The Most Critical Fact: Two Views.

As “Making all Things New” continues its course, one decisive fact has emerged. The New York Times (of course) first highlighted it. It has been long known to every Catholic here remotely in touch with reality. Now Cardinal Dolan restates it in his inimitable way:

However, a perceptive journalist laser-beamed the real shortage: “Seems like you have a shortage of people!” Bingo!

She was right! Simply put, our people aren’t coming anymore. True, some of the shortage in older parishes is due to the fact that our folks have moved. The people that do come are as committed as ever. But, we still have to admit our numbers of committed, consistent churchgoers are down…. Still, though, we have to admit, our people aren’t coming anymore. On any given Sunday, the stats tell us that only somewhere between 15 and 28% of our folks show up!1)

That indeed is the problem. If only 15% of the Catholics regularly practice their religion, the financial resources contributed to the Archdiocese will shrink: everything from the Cardinal’s Appeal to the Sunday collection to two dollars in the box for a votive light. The number of vocations to the priesthood will correspondingly suffer. As time goes on, parishes will see fewer weddings, baptisms and funerals as well. And this decline has been going on for decades.

The Cardinal now concedes that the New York Archdiocese, taken as whole, has NOT suffered a crisis of “demographic change” – at least in the normal sense of that term. New York is no Buffalo or even Boston. The number of Catholics in the Archdiocese has even risen over the years. New York City remains the economic center of the country, even of the world. The crisis of the Archdiocese is not the result of impersonal forces over which the clergy could not be expected to have any control. Indeed, the Cardinal asks:

So, now our sacred responsibility is to win our people back! That’s what Pope Saint John Paul II called the new evangelization! That means asking why they no longer come, how we can attract them back, and what we’ve done wrong, a strategy Pope Francis is encouraging.
As one savvy priest remarked, “Let’s stop closing parishes and start filling them up!” 1)

Regrettably, this candid diagnosis does not appear to raise any questions in the Cardinal’s mind concerning the current policies of the Archdiocese. So, the Cardinal explains that 220 Parochial schools were reduced to 160 because 70% of Catholic parents “chose not to send their children to our excellent schools.” Were these parents asked their views of the “excellent” schools? A parish scheduled to be closed  under Making All Things New (probably Our Lady of Peace) had a petition signed by 3,000 supporting keeping the parish open, yet only 500 people attended mass each Sunday. If 1,500 had attended, according to the Cardinal, the decision to close “would not have been foreseen“ (=taken?). Thus, the decision to close appears as a punishment for the failure of the parishioners to participate. And, at the end of the day, the Cardinal offers once again only the existing, materialistic solution of downsizing:

“fewer, but now stronger, fuller, more vibrant parishes, better served by more available priests, in new communities no longer straitjacketed by demands of maintenance of huge, half-empty, in-need-of-repairs buildings….” 2)

For a second view of the situation, we have Father George Rutler, Pastor of two churches originally scheduled for closure that have survived the cut (for now). He identifies much more frankly and precisely the nature of the problems:

I think there’s a great deal of dishonesty and denial on the part of some people who engaged in the fantasy that we were entering a new springtime of the faith. The aggiornamento of Vatican II was supposed to bring in tons more people; it did just the opposite. So long as people refuse to admit there were mistakes made a generation ago — in catechesis, liturgy, addressing the real problems of secularism — they’re never going to make any real reform.

The primary fact is that most Catholics aren’t practicing the faith. Mass attendance in New York is about 12%. You’ve had about a 50% drop since the Second Vatican Council. Nobody will address that. They’ll acknowledge the fact, but they will not address the fact that there were some serious mistakes made in the last generation.

And solutions?

The first thing is to be realistic, to address the real problems in our society, secularity, instead of trying to be everything to everyone. It’s a great danger just to want to be friendly and liked instead of challenging in a prophetic way the errors of society and caving into them. St. Paul said to Timothy, “Do not be a man-pleaser.” This doesn’t mean going around and hitting people over the heads with bibles, but it does mean being Catholic, right across the board…. We’ve had a secularization of religious life. Women’s religious orders are collapsing, have collapsed. Nothing was done a generation ago to discipline the orders, and to truly reform them. The ones that are growing are the ones who are faithful to their founders’ charisms.

And a primary evangelical tool of the Church is the liturgy, and wherever the liturgy is banal, you will not have vocations. In many places it’s not a problem of heresy, it’s just a matter of sloth. People are just stuck in the 1970s. Young people don’t want to go to a church where there’s a septuagenarian playing very bad Jesuit hymns from the 1960s. 3)

I hesitate to criticize a priest who has made such unique contributions to Catholic life here over the last  decades, but I cannot follow Fr. Rutler’s further observations:

I think there’s a real problem of reaction from evangelization, a real problem of nostalgia rather than tradition on the part of many people as far as the Extraordinary Form is concerned…

The priest facing the people (in the ordinary Form – SC) becomes a kind of circular community lacking in transcendence. But a lot of people who embrace the Extraordinary Form run that risk too. They become ghettoized. It’s rather significant that in so many cases — I can’t cite numbers — but usually it’s been my experience that where the Extraordinary Form is, usually you have a static group of people, and you don’t have outreach for bringing others in.

So just using the Extraordinary Form is not the solution.4)

I would agree that JUST using the Extraordinary Form is not the solution. But clearly, given the average age of the current EF congregations, how can there be nowadays any question of “nostalgia?” Furthermore, it does seem a little peculiar for Fr. Rutler to talk about a lack of “outreach for bringing others in” when a Traditionalist community under his administration (Holy Innocents) just concluded a highly successful world-wide “outreach” campaign. A community, I should add, that has only been in existence since the end of 2007 as a predominately lay apostolate.

So the critical fact of Catholicism in this region – that only some 15% of Catholics regularly practice their faith – is finally being admitted. Both our writers agree that some questions may legitimately be asked of the current practices of the Archdiocese. We certainly welcome that! And Fr. Rutler identifies that a critical review of the policies and program of “Vatican II” must play a role in any real revival of Catholicism. Yet even he hesitates at the “Traditionalist” component of the solution. It seems it will take more patient work – or “outreach,” to use that term of Catholicspeak – on the part of Traditionalists before their indispensable contribution to the recovery can be more widely acknowledged even by those who should be our allies.

1) Cardinal Timothy Dolan, The Best Is Yet to Come (November 11, 2014) http://cardinaldolan.org/index.php/the-best-is-yet-to-come/
2) http://cardinaldolan.org/index.php/the-best-is-yet-to-come/
3) Burger, John; Beyond the New York Church Closings, Alateia (November 3, 2014) http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/article/behind-the-new-york-church-closings-5852002303082496?page=1
4) http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/article/behind-the-new-york-church-closings-5852002303082496?page=2