From Chicago magazine, a feature article on the declining membership in the Catholic Church in Chicago — a decline even more severe if you keep in mind that the current influx of Mexicans is propping up the parishoner count (but not helping much in terms of support for Catholic schools and generally being more recipients than providers of aid).
As usual with these sorts of articles in the secular press, the general approach is “they’d go a lot better with retention if they got rid of all the unpopular doctrines” — which is, to begin with, not likely to be the right diagnosis (the Episcopalians ought to be swarming with members, then, with its balance of ritual vs. doctrine), and, secondly, sort of missing the point: the Catholic Church is not just a club whose objective is nothing more than to keep membership numbers up.
So I want to think and write about this some more, but in the meantime, thought I’d put it to my readers, some of whom are Catholic, some Protestant, some not any religion at all but like a good puzzle: what can the Catholics do to bump up their numbers, without abandoning what it means to be Catholic?
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