Mistaking Symptoms For The Illness

Photo by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash

I greatly appreciate Fr. Matthew Schneider's (@FrMatthewLC) brief reply to my post, There Is No Secret To Reverse Parish Closings, via his Twitter account on May 11. As before, I wish to address the four points he raises in his reply, then move to a discussion of a larger topic. I greatly respect Fr. Schneider and am eternally grateful for his priesthood and the beautiful witness it is to the world. I will now address his Twitter comments very briefly.

1.     Fr. Schneider first addresses his writing style, describing it as "brief & with catchy headlines to hopefully increase readership." Alright. Increasing readership is an admirable goal for one devoted to evangelizing the masses via Twitter, but shouldn't a little more thought be given to what is being offered to them? While it may be important to form Catholics to evangelize the world, the issues raised in my earlier article requires evangelization and catechesis of those same Catholics before forming them as evangelizers can even be considered. That Fr. Schneider misses this point is indicative of the prevalent mindset in the Church, the mindset, which is condemning the Church to irrelevance and banality.

Catholics are not to be formed as apostles. In the Church's Tradition, Sacred Scriptures, and Magisterium, the office of apostle belongs to the thirteen men chosen by Jesus Christ and the bishops, whose rightful successors they are. With the confusion and conflation of so much terminology, roles, and offices in the Church today, it would be best to avoid stating or claiming, that Catholics should be formed as apostles. Catholics, first, need to be formed as Catholics, then as evangelizers. While this may seem a minor point, it isn't.

2.     Fr. Schneider claims that his examples of programs available to form Catholics as apostles, including reaching the lost, "has concretely happened," yet he provides no evidence of this. The lost are those adolescents and their parents in our Catholic parishes today, as Smith presents, who are certain they are living a great Catholic life without knowing the first thing about the Catholic faith. These people are not being "engaged properly," if at all. Christian Smith's work in this area demonstrates this definitively. The 20% I threw out is a figure Sherry Weddell identifies as the percentage of a parish's membership involved in some way in the life of the parish. Yet neither she nor anyone else wonders why it's only 20%, except to say that Catholic parishes need to conduct more programs. Also, contrary to Fr. Schneider's claim, that 20% is having almost no discernible impact on the uninvolved 80%. Again, both Sherry Weddell and Pew have made this crystal clear. What if more programs or training up disciples isn't the answer? What if it's something called the Pareto Distribution? If this 80/20 split in parishes is explained by the Pareto Distribution (and it is), then how do Catholic parishes address it, if at all? Why is no one in the Catholic Church in the United States even thinking about this?

3.     Fr. Schneider's third point is unclear to me. I believe he is stating that since one suburban mega-parish is equivalent to two urban/ethnic parishes, then it's perfectly alright for dioceses to close urban and ethnic parishes. Regardless, the point Fr. Schneider missed here is that the Church has not pursued and is not pursuing the evangelization of the neighborhoods in the parishes they are closing. The USCCB's rabid support of DACA and their pushing of the whole legalization issue reveals this in spades. The Church in the United States has always relied on immigrants to populate its parishes and dioceses, so a sudden and huge wave of ostensibly Catholic immigrants from Central and South America looks like the solution to a huge problem for the USCCB, but it isn't. Pew and Smith both point out that immigrants and their descendants lose their Catholic faith surprisingly quickly as they assimilate to the culture in the United States. The USCCB is ignoring their own history by adopting this position. What are the short- and long-term plans for handling this issue? Again, if the Catholic Church in the United States had spent the last 100 years evangelizing their parishes, she wouldn't be facing these problems today. This is my point and Fr. Schneider does not address it.

4.     That Fr. Schneider boils down my article to my dislike of "#1 secret" is insulting, although it allows him to preserve his thesis. The shift in mindset of which he speaks falls back on the average Catholic accepting his role as evangelizers, while missing entirely my point, that the vast majority of Catholics incorrectly believe they are living a Catholic life, so such appeals are falling on deaf ears. Absolutely there needs to be "a whole mindset shift," but that shift must begin with the bishops, priests and catechists and must consider the philosophical and psychological state of the laity to which the Church is now addressing her message.

In summary, despite Fr. Schneider's claim that my article is "more of a development than a rebuttal,"it is a rebuttal of this lazy, uncritical and unthinking position in the Church, which spends all of its time addressing symptoms without ever thinking about the underlying illness. Fr. Schneider is not alone in this and what he posited in both his original article and in his Twitter response are infecting the thinking of too many of the Catholic clergy and intelligentsia in the United States. While Fr. Schneider cannot be held responsible for his absorption of this lazy, uncritical, and unthinking mindset, he and his fellows must be held responsible for stubbornly retaining it in the face of facts.