Four decades after Vatican II, a quarter century into the pontificate of John Paul II, Kenneth C. Jones of St. Louis pulled together a slim volume of statistics demonstrating that the fears of traditionalists who warned that the council was courting catastrophe had been justified.2 And they exposed as naive those who insisted that the council would revitalize the faith, reconcile Catholicism with modernity, and make the Church more appealing to our secular world. Here are Jones’s statistics on the decline and fall.3
• Clergy. While the number of priests in the United States more than doubled to 58,000 between 1930 and 1965, between 1965 and 2002 that number fell to 45,000 and is on course to sink to 31,000 in 2020, when more than half of all Catholic priests will be over the age of seventy.
• Ordinations. In 1965, 1,575 priests were ordained. In 2002, the figure was 450.
• Parishes. In 1965, only 1 percent of parishes were without a priest. In 2002, 15 percent, or 3,000 parishes, were without priests.
• Seminarians. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians fell from 49,000 to 4,700, a decline of more than 90 percent. Two-thirds of the 600 seminaries operating at the end of Vatican II have closed.
• Nuns. In 1965, there were 180,000 Catholic nuns. By 2002, that number was down to 75,000 and their average age was 68. By 2009, their numbers had fallen to 60,000, a loss of two-thirds in four and a half decades.4
• Teaching Nuns. In 1965, there were 104,000 teaching nuns. Today, there are 8,200.
• Jesuits. In 1965, 3,559 young men were studying to become Jesuit priests. In 2000, the figure was 389.
• Christian Brothers. The situation here is even more dire. Their ranks have shrunk by two-thirds, while the number of seminarians has fallen by 99 percent. In 1965, there were 912 seminarians in the Christian Brothers. In 2000, there were seven.
• Religious Orders. The number of young men studying to become Franciscan and Redemptorist priests fell from 3,379 in 1965 to 84 in 2000. For many religious orders in America the end is in sight.
• Diocesan High Schools. Almost half of these high schools operating in the United States in 1965 had closed by 2002, and student enrollment had fallen from 700,000 to 386,000.
• Parochial Schools. In 1965, there were 4.5 million children in parish grammar schools. By 2000, the number had plunged to 1.9 million. In the first decade of this century, the number dropped again, to 1.5 million, a loss of two-thirds of Catholic parochial school enrollment since Vatican II—in a country whose population grew in that period by over 100 million.5
In 2007, after interviewing 35,000 people for its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the Pew Forum confirmed what Jones had reported. Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church in America had undergone a decline to rival what happened in some northern European countries during the Reformation. By 2007:
• One in three Catholics reared in the faith had left the Church.6
• One in ten American adults was a fallen-away Catholic.7
• Catholics remained 24 percent of the U.S. population only because of immigration. Forty-six percent of all immigrants are Catholics. As Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Catholics leave the Church or die, the pews fill up with Mexicans, Central Americans, Filipinos, and Vietnamese. Were it not for immigrants, Catholics would have fallen from a fourth of the population to 18.4 percent, or less than one fifth.8 “Every week, I bury a Lithuanian or a Polish Catholic and baptize two Latino babies,” one Chicago priest remarked.
Catholic losses have been “staggering,” writes Fr. Joseph Sirba, “if one excludes immigrants and converts from the calculations, the Catholic Church has lost to other religions or to no religion at all 35.4 percent—or more than one-third—of the 64,131,750 of its native-born members.”9
• Latinos comprise 29 percent of U.S. Catholics and 45 percent of Catholics aged eighteen to twenty-nine. According to the Conference of Catholic Bishops, by 2020, Hispanics may account for half of all U.S. Catholics.10 This explains the hierarchy’s support for immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens. The higher Hispanic birth rate and immigration represent the Church’s last hope of retaining or expanding its one-quarter share of the U.S. population. It is no accident that the new archbishop of Los Angeles, who replaces Cardinal Roger Mahony, is Jose Gomez, who is destined to become the first Hispanic cardinal of the American Catholic Church. On appointment, Gomez expressed his joy that Los Angeles, “like no other city in the world, has the global face of the Catholic Church.”11
Yet, there is a cultural divide among U.S. Catholics. Fifty-six percent of Hispanic Catholics prefer to hear Mass in Spanish. Only 8 percent prefer English. In the churches Hispanics attend, 91 percent offer Spanish language services, 82 percent have Hispanic clergy, 79 percent hold worship with a largely Hispanic congregation.12 The adage that Sunday mornings are the most segregated hours in America applies to the Catholic Church.
AGE OF DISBELIEF
The Catholics who remain in the Church are not nearly as firm in the faith or devout as their parents were. The institutional shrinkage mirrors a spreading disbelief in doctrines that define the faith.
• Catholic marriages have fallen by a third since 1965, while annual annulments soared from 338 in 1968 to 50,000 in 2002.13
• Where a 1958 Gallup poll revealed that three of every four Catholics attended Mass on Sundays, a recent study by the University of Notre Dame found that one in four Catholics attend Sunday Mass today.14
Lay teachers have replaced nuns in the instruction of children and young adults in the faith, but they are nothing like the nuns of the 1940s and 1950s.
• Only 10 percent of lay teachers accept church teaching on contraception.15
• Fifty-three percent of lay teachers believe a woman can have an abortion and remain a good Catholic, even though participation in an abortion means automatic excommunication.16
• Sixty-five percent of lay teachers believe Catholics may divorce and remarry.
• Seventy-seven percent believe one can be a good Catholic without going to Sunday Mass.
Millions of Catholic children are being taught their faith by heretics.
In April 2008, a survey of 1,000 Catholics, commissioned by the bishops and carried out by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), found:
• Only 23 percent of Catholics say they attend Sunday Mass every week. Thirty-one percent attend Mass sometime during the month.17
• While 26 percent said they went to confession once a year or more often, 30 percent of Catholics said they went to confession less than once a year, and 45 percent had never made a sacramental confession.18
According to one New York Times poll, 70 percent of all Catholics 18–44 believed the Eucharist is but a “symbolic reminder” of Jesus, and nearly two-thirds of all Catholics agreed.19
Through the papacy of Pius XII, Catholicism remained the Church of the deeply traditionalist Council of Trent, which that redefined Catholic doctrine during the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, refusing to modify its teachings to accommodate the age. After Vatican II, the Church came out to meet the world. The statistics give us the results of the encounter.
While the papacy of Pius XII was a period of explosive growth, the papacies of Paul VI and John Paul II were periods of unprecedented decline. Although he was charismatic and played a critical role in bringing down Communism, John Paul II failed to stop the hemorrhaging. But what caused the crisis?
WAS IT VATICAN II?
At the opening of Vatican II, the reformers were the young lions who were to lead the Church out of the Catholic ghettos by modernizing the liturgy, making the Bible more reader friendly, conducting Mass in vernacular languages, discarding old traditions, and engaging the world. They were called the periti: Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, the U.S. Jesuit John Courtney Murray. One wag warned that the Church would come down with peritonitis. And so it did. As former Jesuit Malachi Martin wrote:
Some day, some historian of
Second Vatican Council affairs will have access to all the relevant documents—the correspondence between the periti, the private position papers drawn up, the policy outlines—and establish beyond doubt that the Council of John XXIII was the object of a concerted and, as it turned out, successful attack by the Modernist leaders among Roman Catholics.20
Four decades of devastation followed the “ecumenical moment,” with the final disgrace being bishops who lacked the moral courage shown by the Boy Scouts to keep perverts and predators out of seminaries and to throw them out of the rectories. “If gold rust, what shall iron do?” asked Chaucer, “For if a priest be foul, in whom we trust,/ No wonder is a lewd man to rust.”21
In April 2011, the Christian Brothers of North America had to declare bankruptcy to protect the order from lawsuits arising from the abuse of boys at schools and orphanages in the Seattle area.
Not since the Reformation has the Church suffered so devastating a blow. Belated exposure revealed that, over decades, many priests had preyed on teenagers and altar boys, and the shepherds Christ had entrusted with his flock had been the enablers of wolves and secret wolves themselves. The revelations were disgusting and disheartening.
Result: The Church lost much of its moral authority and was forced to spend billions in legal fees and in damages to victims, accelerating the closing of Catholic schools, hospitals, and churches that had served the faithful all their lives. Not least of the losses were the broken hearts of the faithful at the shame and disgrace visited upon the Church they loved. For those responsible, the words of the Savior come to mind: “[W]hoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”22
Defenders of Vatican II say that to blame the reforms for the decline in vocations and devotion is a classic case of the logical fallacy “Post hoc ergo propter hoc.” After this, therefore, because of this. That the precipitous decline followed Vatican II does not prove Vatican II caused the decline. After all, all the mainstream Protestant churches—Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran—suffered commensurate losses of faithful and, in some cases, greater turmoil and decline. Can Vatican II explain that?
Yet if one measures what Vatican II promised against what the Council produced, the Council failed. Neither Paul VI nor John Paul II was able to arrest the ensuing epidemic of heresy, defections, and disbelief. Paul VI once ruefully observed that when Pope John threw open the windows, the smoke of hell entered the vestibule of the Church.
Catholics must cease deluding themselves about the strength and vitality of their Church, says Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver: “We need to stop over-counting our numbers, our influence, our institutions, and our resources, because they’re not real. We can’t talk about following St. Paul and converting our culture until we sober up and get honest about what we’ve allowed ourselves to become.”23 The Catholic Church of 2010 is a hollow army. Though her numbers, 65 millions, are as large as they have ever been, the Church is an institution whose moral precepts are ignored even by Catholic politicians. And though Catholics represent nearly a fourth of the nation and almost a third of the Congress, they have gotten only crumbs from that table.24 Republican platforms and presidents promised tuition tax credits for parochial schools but they were never enacted. And now the schools are dying. The right-to-life movement, representing millions, has been unable to effect protections for the unborn, fifty million of whom have died in the womb since the Supreme Court ruled in Roe. v. Wade in 1973 that the right to an abortion was now a constitutional right. Among the reasons abortion on demand endures—the support of Catholics in Congress.
Catholic politicians’ failure to promote a Catholic agenda is their own collective fault. Divided on every issue, including life, rarely do they act in unison to advance Catholic interests. With the exception of the Hispanics, Catholic ethnic groups rarely act as such, though Polish and Lithuanian Catholics did push for and succeed in having the umbrella of the NATO alliance spread over Eastern Europe.
“THE DEEPEST BIAS”
“Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual,” said Peter Viereck.25 Arthur Schlesinger called it the “deepest bias in the history of the American people.”26 And as the Church has weakened, anti-Catholicism has come out of the closet and is now rampant in the culture.
In 2007, the New York Philharmonic performed Paul Hindemith’s 1921 opera Sancta Susanna in Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. In the opera, Sisters Klementia and Susanna are chatting in chapel and Klementia tells Susanna of having seen a nun strip naked and embrace Christ on the cross. Susanna disrobes and proceeds to the crucifix, as other nuns enter the chapel to condemn her as “Satana,” a devil.27
That same year, an anatomically correct sculpture of a naked Jesus, made of chocolate and created by Cosimo Cavallaro, was scheduled for display during Holy Week at the art gallery of the Roger Smith Hotel. The Jesus statue was placed at street level, visible through the hotel windows to a passing public. After a Catholic League protest, with warnings of boycotts, the hotel canceled the “Chocolate Jesus” exhibit, but not before the gallery’s creative director accused the League of conducting a “fatwa” against the hotel.28
In 2008, television’s Comedy Central reran an episode of South Park that features a statue of the Virgin Mary spraying blood on people out of her backside.29 Desecration of Christian icons has been going on for years. Insulting and blasphemous art, from the “Piss Christ” statue in a vat of urine to the Madonna smeared with elephant dung and surrounded by female genitalia at the Brooklyn Museum, from films like The Last Temptation of Christ to The Da Vinci Code, is defended as freedom of expression. Catholics who object are told, “You just don’t understand the First Amendment.”
In an October 2009 episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David inadvertently urinates on a painting of Jesus in a Catholic home. The woman who discovers it believes these are the tears of Jesus, that the painting is weeping. She rushes off to church to report the miracle.30 When the Catholic League expressed outrage over making a joke out of urinating on a picture of the face of Jesus, HBO said this was just another example of the “always playful … never malicious” Larry David.31 Deal Hudson, publisher of InsideCatholic.com, asked, “Why is it that people are allowed to publicly show that level of disrespect for Christian symbols? If the same thing was done to a symbol of any other religions—Jewish or Muslim—there’d be a huge outcry.”32
When Loveland Museum in Colorado hosted a 2010 exhibit featuring Stanford professor Enrique Chagoya’s artwork depicting a man preforming oral sex on a naked Jesus, Kathleen Folden, a Montana truck driver, took a crowbar to the Plexiglas case housing the piece, then ripped it to pieces. Observed Bill Donahue of the Catholic League: Had that artwork depicted a man performing oral sex on a naked Muhammad, “the museum may have been blown up by now. So it is lucky that Ms. Folden is a Christian.”33
Indeed, trendy artists would not dare put a naked chocolate statue of Muhammad in a show window, or urinate on the face of the Prophet in a television comedy. In 2010, South Park introduced a character named Muhammad in a bear costume. A warning of violence against creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker by a New York group called Revolution Muslim resulted in heavy censorship of the next episode by Comedy Central.34
Mocking Catholics, their religion, symbols, and beliefs, however, is considered innocent fun by a Hollywood that would regard reruns of Amos ’n’ Andy as a hate crime. Historian John Higham’s insight remains valid: anti-Catholicism “is the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.”35
The gay rights movement contains a coterie of Catholic-haters who do not shrink from what would be regarded as hate crimes, were they done to another religion. When Proposition 8, overturning California’s law legalizing gay marriage, passed, swastikas were painted on Holy Redeemer Church in San Francisco. The words “Ratzinger” (Po
pe Benedict) and “Niederauer” (archbishop of San Francisco) were painted beside the Nazi symbol.36 Crucifixes are sold in the city as sex toys and homosexual men dress up as nuns and show up at Mass.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Legion of Decency, with backing from the pulpit and threats of boycotts, could compel Hollywood to show respect for the faith. Now Hollywood revels in mockeries of Catholic beliefs and symbols—the Vatican, bishops, priests, nuns.
But Tinseltown is a coward when it comes to Islam. When The Message, starring Anthony Quinn as the Prophet, was released in 1976, there were threats to firebomb theaters. Message received. The film was pulled. Hollywood does not mess with Muhammad.
Director Roland Emmerich’s 2012 depicts the Vatican and the statue of Christ the Redeemer on the mountaintop above Rio de Janeiro being blown up during the end of the world. Asked why he did not show the destruction of the Kaaba, the building inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the most sacred site in Islam, Emmerich, a self-described enemy of all religions, replied, “I wanted to do that. I have to admit.… You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol you would have … a fatwa.”37
In November 2010, the Conservative News Service created a cultural storm with an arresting story about a staid old Washington museum:
The federally funded National Portrait Gallery, one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, is currently showing an exhibition that features images of an ant-covered Jesus, male genitalia, naked brothers kissing, men in chains, Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts, and a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show’s catalog as “homoerotic.”38
The film of ants crawling on the figure of a crucified Christ was from “A Fire in My Belly” (1987), a video by David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. His video was created to express his rage and anguish at the death of a lover, Peter Hujar, who died of complications from AIDS the year the video was created.
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 10
