Do You Know Where You Were Last Sunday?
The low-down on Mass Attendance
23% of American Catholic adults say they attend Mass every week.
(We should remember that a 90's hand-count of actual attendance at American churches on a given Sunday showed that the numbers present were much lower than the number of Americans who told surveyors they attended Church every Sunday. 48% said they attended every Sunday but only 25% were actually in the pews when the count took place. There is a natural, built-in inflation factor here since people are often answering based upon the fact that they mean to be there every Sunday or think of themselves as a regular church-goer. The actual numbers in the pew on a given Sunday are almost certainly considerably lower than self-reporting would indicated.)
Twice as many Catholics - 56% - report that they are never or rarely attend or only attend a few times a year.
21% attend at least once a month (which in some US dioceses and in Australia is the standard to be considered a "practicing" Catholic.)
So using this as a standard, that would mean about 44% of US Catholics would be considered "practicing" and 56% "non-practicing."
Which looks fairly dismal until you compare it to other western countries like Australia where only 15% of Catholics attend Mass once a month. In France, weekly attendance is usually put at less than 5%, under 10% in deeply Catholic Austria, etc. so you can see why the Pope might look with respect and interest on a western country that is still overtly religious in its public life and possesses a huge and relatively vibrant Catholic population.
And now off to Mass.
Just in case anyone was curious :-}
posted by Sherry W @ 8:20 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I wouldn't be so quick to write off Europe. It has 2000 years of Catholic identity and its Catholic roots are deep. It has just come off a century of two wars, the Holocaust, the final trick-down of Kantian philosophy, secularism and nihilism, Soviet occupation of half of its land mass, losses of previous empires (French, Austro-Hungarian), etc.
It is worth noting that it is the traditionally Catholic countries in Europe: Italy, Spain, Portugal, that fought the Enlightenment unlike the Protestant countries (as well as the USA, where the Protestant ethic flourished). The substantial declines are in France (where is has declined since the Revolution), the Netherlands (no surprise there) and Britain (again, no surprise there, as it is heavily informed by the Enlightenment).
But Catholic Europe has survived huge challenges before: what about the onset of the barbarian invasions? What about the demographic effects of the plague years? What about the effects of the Reformation itself?
Only Catholic Europe survived with unity intact, as Protestantism spins further and further out of control (pace Philip Jenkins).
Just throwing out a bunch of statistics is not enough.
Yes, Catholic Europe survived but the last great real revival was in the 17th century with the generation of saints whose passionate, creative, response to the Reformation turned the tide. We have been living on the coattails of that revival ever since.
And that revival did not happen by trying to recreate the medieval Europe that had died in the fires of religious wars. It happened through faithful and inspired creativity that really address the new world they lived in a point when the last great western-wise cultural change was taking place - from medieval to modern world views. As we live through the change from modernity to post-modernity, we can learn alot from the late 16th/17th century saints and founders.
It wasn't just looking to the past that did it - it was innovation on a colossal scale. They had one terrible advantage - 3 generations of religious wars that had destroyed so much of the old infrastructure and assumptions. They knew that there was no easy going-back and they did not idealize the pre-Reformation realities. They knew that the Church needed reformation in the past and most assuredly, in the present.
From the understanding of the Church (first major works on ecclesiology,) to the priesthood (invention of the seminary and whole new understanding of the priesthood and formation); to new clarity about the relationship of personal faith and the sacraments (Council of Trent) to a new emphasis on the conversion of the individual (Francis de Sales), new forms of religious life and a new emphasis on systematic works of charity (Mary Ward, Vincent de Paul, Louis de Merrilac, spread of Discalced Carmelites, Jesuits, etc), a whole new focus on the spirituality and holiness of the laity (Francis de Sales), and invention of new ways of evangelization and nurturing the spiritual lives of average Catholics (the invention of the retreat, the parish mission, the creation of the Catholic school system and systematic sacramental prep), etc. And I could go on and on.
Catholic Europe didn't just survive because it was inevitable. It survived and took back communities that had been lost to Protestantism because it was re-fashioned and renewed over and over against at critical points by many thousands of Catholic apostles and saints who were able to see afresh how the Tradition and the Holy Spirit is speaking to the needs of this generation.
Where that doesn't happen, the Church does not magically survive.
Thousands of historical churches and place names and historic traditions unleashed from the real lived culture and experience of 21st century people are wonderful and valuable but they are not enough. And there are many forms of splintering - of which obvious institutional splintering is only one form.
We need a new generation of creative evangelizing saints. It will take a renewal on the same scale as happened after the Reformation to give birth to a living Catholic Europe that will be a living force into the 22nd century.
It's entirely possible. But it is anything but inevitable.
Sherry W.
No one said it was inevitable. But Catholic Europe has always survived by creativity. Again, look at the creation of Christendom with the missionary work among the various Gothic tribes. Or the missionary work among the Slavs. Or the synthesis of the work of Aristotle with Catholic doctrine (or that with Platonism).
No one's is talking about recreating medieval Europe or Christendom (which actually had died out, as it were, with the nominalists). But they are talking about Catholic Europe, which is not the same thing. And that involves overturning the Enlightenment or at least "relativizing" that for the theory that it is. That will be the "innovation": realizing that Kant's theory is just that, a theory. Putting God back can create a Catholic Europe again (not state-sponsored obviously). And Europe has much on which to draw from its past.
The Enlightenment represents an immaturity in the development of humanity, an adolescence. Now that we are coming to the end of our fascination with the notion that "God" is only a mental concept, etc., people can return to a traditional concept of God.
You underestimate the power of the Catholic tradition, especially in an age where there is little or no tradition, especially in the Protestant world. The Protestant world has been in a great arc since the Reformation, very slowly descending from some coherence to complete incoherence (divested of any institutional coherence, accent completely on the personal, etc.). Only the Catholic Church manifests the teaching, traditional, liturgical and "institutional" coherence that it has had from its beginnings. Certainly, it has responded to the exigencies of different historical circumstances, but it has not been substantially "refashioned," as you say. Nor were its assumptions changed.
I think it's incorrect of you to say that the Baroque Church provided "innovation on a colossal scale." You need to define what you mean, at least.
If you're looking for works on ecclesiology you might try Ignatius of Antioch, Cyprian, Optatus, Augustine (especially). In fact, the whole patristic period concerned ecclesiology because it concerned Christology and theology. They were all of a piece. Read Thomas Aquinas, also, as well as the late medieval theologians. The idea that ecclesiology has to wait until the theologians of the Baroque Church is absurd and I don't mean the first major works, either.
If it's the relationship of personal faith and the sacraments, you might go back to the Church Fathers as well (and Eastern Orthodoxy in general). Same for works of charity (Gregory the Great). And Augustine's De doctrina christiana speaks both of the conversion of the individual as well as the Christian communio, an approach that had consequences for the faith in the Latin West.
My point is that one cannot understand Trent or the Baroque Church as other than in continuity with what went before, just as Vatican II is in continuity with what went before.
What does "vibrant" mean in this context?
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