THE challenge for the New Evangelization: bringing men back to church

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 17, 2015

Here’s a simple formula, tried and true, for getting families into church: If the fathers come, the wives and children will come, too.

Steve Wood, who founded St. Joseph’s Covenant Keepers, cites research done by Southern Baptists on bringing families into churches:

• If a child is the first in the family to become a Christian, there’s a 3.7 percent probability that the rest of the family will become Christians.
• If mom is the first in the family to become a Christian, there’s a 17 percent probability that the rest of the family will follow.
• If dad is the first in the family to become a Christian, there’s a 93 percent probability that everyone else in the family will follow his lead.

Wood found the same result in a Swiss study: “The study found that the one overwhelming critical factor is the religious practice of the father.” He concludes: “If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular).’”

But don’t take Wood’s word for it; consult your own experience. Chances are, you know several families in which the mother goes to church regularly with the children, but the father doesn’t. Do you know any families in which the father goes, but the mother doesn’t? Offhand I can think of several families that fall into the former category, but not one in the latter.

Try another exercise: Think of the families you know that don’t go to church. Try to guess which parent would be more likely to respond favorably to an invitation. If she went, would he? If he went, would she?

Finally, stand at the door of your parish church on Sunday and take a quick count of men and women filing in or out. If the women don’t outnumber the men by a substantial margin, your parish is very unusual.

If we want to draw families into the Church (and keep those who are already there), we need to attract fathers. But to attract fathers means attracting men. And that’s not something the Catholic Church has been doing very effectively.

For three or four decades now, there has been a lively discussion in Catholic intellectual circles about the role of women in the Church. Only rarely does one hear about the urgent need to bring men into the active life of the Church. The discussion of women’s roles is usually focused on questions of ecclesiastical authority: on the need to have women serving on Vatican dicasteries and diocesan councils. For the vast majority of Catholics, however, the life of the Church is lived out at the level of the parish. And in most parishes, women are definitely not under-represented. Men are.

Yes, lay women have very little direct control over the decision-making process in the Church, but lay men have even less. Leaving aside the clergy, who are the people who shape the life of the ordinary parish? The parish secretaries, religious educators, lectors, extraordinary ministers, music directors, CCD teachers, housekeepers, and cantors are predominantly female. The pastor may have final authority, but his advisers—and the people to whom he will have to explain any tough decision—are mostly women.

The most important challenge facing the Church today, as three successive Popes have told us, is the New Evangelization. We urgently need to revive interest in the faith in societies such as our own, where the influence of the Church has been receding. We must stop the exodus of young people from the Church, the closing of parishes, the disappearance of religious orders and institutions. We must begin bringing people into the Church. In order to do that, we must make our parishes more attractive to men: to the fathers who might lead their families back to the active life of faith.