Please Look Behind the Bishops' Potemkin Village
Another portion:You might, for example, tell the Holy Father something like this:
There are two radically different versions of how things are now in the Catholic Church in America. Call them "We're doing okay" and "We're in desperate trouble."
Professor James D. Davidson of Purdue University is a well-informed, urbane spokesman for we're-doing-okay. Davidson, a sociologist, has studied religion in America for many years, and much of his work has focused on the Catholic Church. According to news reports, he said in a recent talk that media coverage that emphasizes Catholics ignorant of and/or at odds with the faith distorts reality. What reality, you ask? A body of adherents who are not only "the most highly educated laypeople in the history of the Church" but who "affirm [its] core beliefs and practices."
Lots of people say things like that. This happy-talk version of American Catholicism is a central element of the liberal Catholic line.
For contrast, consider a letter an 84-year-old Catholic layman in a midwestern diocese sent his bishop a while ago, with a copy to me.
After reviewing things like the loss of the sense of sin, the huge decline in receiving the sacrament of penance, and the increase in "Catholic divorces, abortions, premarital sex, the practice of birth control, etc.," this man wrote: "The problem, as I see it, is a possible deterioration of Catholicism of our youth two or three generations down the line if the liberalization enjoyed by their parents is absorbed." In particular, he remarked, "a great majority of the children of those families" are certain to attend public high schools and state universities "where materialism, hedonism, and immorality prevail."
I disagree with just two points: first, the idea that the "deterioration of Catholicism of our youth" lies somewhere in the future, when in fact it's been happening for years; second, the assumption that the faith of Catholic young people can be assumed to be safe in Catholic schools. Otherwise, this elderly layman has it all over Professor Davidson when it comes to facing facts.
This is a sobering read but well worth it! Please check out Shaw's comments.People who talk as the happy-talkers do about the glories of contemporary American Catholicism aren't crazy. They know what’s going on. But they pass it over lightly because that suits the project of replacing a form of Catholicism they consider moribund with an endlessly evolving religion without norms. In their estimate, a Church like that would better suit the exigencies of post-modern times. Call it Anglicanism with a figurehead pope. (In general, I think, bishops who take the same line don't share that objective—they simply think blarney is good for morale.)
Orestes Brownson anticipated much of this nearly a century-and-a-half ago. Brownson, a convert who was probably the most influential public intellectual American Catholicism has had, ardently favored the cultural assimilation of Catholic immigrants for much of his life as a Catholic. In this, he was of one mind with his close friend Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists, who considered the Americanization of immigrant Catholicism to be an essential prerequisite to the achievement of his great goal of evangelizing the United States.
Late in life, however, Brownson—a man who admittedly had a history of at one time or another adopting very nearly every side on every issue—changed his mind on this one too. Having seen the bitter fruits that assimilation was producing in his coreligionists, the gruff old man turned on Hecker, and in 1870 wrote to him:
Instead of regarding the Church as having advantages here [in America] which she has nowhere else, I think she has here a more subtle and powerful enemy to combat than in any of the old monarchical nations of the world….Catholics as well as others imbibe the spirit of the country, imbibe from infancy the spirit of independence, freedom from all restraint, unbounded license….I think the Church has never encountered a social & political order so hostile to her, & that the conversion of our republic will be a far greater victory than the conversion of the Roman Empire.
One small suggestion: If just the barest friendly mention of Orestes Brownson could be worked into one of Pope Benedict's American talks, it would be a hint to some of us that he'd gotten the message and understood.
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