Will U.S. Catholicism Survive?

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

I begin my recent book on Catholicism relating a story about two Philadelphia priests walking by a church building being demolished. The church was Our Lady of Mercy at Broad Street and Susquehanna Avenue, an area of the city much in need of mercy. The event spurred them on to ponder whether or not the entire church in the United States was in danger of being demolished. Their questioning about the future of Catholicism was not unfounded. There has been a steep drop in the number of people who identify as Christian in the United States in the past couple of decades, and Catholicism has not been immune from that trend. Much of that decline has taken place among young people. That trend has not been limited to America. When I traveled through the Netherlands, I visited a number of churches. I asked a curator at one church if they held services there. He said, “Not really. Our churches are mostly museums now.” That sounds exactly like what Pope John XXIII and Pope Francis feared. They warned that the church was not meant to be a museum. If it was to survive it had to be a living, growing, thriving garden. To be that blossoming garden, both of these popes saw a need for change—what Pope John XXIII called aggiornamento, “updating.” 

Pope John saw updating as responding to the “signs of the times” during the early 1960s. Pope Francis sees a world in crisis today, especially an environmental crisis, that calls for creative change. Moves toward change create problems for an institution as old as the Catholic Church. Would it mean mimicking secular society and adopting secular values dominant in Western society today? Pope Francis actually offers a balanced vision for the church today: dare to dream of new possibilities, but hold onto your roots. In a talk he gave in 2021, Pope Francis said the following:  

A living faith draws strength from remembering the past while continuing to grow in love of God and service to others…. Go to the roots, get nourishment there and move forward.         

Catholics who hold onto the ancient faith propose that the roots of the community begun by Jesus two thousand years ago offer enriching nourishment for living fruitfully in the world today. Presumably, all of them would agree that love should be the guiding principle when pondering how to move forward. The very beginning of Christianity reflects the roots and wings that Pope Francis is talking about. The Christian community was a Jewish community. The Acts of the Apostles makes clear that early followers of Jesus attended synagogue services, not as outsiders but as accepted members of the Jewish community. A gradual separation occurred when, out of love, people who were not Jewish in background were welcomed to share faith and table fellowship with those Jews who were Jesus’s followers. These Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians put their own stamp on the Jewish roots of the movement. They helped the community move forward, adapting to what at the time were “modern,” secular, non-Jewish and non-Christian practices and beliefs. Many examples of such adaptations exist. A simple one is the use of the stole worn by priests when serving in official capacities. When a priest presides at Mass or hears confession, taking on that priestly role, he wears a cloth around his shoulders called a stole. Where did that practice come from? Stoles were worn by members of the Roman Senate to identify themselves as having the power to govern. Churches went from meeting in people’s homes to gathering in large spaces, modeled after the Roman public buildings known as “basilicas.” Despite external changes such as these and other adaptations, the root meaning of Christianity remained the same. Today, people who call themselves Catholic must address the tension between holding onto the riches of the tradition while making changes in fruitful, caring ways. Creativity and innovation are not to be feared, even though admittedly they can be misdirected. Pope John called for humility when trying to decipher the signs of the times. Our perspectives are always in need of reflection and questioning, and a necessary way to make that happen is to listen to and talk with real people facing real problems. And Pope Francis would surely second the advice of Anthony de Mello: “Always err on the side of love.”