stage. Children in the 7–8-year-old range fall into Stage Four of Erikson’s progression, called the “Industry vs. Inferiority” stage. I am not doing justice to its nuances here, but this is the stage where a child gives objective thought to his or her place in society, by comparing achievements with peers and developing the ability to read feedback from people in authority. Wikipedia adds this: “Additionally, the child is asking many questions to build knowledge of the world. If the questions earn responses that are critical and condescending, the child will also develop feelings of guilt. Success in this stage leads to the virtue of purpose, which is the normal balance between the two extremes.” Failure, of course, costs us a promising Catholic. Bottom line: Stage Four is the age of independently “sizing things up” for the first time in the real world. At the very least, stage four is an introduction to “street smarts,” the ability to tell when you are hearing the truth from peers and authority figures and when you are getting the con. Unfortunately, the capacity for abstract thinking—like, maybe somebody meant well when they told you Santa Claus was making a list—comes often at a later stage. If you think about it, catechetics makes some big promises in general, and I bought the con 100% at sixth grade Confirmation. We were promised we would feel stronger and more confident, so powerful was the Holy Ghost. Well, I came home feeling exactly the same as before, so much so that I sat up late thinking about the contradiction. In retrospect, I suppose I did receive the Gift of Wisdom that night, but it didn’t feel much like a gift then. The next year puberty hit me like a category five hurricane, and I stopped worrying about religion, at least for a while. If, as studies have shown, sizeable percentages of adult Catholics do not understand or do not believe in Transubstantiation, it stands to reason that children may have doubts, through no fault of their own. Why are young people denied the right to question, to doubt, to object—rights that baptized adults enjoy. Eucharistic faith calls for a measure of abstract thinking that is beyond the faculties of the 7-8 year old cohort [though there are exceptions] but concrete reasoning is well-enough developed for the young candidate to question the process of the First Communion event for reason[s] we adults might understand if we took the time to really listen to the thinking of the young…who can, if taken seriously, serve up an unbridled articulation of realities that we adults routinely side step because, in our older conventional mores, it is much easier to live in a world without “controversy.” There is no shame in admitting that we can’t answer their arguments and critiques and instead suggesting that “maybe this is something we can figure out together.” First Communion at ages 7 or 8 is a new practice in the Roman Catholic Church. In 1910, per Wikipedia, Pope Pius X “issued the decree Quam singulari, which changed the age at which Communion could be received from 12 to 7 years old, the age of discretion. The pope lowered the age because he wished to impress the event on the minds of children and stimulate their parents to new religious observance; this decree was found unwelcome in some places due to the belief that parents would withdraw their children early from Catholic schools, now that First Communion was carried out earlier. Pius X even personally distributed First Communion to a four-year-old boy the day after the child was presented to him and demonstrated an exceptional understanding of the meaning of the sacrament. When people would criticize Pius X for lowering the age of reception, he simply quoted the words of Jesus, "let the little children come to me". Intriguing, isn’t it, that Pius X would designate age 7 as “the age of reason?” The 1917 Code of Canon Law codified this age for the universal Church as the marker of a comprehensive faith. Does the young lady I cited above speak for all her peers, and for old timers like me, in seeking her baptismal right to discern—individually and communally—where her divine DNA is taking her? Doesn’t every child deserve our attention to hear their faith stories?
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It is an accident of history that one of the United States’ major research centers happens to be called PEW. Privately endowed fifty years ago to poll a wide range of opinion and sentiment across all aspects of American life, PEW does include religion among its multiple populations. Early this week Crisis Magazine, a conservative Catholic publication which has been sending me free news updates of late, published a lengthy analysis of a newly released PEW study of religion in the United States, a cross section of 34,000 adults. PEW undertakes such religion studies every seven years and has developed a measure of statistical and social expertise on religious practice, integrating trends like the “nones” as they come along. I should note here that the Catholic Church has its own polling instrument conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate [CARA] at Georgetown University, but it is not supported by the U.S. bishops and it is limited in its projects. PEW, on the other hand, is a commercial business which charges for its work.
The Crisis report on March 4 begins with the headline “Catholics Are Rapidly Losing Ground.” For the curious, and especially “numbers geeks,” a detailed breakdown is available here, but for our purposes in this post I will stick to the analysis provided by the editor in chief of Crisis, Eric Sammons. An intriguing metric developed by PEW is the numerical ratio of new members to departing members, or the “join/leave” ratio. Put simply, for every person who enters your parish through infant baptism or the adult rites of initiation, 8.4 persons leave the parish, for a ratio of about 8.4 to 1.0]. Sammons comments that it could be worse: “So while millions are leaving the Catholic Church, immigrants keep the overall numbers from looking horrific.” I wonder if Catholic elected officials in Washington know that. I believe that most Catholic pastors have more than a little inkling of the join/leave ratio. A half-century ago I would look at my own end of year records and contrast infant baptisms against funerals, and I always ran a negative ratio [though the PEW study counts only living people.] PEW found that when youthful or adult Catholics leave the Church, they tend to join the “Nones.” We are hearing more about the Nones, and indeed we should. They are the number one identifiable religious group in America: Nones [32%], Evangelicals [24%], Catholics [23%]. About this group, PEW states: “Most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service. They aren't all anti-religious. Most Nones say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. Most have more positive views of science than those who are religiously affiliated; however, they reject the idea that science can explain everything.” On the precarious state of Catholicism in the U.S., Sammons continues the bad news by pointing out the PEW study definition of a Catholic, i.e., as someone who states to an interviewer that he or she is a Catholic. As members of the Church, we learned a long time ago that we are supposed to go to Mass every Sunday and confess our sins once a year [the latter admittedly a low bar]. PEW did not research how many of the 23% identified Catholics in its study meet the standard of “practicing Catholic” set by Church Law and pastoral practice. Sammons estimates that there are thirteen million practicing Catholics across the country, or 3.8% of all Americans. Sammons proceeds to the burning question; how did we get to this point? He lists his reasons, and while he does skew toward conservative and traditional thinking, at least half of the American Catholic population would find common agreement on several of his points. __________________________________ Ineffective leadership, especially among bishops. The USCCB holds most of its executive conferences [spring and fall] behind locked doors, so it is impossible to know what our American synod of bishop really thinks or how they react to PEW’s study, though clearly, they know about it. Moreover, the clergy abuse scandal and its attendant financial costs and parish closings has made the body more closed mouth than less. Enmeshment in American politics and elections has not proved wise or effective, either. It wasn’t always this way. In 1972, the USCCB issued a book on religious faith formation for the U.S., called To Teach As Jesus Did. It was written with high hopes, but impossible logistics, and I reviewed it here on Amazon a few years ago. A half-century ago, bishops would write such directives—though today that rarely happens—but even in 1972 episcopal teaching had surprisingly little impact or attention. Religious indifference. It is hard to know how the author defines “Indifference.” My experience working for the Church suggests to me that when people give up on the Church, there can be powerful emotions at play: anger, frustration, neglect, etc. Poor Catechesis. One of the worst mistakes we make as the Catholic Church is propagating the idea or model that “catechesis” is a youth ministry. I made this mistake for many years, until one of the newly baptized adults from our catechumenate asked me after Easter, “What’s next?” I was embarrassed to admit, very little. For a multitude of reasons, this issue distresses me intensely because it is the hardest issue to solve. I am immensely impressed with the years of work undertaken by a group of Catholics in my parish who, of their own initiative, meet to study the key documents of Vatican II. But I have witnessed their struggles, too, in such things as selection of sources or commentaries, pedagogy, and group dynamics, and attracting young adults into their studies. There ought to be “house theologians” on the staffs of parishes—or at least of dioceses—who, without disrupting the initiative of local determined Catholics—can provide the sources, insights, and tools to help them achieve both the competence and enthusiasm so essential to evangelization. I would include in this office the development of sampling and purchasing skills for spirituality and theology texts for individual and group use. It is no accident that the best teachers and preachers are voracious and prayerful readers. [The printed treasures that await us….] Sadly, I don’t see this happening soon on a large scale. Despite Canon Law’s dictate that every bishop and every pastor is the chief teacher/catechist of his community, the idea of educating adults with the same urgency as we do First Communion and Confirmation candidates has rarely taken root. We don't include sermons in faith formation discussions. In fact, listen to the sermons in your own parish. If there is a certain “sameness” to each week’s sermon, this is a “tell” that the preacher is either not preparing or not reading religious scholarship. When a priest or deacon preaches and doesn’t read, he reverts to the one or two sermons you in the pew are subjected to over and over. Take it to the bank. Of course, the same principle holds true for our own private meditation and prayer. Scandals within the Church. This is a multilayered tragedy. The first layer was the victimizations. The second was the wholesale revelations of episcopal coverup. We are now in the third phase, coming to grips with the significant financial deficiencies of the Church that face us now and in the future. About 25% of Catholic Dioceses have declared bankruptcy. This may come as a shock, but on my reading desk I have a new copy of Gone for Good: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition [2024]. Did you expect to need that in your lifetime? The anger in my home diocese [Buffalo] about church closures and sales is palpable. ____________________________________ Sammons has other issues he believes drive people from the Catholic Church, but I think we have enough here to get a grasp on why so many people have grabbed a lifebuoy and jumped off the bark of Peter. Clearly, the upper echelon of the Church—both in Rome and the United States—will need to enter a prolonged period of assessing its strengths and weaknesses, lasting at least 60 years or the time since the last Church Council [1962-1965]. But that need not be a discouragement. You must wonder if Pope Francis saw the need for a “rethinking” when he declared the move to Synodality—community between all members of the Church, lay and priestly. [It is unfortunate—although predictable--that most American bishops avoided participation in the synodal process at the local/parish/diocesan level like the plague.] But…Evangelization cannot wait. It is a welcome gift, the Holy Spirit come to us in Scripture, lectio divina or sacred writing, and the fraternity of fellow seekers of God’s truth and love. If we bring one fellow seeker into our lives or our groups, we have done God’s work. |
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