American Catholics are flunking the test of evangelization

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | May 13, 2015

Yesterday’s top CWN headline news story points to the most urgent problem facing the Catholic Church in the US: the decline in the American Catholic population.

As our headline story reports there is some disagreement among experts about the extent of that decline. Pew Research finds that the Catholic population of the US has fallen by 3 million in the past seven years. Other surveys suggest that the decline has been less severe, or that the Catholic population may even have held steady over those same years. But no one is suggesting that the number of Catholics increased.

That means we, as a Church, are doing something wrong. We are failing abjectly in our mission—failing to carry out the task assigned to us by Jesus Christ.

The Lord did not order us to publish new hymnals or to build hospitals or to balance diocesan budgets or bring about world peace or to eliminate economic inequality or to stop global warming. Those may (or may not) be laudable efforts, but they are not the central mandate of the Church. Jesus did enjoin us to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Mt 28:18-19) We aren’t doing that. On the contrary, we are losing sheep from the flock.

To be honest, the Church in the US has never been very good at attracting converts. In the past, the American Catholic population grew steadily because of three factors: the children born to Catholic parents, the arrival of immigrants from Catholic countries, and the non-Catholics who entered the Church as they married Catholic spouses. But today most American Catholic couples have only one or two children. Today Hispanic immigrants by the thousands come into the country as Catholics, but many soon switch to small Evangelical denominations. And today when a Catholic marries a non-Catholic, it is the Catholic partner who is statistically more likely to change religious affiliation.

So the numbers keep falling; while the American population grows, the Catholic drops. The Pew survey found that for every one American who comes into the Catholic Church, there are more than six who leave. If current trends continue, the number of American ex-Catholics will surpass the number of active American Catholics sometime within the next few decades.

Keep in mind, too, that the Pew figures are based solely on how respondents answer survey questions. If a respondent identifies himself as Catholic, he goes into the books as a Catholic, whether or not he ever goes to church. Since Mass attendance figures have been dropping, too, the grim reality is undoubtedly worse than the Pew statistics would suggest.

What do we plan to do about it? Many Catholics, I’m afraid, will see these survey figures as a reason to launch ambitious new programs for evangelization, complete with workbooks and staffing criteria and PowerPoint presentations. That’s not what we need. We already have a program for evangelization that has been successful for 2000 years: the liturgy. What we really need, in order to take advantage of that “program,” is a new attitude.

Back in February, when he celebrated Mass with the new members of the College of Cardinals, Pope Francis observed: “There are two ways of thinking and of having faith.” He explained: “We can fear to lose the saved, and we can want to save the lost.” When we stop worrying that we might offend someone by proclaiming the truths of the faith, and start realizing that we might save someone by being forthright, we may begin drawing converts into the Church.

In another interesting CWN news story that appeared yesterday, we reported on a new written work by Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI. In his introduction to a new book by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the retired Pontiff reminds us that the Church exists not only to serve the faithful, but to serve the spiritual needs of “the world in its entirety.” We have a responsibility to our neighbors: to bring them the Good News of salvation.

When things are going well, we should be drawing people into the Catholic Church. Even when things aren’t going particularly well—when we are doing just a mediocre job as Catholics—our communities should grown naturally, by birth and marriage and immigration. Right now we aren’t even doing a mediocre job. We’re flunking the test.