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Dec 29th, 2019
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Orthodox Christian Member
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The crisis isn't the beliefs but the lack of proper teaching. My priest who brought me in made this very clear. My Orthodox friends have complained about the same things of the Orthodox. I will say the Church is starting to catch up with reality! This is true. I have heard it said that 40 percent or more of the cradle Orthodox lose their faith by the time they are young adults. Religion has become a cultural thing for them. It is the converts who are devout.
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I think Fr. Alexander Schmemann of Blessed Memory has written three articles many years ago (40?) that I think provocatively address this issue. May you receive some profit from them. Speaking of Father Schmemann of blessed memory, I had the great joy of attending this lecture in honor of him at St. Vladimir's Seminary last week given by the charismatic Bishop Basil of Wichita and Mid-America (OCA): http://www.svots.edu/
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My husband's best friend is Greek Orthodox.. we never have talks about the papacy. It is always about trying to get him to go back to church. I don't think he gets the fact that even if he travels he can go to another ethnic group Orthodox church.I was trying to figure out a way to get him to visit the shrine of St Nectarios. Maybe that would help! We pray for him all the time to come back.
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maxpercy00: Glory be to Jesus Christ!! Glory be to Him forever and ever!! Thanks so much for these articles. This last article could have "Orthodox" deleted and "Catholic" inserted to describe the same type of problem in American Catholicism. The differences in property ownership details might be different but the spiritual problems are the same IMHO. In Christ, BOB
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Nominalism, disinterest and apathy certainly go beyond confessional lines.
In this case I'm really trying to understand the American Catholic church in particular, which is why I started the thread with those articles. What are the causes of this? Americanism of course makes sense in a way, but that doesn't explain to me the rapid change over basically one generation.
I was talking about this with my wife tonight and she says most of her friends and acquaintances through various groups are Catholic (we do live in the Northeast). She said of all the women she knows and interacts with, she would count one as an actual practicing Catholic who believes in what the church teaches. In general she said the thinks it's a cultural thing, like how many Jewish people view their religion.
Our closest friends don't go to mass, but send their daughter to CCD so she can "make a choice" after she gets confirmed. The mother when I've spoken to her said she thinks all religions are the same.
Ultimately I guess I'm trying to understand is this actually getting worse and not better. The article would lead me to believe the former.
Last edited by AMM; 02/10/08 01:48 AM.
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Indeed a brilliant and quite astute article by Father Alexander..may his memory be eternal!
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My critque of these pieces on this source is that I am not certain if the author is aware of the goings-on elsewhere worldwide or if he imagines somehow Catholics don't breathe the same smog in the air as everyone else. Worth examining also might be the widespread implosion and subsequent shrinking of mainline protestantism (If the Episcopal Church had grown proportionate to the US population since peaking in communicants 40 years ago, we would have 5M+ of em today. Ditto for Lutherans of all stripes...). Also the 900 pound gorilla in the kamilavka we don't care to talk about too much at ByzCath has been the wholesale decline of the net communicants in all Eastern Christianity (EO, OO & EC) where immigration has not propped communities up. All the "isms" in all the world, put together have had the same or similar net effect on all of us. It is a pretty hostile world out there to be an believer of confessional faith, of any stripe. AMM, I am not certain it could be said that there are any more special reasons for this loss of influence and ascent in the Catholic Church then some other places. Easterners my face more "ethnic" difficulties, and Protestants may end up "voting on dogma to death"... But in the end, how much can just plain be blamed on cable TV and connsumerism? (I admit, I am putting that out there as a rhetorical question, I like having cable... sigh) Both are very good sources, and are accurate. You'll notice that in the article in the first link, Archbishop John Ireland's "Americanism" is at the root of the problem. I could write books about the damage his party did to Catholicism (both Eastern & Western) in the U.S.
Dn. Robert I think we could also, if we were willing to be honest, write books about the mistakes we made for ourselves by ourselves. I sometimes wonder if one of the most daming consequenes of the legacy of +Ireland was the way his ignorance has allowed serveal generations to act as though it was all someone else's (his) fault... One could almost start to believe there was never a wholly unrelated trusteeship debate/schism and ignore the intensive rivalry already pre-existing between EC and the ROC which just came over on the boat to a new continent. Sometimes it is just easier to blame it all on +Ireland. Ultimately I guess I'm trying to understand is this actually getting worse and not better. The article would lead me to believe the former. If you should find yourself here in the Buckeye state sometime, look me up. We will take a tour of some of the midwestern seminaries, houses of religous formations and some thriving parishes where seeds are being planted... The local seminary population has doubled in the last 10 years to just under 200... I personally think that is just the start. Than maybe we can get a feel for it. No one ever said we would run out of work!
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I think Fr. Schmemann is perceptive and accurate in identifying the issue as secularism and how that reorients and redefines everything as it becomes the ethos of the Church culture, whether Catholic or Orthodox. I do not think there is anything peculiarly American in this other than America is the primary engine of secularism in the world.
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Jessup B.C. Deacon Member
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I do not think there is anything peculiarly American in this other than America is the primary engine of secularism in the world. There lies the big problem! Our calling is to "fix" that. In Christ, Dn. Robert
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"Cultural" catholicism is not the sole province of the 50 states of the Union; it happens in Mexico, too. How does one account for the fact that hispanic Ash Wednesday services are crammed to the rafters with people who miss every other Sunday and feast day in the year with the possible exception of Christmas and Easter? Well, in the Mexican tradition, it is considered "bad luck" not to receive one's ashes on Ash Wednesday.
This sickness pervades the entire Church. It is the direct result of disengagement of families from the life of the church, and of the lack of catechesis, both within families and in the parish context.
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I am not certain it could be said that there are any more special reasons for this loss of influence and ascent in the Catholic Church then some other places. Easterners my face more "ethnic" difficulties, and Protestants may end up "voting on dogma to death"... But in the end, how much can just plain be blamed on cable TV and connsumerism? A good deal could certainly be blamed popular culture and outside influences. In reading the Shaw and Lawler articles it seems there are some central themes however that have to do with internal structure more than anything else. Shaw does talk about the start of assimilation and the triumph of Americanism at the end of the 19th century. Even then, you could say up until the 1950's you had influential figures on the local or national level like Cardinal O'Connell, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Fr. John Corridan or Fr. Maurice Dorney. Shaw points to the 60's as a turning point But in the 1960s something else began that worked hand-in-glove with the absorption of Catholics into secular America and was not inevitable at all. I mean the institutionalization of theoretical and practical dissent, a process memorably signaled by the 1967 Land O' Lakes declaration by the presidents of major Catholic universities proclaiming their schools' independence from the magisterium. The effects of the powerful one-two punch of assimilation and dissent are reflected in the figures above. Lawler also points to the rise of dissent in Boston Yet again, the most conspicuous examples of this attitude have been shown in Massachusetts. In the 1950s, an Archbishop of Boston discouraged a priest from his energetic public preaching of a defined Catholic dogma, because some people found that dogma offensive. A decade later the same archbishop� now a cardinal� announced that Catholic legislators should feel free to vote in favor of legislation that violated the precepts of the Church. In 1974 his successor encouraged Catholic parents not to send their children to parochial schools. And in 1993 yet another Boston archbishop instructed the faithful that they should not pray outside abortion clinics. In each of these remarkable cases, the Archbishop of Boston obviously thought that he was serving the cause of community peace. But just as obviously, he was yielding ground, and encouraging the Catholic faithful to yield as well. Both point to institutional failings in the above issues Shaw says To begin with, our bishops need to face the fact that very many Catholics have lost confidence in them as a group. To some extent, that may be a consequence of the sex abuse scandal, but to some extent it predates that sorry affair. For the most part, people aren't hostile. They just aren't paying attention any more. If Catholic university presidents and pro-abortion Catholic politicians can get away with ignoring the representatives of the magisterium, why not ordinary folks?
Soon after the sex abuse scandal broke, several bishops suggested holding a new plenary council for the Church in the United States to consider what had caused that disaster and what needed to be done. The national conference of bishops proceeded to talk that idea to death over the next several years, then hired some academic social scientists to tell them what had happened. The plenary council didn't appeal to the bishops, one suspects, because by Church law it would have required the participation not only of bishops but lower clergy, religious, and�heaven help us!�the laity.
Plenary council or no plenary council, we need to take a fresh look at shared responsibility in the Church. Openness and the sharing of responsibility in Church affairs at all levels�parish, diocesan, national�are indispensable. But when I made that point to one good bishop, he sighed and replied, "Consultation takes so much time." Indeed it does, and much education and re-education now are necessary as well. But the future of the Church in America depends on it. and goes on to say Underlying this episcopal stand-offishness about sharing responsibility is the powerful, largely unacknowledged influence of clericalism. The clericalism of American Catholicism, I once wrote, is like wallpaper�it's been there so long you don't see it any more. This kind of invisibility multiplies its capacity for doing harm.
Sad to say, many good bishops and pastors seem to believe they have buried the last vestiges of clericalism by promoting lay ministries, including the work of salaried "lay ecclesial ministers" who by an overwhelming margin are women. Twenty years ago, in Christifideles Laici, Pope John Paul II correctly pointed to the lay ministry craze as an expression of neo-clericalism. Few people paid attention then, and the craze persists. In commending the laity of the United States, as he will undoubtedly do, could Pope Benedict perhaps say a word about that? And also about personal vocation and its discernment as keys to finding the proper roles of all Catholics, but especially lay women and men, in the apostolate of the Church?
There is a desperate need for moral straight talk, too. Telling people who rarely or never go to Mass and take for granted their right to dissent that they're good Catholics does a vast amount of harm. Giving Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion is an especially egregious instance of it. Lawler says And to what end? Today the bill for the sex-abuse scandal(s) has come due, and the Church is paying a frightful cost-- in public stature as well as in cash-- for the bishops' pastoral failures. With their efforts to preserve the Church from criticism, they succeeded only in bringing down much greater obloquy upon the Church. If Church leaders had acted decisively and forthrightly to discipline the priests who molested young people, and remedy the defects in clerical discipline that had allowed this sort of aberrant behavior, the faithful might have been shocked, but at least the public revulsion would have been directed where it belonged: at the erring individuals. Instead, by becoming silent partners in the scandal, the bishops have jeopardized the credibility of the Catholic faith itself.
The bishops made a fool's bargain. They were prepared to sacrifice the essential elements of the Catholic faith: the moral teaching, the clerical discipline, even the loving care for the faithful. In return, they hoped to prop up the prestige of the institutional Church. But whatever prestige the Church enjoys is based on public respect for those essential elements of religious faith. When the disgraceful stories eventually hit the headlines, the bishops could no longer fall back on the conventional respect they had once taken for granted. They were willing to sacrifice their apostolic mission to preserve their prestige; in the end they were left with neither mission nor prestige.
Critics of Catholicism, seeing this disaster as evidence to support their own views, have often observed that the bishops erred by devoting their attention to the institutional Church rather than the needs of the faithful. That explanation is misleading because it assumes that the Catholic faith can somehow be separated from the Catholic Church. It cannot. Lawler also says the following The thesis of this book is that the sex-abuse scandal in American Catholicism was not only aggravated but actually caused by the willingness of Church leaders to sacrifice the essential for the inessential: to build up the human institution even to the detriment of the divine mandate. I argue that in Boston, Catholic culture lost first its integrity and then its power because Church leaders made the same fatal mistake, offering their first fealty to the church that is "it" rather than the Church that is "she." If my thesis is correct-- if American Catholicism has been corrupted because Church leaders were pursuing the wrong goals-- then it should not be surprising that the results have been most disastrous in the Boston archdiocese, where Church leaders had been must successful in pursuing those goals.
No, the collapse of Catholicism in Boston did not begin with the sex-abuse crisis of 2002. That crisis itself was the manifestation of corruption that had begun long, long ago. The corruption was evident decades ago, when Cardinal O'Connell-- the same powerful prelate who could scuttle a popular legislative initiative with a single statement-- learned that a prominent priest was engaged in gross sexual misconduct. The cardinal chose to leave that priest in office, and cover up the evidence of his transgressions. No doubt he told himself that he was acting "for the good of the Church." That probably is a good summary of the crisis itself as a whole from the perspective of the articles. If you should find yourself here in the Buckeye state sometime, look me up. We will take a tour of some of the midwestern seminaries, houses of religous formations and some thriving parishes where seeds are being planted... The local seminary population has doubled in the last 10 years to just under 200... I personally think that is just the start. Thanks, and it's good to see such a movement afoot. Shaw actually touches on this when he says Reviewing the evidence of decline in his book The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America (Sophia Institute Press, 2003), David Carlin concludes that the outcome of the crisis will probably be the de facto collapse of the Church in America and the retreat of Catholics into the status of a "minor and relatively insignificant sect." Traditionalists will have won the internal Catholic power struggle, mainly because the progressives will have drifted away. But in the end, the small band of traditionalists will find themselves isolated in "a new Catholic quasi-ghetto," with about as much influence on the culture as the Amish and Hasidic Jews have now. Maybe that's a little alarmist, but you can see what he's saying. It seems to me looking at the future that what they're saying is that if the institutional crisis isn't resolved, things will get worse. My question is, which way is that going?
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It's good to see that, now that a few personalities have moved on, the temperature of this place has changed so that one can post about this stuff without being run off.
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There lies the big problem! Our calling is to "fix" that.
In Christ,
Dn. Robert [/quote]
What do you suggest?
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Jessup B.C. Deacon Member
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There lies the big problem! Our calling is to "fix" that.
In Christ,
Dn. Robert What do you suggest? [/quote] Ultimately, it boils down to evangelization and conversion of the populace. We can only expect America to act in a Christian manner if the population is Christian. Sadly, this is no longer the case (at least, we are not in the majority). Dn. Robert
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Ultimately, it boils down to evangelization and conversion of the populace. We can only expect America to act in a Christian manner if the population is Christian. Sadly, this is no longer the case (at least, we are not in the majority). It seems to me the article is saying the hierarchy is failing to uphold the standards of the church itself in regards to the people that are already "evangelized". It seems they are in need of "converting" as it were.
Last edited by AMM; 02/11/08 08:45 PM.
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