There Is No Secret To Reverse Parish Closings

Photo by Nathaniel Tetteh on Unsplash

On May 8, 2018, Fr. Matthew P. Schneider, LC, of the Archdiocese of Washington, D. C. published to his blog on Patheos.com an article entitled, The #1 Secret to Reverse Parish Closings. While I am not in any way disparaging Fr. Schneider and I do hold him in the highest regard, I do mean to put an end to the lazy, thoughtless, and enduringly unproductive advice he restates, advice which finds relevance only in the small positive feedback loops in which it is circulated like pot at a Willie Nelson concert.

We, as Catholics, seem to have a macabre horror of considering as relevant anything that finds Catholics or the Catholic Church at fault for its own problems. Fr. Schneider's oft-repeated trope, that "parish closures come from demographic factors like Catholics moving to the suburbs, ethnic parish attendance dropping, and the population decline of the rust belt," is a perfect example of this mindset.  Other than the "population decline of the rust belt," active and effective evangelization and catechesis of the neighborhoods surrounding these parishes over the past fifty or sixty years would have ameliorated these "demographic factors." That did not happen, but why?

Fr. Schneider lists five causes, that "point back to a common theme": "lack of formation or training of the next generation," "[c]lergy shortages are also an issue," "a lack of Sunday Mass attendance," "everyone else is off the hook in terms of his or her obligations of discipleship," and individual Catholics are refusing to be "engaged and committed enough to make [the New Evangelization] happen." The common theme, he believes, is the absence of the formation of disciples, which is a common theme with no real substance.

The #1 Secret to Reversing Parish Closings, according to Fr. Schneider, is "to really help EVERY Catholic realize their BAPTISMAL COMMITMENT to be ACTIVE APOSTLES at the service of the Church" (italics and all caps in the original). Well, that should be easy enough, right? Yet, neither Fr. Schneider here nor anyone else who broaches this topic ever delves any more deeply than this nor do they ever offer any ideas of how this can be accomplished. Of course, Fr. Schneider offers a number of programs "to really help" parishes or individual parishioners. Such programs are great for attracting and engaging that 20% of the parish already engaged in their faith, but what about the rest? Why are adolescents leaving the Church as soon as they hit college at a ratio of 8:10? What are the underlying reasons young adults and their parents do not know the faith and, really, don't care to? Nothing Fr. Schneider presents in his article addresses any of these deeper, more difficult issues and his solutions are way wide of the mark.

Forgetting about cultural or societal relevance, since neither are the mission of the Church, if the Church is "to make disciples of all nations (or the U. S. A.), baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19-20a), then the Church better get a realistic lay of the land. For brevity, I will address the problems the Catholic Church in the United States is having with evangelization and catechesis from three broad perspectives: history, philosophy, and psychology.

Christian Smith lays out a history of the Catholic Church in the United States on pages 9 through 88 of his book, Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults In, Out of, and Gone From The Church. The history of the Catholic Church has two parts. The first part, the longer part, is the Church of the poor immigrant. This Church began with the establishment of the first mission in the United States in the Maryland Colony, the only colony in which Catholics were allowed to live. This period ended shortly after the Second World War, when the large waves of Catholic immigration ended and the wealth accumulated by individual Catholics made them look more to the larger culture than to the Church. During this period, Catholic parishes were largely drawn up along ethnic and national lines. The Church took a defensive posture against the prejudices, attacks, and evangelistic incursions by the dominant Protestant society and became de facto Catholic ghettoes. Here, a Catholic child may never have known a non-Catholic until he went out into the wider world to make his way. Catholic education fostered the verbatim memorization of the Baltimore Catechism and the reception of the sacraments.

During the second period of the Catholic Church's history in the United States, Catholics discovered that their limited incursions into the wider society were successful and garnered them more money, prestige, and power, especially when compared to their parents, who had remained within the orbit of their Catholic parishes. In an era overwhelmed by the country's success in the Second World War and its dominance on the world stage, Catholics saw non-Catholics as partners in building on this great success and lost many, if not all, of their parents' prejudices and misgivings. They began to see themselves as Americans first and Catholics second, if at all. No longer fed by waves of poor immigrants, the Catholic Church in the United States struggled to adapt to these new developments, if they thought about them at all. For example, while non-Catholic Christian churches had been ministering to their youth in various ways and with a solid degree of success for centuries, the Catholic Church in the United States did not begin to think of youth ministry until the 1970's. The Second Vatican Council only helped individual Catholics caught up in their own wild economic success to tolerate cognitive dissonances, like being a faithful Catholic, while having an affair with the secretary or no longer attending Mass. Catholics' success economically, socially, and politically coupled with the chaos brought on by the Second Vatican Council revealed the gross and fatal inadequacy of the Church's reliance on the handing on of the faith in dry formulas of the Baltimore Catechism devoid of all context. Unable to turn to their Catholic faith to explain the horrors of war, the chaos of society, and the desire for personal sin, Catholics began to doubt, then leave, the Church. As Fr. Schneider and others have noted, this trend continues and is increasing.

In missing the opportunity to effectively educate its flock in the Catholic faith, so they could withstand the challenges and vagaries of life, the Catholic Church in the United States left Catholics open to accepting whatever philosophies have been au courant. After all, nature abhors a vacuum or, more colloquially, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. Most Catholics have done just that. Deprived of the theological and philosophical underpinnings missing from the Baltimore Catechism's aphorisms, Catholics, left to fend for themselves, opened up their own cafeterias of belief and picked and chose freely from whatever seemed right at the time. Eventually, this smorgasbord left them empty and many Catholics left for the non-Catholic Christian churches and Eastern philosophies. A drop of theology or philosophy is better than none. More recently, adolescents, young adults, and their parents believe they are living the Catholic faith, while, in fact, they have adopted the parasitic framework of Moral Therapeutic Deism. Christian Smith began the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) in 2001, and first described the phenomenon of Moral Therapeutic Deism in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.

The most remarkable finding from the NSYR was Smith's discovery, that Catholic youth are not rebelling from their parents, but are very closely following the examples of their parents. "Perhaps the most widespread and persistent stereotype about teenagers in American culture is that they are intractably rebellious...But that impression is fundamentally wrong....the vast majority of American teenagers are exceedingly conventional in their religious identity and practices" (Soul Searching, 119-120). Furthermore, "American youth, like American adults, are nearly without exception profoundly individualistic, instinctively presuming autonomous, individual self-direction to be a universal human norm and life goal. Thoroughgoing individualism is not a contested orthodoxy for teenagers. It is an invisible and pervasive doxa" (Soul Searching, 143). The most significant result of this is "that at least some contemporary teenagers seem to live in...a 'morally insignificant universe.' In such a universe, moral commitments, decisions, obligations, and actions have little if any larger meaning, significance, or consequence; that is, in short, a morally empty reality" (Soul Searching, 156).

The philosophy, which adolescents and young adults have adopted from their parents, which Smith calls Moral Therapeutic Deism flows from their individualistic and morally empty reality. This philosophy "is about inculcating a moralistic approach to life. It teaches that central to living a good and happy life is...being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, responsible, at work on self-improvement, taking care of one's health, and doing one's best to be successful....[It]"is, [also], about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents....the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace...attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people....Finally, Moral Therapeutic Deism is about belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved with one's affairs-especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved. Most of the time, the God of this faith keeps a safe distance" (Soul Searching, 163-164).

Alongside Moral Therapeutic Deism is the postmodern neo-Marxism, which is now so prevalent in our society. This unnatural hybrid, as described by Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and grossly simplified by me, perceives the world to be locked in an eternal struggle between identity groups, who, because they are unable to communicate, increase the violence of their struggles against each other until annihilation of the perceived enemy is achieved. The nihilism and hopelessness inherent in postmodern neo-Marxism are germane to this discussion, as both are antithetical to Christianity and quickly detach Catholics from their faith. Also, the adherents of postmodern neo-Marxism are in no way hesitant to pursue their objectives of complete domination of the political and social landscape. Since they perceive the only purpose of the currently existing structures is to oppress, then the Catholic Church is this philosophy's Public Enemy #1. To the adherents of this philosophy, there is nothing more evil and oppressive than the male-dominated patriarchy of the Catholic Church and, therefore, nothing more worthy of utter and complete destruction.

Finally, the psychology of many people today has much to do with the inability of the Catholic Church in the United States to retain young adults and converts. Chap Clark in Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers points out how the extending of adolescence and a culture of abandonment are leading to generations of adolescents and young adults in a "turmoil that is difficult, painful, lonely, and even harmful....The fact is that adolescents need adults to become adults, and when adults are not present and involved in their lives, they are forced to figure out how to survive life on their own." Clark continues, "...I found that a far wider relational and social chasm exists between adults and adolescents than I had previously considered....There is simply too much cumulative weight that points to a disturbing trend: the way midadolescents have been forced to design their own world and separate social system has created perhaps the most serious and yet understudied social crisis of our time" (Hurt 2.0, 26-27).

Clark begins his discussion with a review of the work of David Elkind's Hurried Child, first published in 1981 and subsequently in 1988 and 2001. Elkind's research found, "the concept of child competence, which drove much of the hurrying of childhood in previous decades, is very much alive today. Parents are under more pressure than ever to over schedule their children and have them engaged in organized sports and other activities that may be age-inappropriate" (Hurt 2.0, 27). Clark refines Elkind's presentation by understanding adolescents to be abandoned more than they are hurried. "...[A]dolescents have a longing that parents, teachers, and other adults have ceased as a community to fulfill. There reasons are many and varied, but this concept of the systemic abandonment of adolescents as a people group seems to capture the widest range of descriptors used by careful observers of adolescents and adolescents themselves.'...postmodern children and adolescents are feeling victimized. They believe that they must suppress their own needs for security and protection to accommodate their parents' and the society's expectations that they be independent and autonomous. Like modern mothers, postmodern young people either turn their anger on themselves (for letting themselves be used) or at the world around them'" (Hurt 2.0, 27-28). Within this culture of abandonment, children and adolescents "learn that they are only as valuable as their ability to contribute" (Hurt 2.0, 31). The two consequences of this culture of abandonment are "the adolescent journey is lengthened, because no one is available to help move along the developmental process along...[and]...adolescents know that they are essentially on their own, for 'aloneness is the enduring result of abandonment'" (Hurt 2.0, 38). Clark's research, and Smith's to a lesser degree, point out that many of the adults in Catholic parishes across the country are not functioning as adults socially and psychologically. Since they cannot or will not accept the responsibilities of their positions in life, they have abandoned their children, who are now insecure and lost, as well.

In summary, when the history, philosophy, and psychology at work in our country today are taken together, a much clearer appreciation of the landscape in which the Church is situated emerges. The Catholic Church is being called to evangelize and catechize both a population of adults stuck in adolescence, who are refusing to mature, and their abandoned and isolated children. Both groups exist within a morally empty reality and have adopted Moral Therapeutic Deism as a way of feeling good about themselves, easing interpersonal relationships, and preserving their radical individualism. The Church, unwilling to respond to the changing circumstances of our society, maintains the structures and administrations of a bygone Church for immigrants for which all it had to do was provide parishes. Unwilling to change incrementally over time, the Catholic Church has placed herself in a horrible position in relation to the real issues facing it today. Rather than intelligently analyzing these trends and determining effective solutions, the Church chases the political causes du jour, while seeming to be content with losing Catholic laity and clergy with no other plan than to close parishes and publicize the latest evangelization program by any one of a number of lay Catholic leading lights. Fr. Schneider's analysis, information he is only repeating, does nothing for this situation and, therefore, should never be repeated by anyone again.

What is the solution? Is there a solution? Yes, there is. I agree with Fr. Schneider, that we can "look forward with hope," but there are no easy answers. There is no "#1 Secret," though the solutions, which may be more helpful, are largely ignored. The Catholic Church in the United States has to come to a completely different understanding of herself and this adjustment must be led by the bishops. The Catholic Church in the United States is no longer the great church of the immigrants with unparalleled social, political and economic clout. At some point, the Church shot herself in both feet and has been working her way up ever since. No longer the church of the immigrant, she must become the church of the partisan. Rather than taking up the great battles herself, she must equip her faithful with the best and most effective education in the Catholic faith, then loose them onto the larger society in a guerrilla-type assault on the ills reviewed above. Catholics are willing, but too few of them know the faith in a way, which allows them to appropriately evangelize others. The Church must make this its first priority.

With this, Thomistic metaphysics, perhaps the Thomism of W. Norris Clarke, S. J., must be reinstated into the religious education of every Catholic student from first grade through twelfth and in RCIA as a counter to both Moral Therapeutic Deism and postmodern neo-Marxism. The Church has forgotten that the Catholic faith, due to the wisdom of her Founder, has a very definite foundational understanding of reality and without that foundational understanding, the faith becomes nothing more than one option among many and a poor one at that. Metaphysics provides the faithful with this very clear understanding of reality as God has created it and governs it. Its loss has been largely responsible for the ridiculous gains achieved by those opposed to the morality of the Church, for instance.

Finally, to help the Church reengage youths, adolescents, and their parents, many wonderful resources from our non-Catholic Christian brethren have been published recently, approaches whose goals are to overcome the abandonment and isolation so many are feeling today. Kara Powell's Growing Young, Andrew Root's Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, and Adoptive Youth Ministry, edited by Chap Clark, are three great places to begin.

Again, these are not solutions. These are places to begin. And like all beginnings, it will be slow, it will be difficult, and it will be fraught with many setbacks. In the end, though, if we do begin and, together, work hard, by the grace and glory of Jesus Christ, we can return the Catholic Church in the United States to her God-given mission "to make disciples of all nations (or the U. S. A.), baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19-20a). ADMG