If one does a circuit around the blogosphere, you’ll see a number of posts speaking of the demographic bomb coming to the church. Although the answers vary a little bit, the answers are essentially fundamentalist. In one version, Catholics need to all be evangelists under the guise of discipleship. In another version, we have the bemoaning of not enough catechesis or not enough “good” catechesis.
I’m not attempting to cause anyone to lose faith, but people leave the Church every day who know their faith exceptionally well. Not only is it condescending, but it is grossly arrogant to assume that people leave you because they don’t understand you. Certainly there are people that leave the Church that really don’t understand what it is. Would more education have solved that problem? The honest answer is that we really can’t say, but we should probably assume the answer is no. Typically force is required for a change in inertia and if reasons of intellect aren’t the cause of leaving, stimulating the intellect won’t lead to many staying.
A little historical perspective is also in order here. At least three continents in recent memory have been converted to Christianity through syncretism: North America, South America, and Africa. A reasonable argument can be made that much of Europe was converted similarly. I’m not claiming to be an advocate of syncretism, but the one thing it isn’t is fundamentalist. And that happy campy social justice garbage has been front and center in history. Some of the first things missionaries set up were schools and clinics. Admittedly these things aren’t going to have near the appeal for the bourgeois we are so desirous of today. But fear not, the Church has plenty of history being tools for the bourgeois. However that history has been more pacifying proletarian outrage and hasn’t really been tested among a people that pretend they are bourgeois.
A lot of the problems today are simply the product of trying to reclaim a past that wasn’t there. Cafeteria Catholicism was the past. People stayed in the Church not out of some profound personal belief but because of social pressure. People didn’t just offer prayers together because they were more holy but because they liked the people around them or heaven forbid enjoyed having a beer with the people around them. Church bingo wasn’t always just a fund raising technique but one of many social activities centered at the parish. One of the Orthodox churches in Milwaukee still runs a bowling alley on their property. And while people can certainly disagree on the properness of this, the Catholic life did not begin and end at the mass. People were perfectly comfortable maintaining their devotions to various Saints even if they didn’t go to mass. That is true among many lapsed Catholics today.
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