Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1383

And Sherry Weddell Replies!

She writes:

OK, I'm back from another trip and I'll take that bait. Those of you who read Intentional Disciples have heard this all before but here it is again.

first of all, I love Creasy. I have her books and pass them on. She is a mainline Protestant who really gets it. And yes, all the numbers for young Catholics are at the bottom of the Christian heap. In practically every category. The ones on the top: Mormons, black Protestants, and evangelicals/Pentecostals.

Here's the deal: roughly 32% of those raised Catholic have abandoned the identity altogether. An additional 38% of those raised Catholic retain the identity but seldom or never bother to show up. 30% attend Mass at least once a month. Only about 15.6% are at Mass on a given weekend. So the next time you witness a baby's baptism, think, in 20 years, 2/3 of those babies will either be gone or non-practicing. Only 1 in 6 of those babies will be attending Mass regularly.
Catholics leave the Church and the name Catholic by age 23. The majority by age 18.

And the Pew Forum showed that attending CCD, involvement in youth ministry, and going to a Catholic high school make little or no difference between those who stay Catholic, those who become "nothing" and those who become Protestant. Our primary strategies aren't making any difference.

But there are two tracks: The Cathoiic becomes "nothing" track and the Catholic becomes Protestant track. Because there are two different basic reasons why people leave.

Track A is those who leave because of an unsatisfied spiritual hunger. This is the group that eventually becomes Protestant (15%) They leave a bit later (only 63% leave by age 23) and seem to spend a period of a few years searching or in a spiritual limbo before they discover a Protestant congregation that seems to meet that hunger. Many don't take on a Protestant identity until their late 20's or early 30's. 71% of this group say their spiritual needs weren't being met as a Catholic. The majority not only become Protestant, they become evangelicals/Pentecostal/independent Christians (by the way, about 7% of current Mormons are former Catholics)

At the very moment, I type this, about a quarter of US adults are either actively seeking or at least are passively open and scanning the horizon for spiritual options. This is true of Catholics in our pews, Catholics who no longer practice, and huge variety of other people of all religious traditions or none. If we were out there, proclaiming Christ in the midst of his Church in a joyful, intriguing manner, the interest of many would be peaked. But so many "orthodox" Catholics are holed up behind their barricades and inside their institutions.

This is a large group who, if we were reaching out evangelizing them during their "limbo" time, could easily become the Catholic saints and apostles of the 21st century. But so many of us distain their hunger and ignore their spiritual distress. They aren't going to accept "no" or "just shut up and do your duty" as an answer. They will vote with their feet.

Track B is those who leave and become "nothing" because it just doesn't mean anything or because they don't believe in specific Church teaching or even in God anymore. (14%) 80% of this group are gone by age 23. They are really out there and we will have to GO OUT and find them with the imagination and zeal of a Francis Xavier setting foot on the soil of Japan for the first time.

There is no one size fits all answer. Track A folks are looking for personally meaningful, life-changing faith and evangelicals are all over that. Track B folks are just out there in the ether. And remember what I call the "Track C" folks who still call themselves Catholic but hardly ever show up.

What we are facing is the 15% factor. Only 15% of all American Catholics are at Mass on a given weekend. Only about 15% of Gen X age Catholics (30's - early 40's) and Millennial Catholics (teens and 20's) attend Mass regularly. If regular Mass attendance is the goal, what we are currently doing is only "working" for roughly 15% of our people.

This goes so far beyond a failure to catechize. We are two generations past that. We are on the edge of a demographic precipice that is going to make the post Vatican II fall-off look like a golden age. We are going to have to (gasp) GO OUT and make disciples.

In our culture, religious identity is not longer inherited, it is chosen. And reconsidering the religious identity of your childhood has become a right of passage for young adults. So we have to evangelize when they are children and we'll probably have to do it again when they are young adults.

I've written about this at enormous length over at Intentional Disciples (www.siena.org) and we cover all this in our seminar Making Disciples. We are still spending our time debating what happened nearly 50 years ago while our future walked right out the door and we didn't notice.

In the future, people will be fervent Catholics because they are disciples of Jesus Christ first who know that this is his Body on earth which he has provided for them and where he desires them to be.

We've worked in 40% of American dioceses now and I can tell you: cultural Catholicism is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD as a retention strategy for the American Catholic church in the 21st century.

In the 21st century west, God has no Grandchildren.

You know the mantra: If we don't evangelize our own, someone else will: evangelicals, Mormons, or a post-modern culture of vague agnosticism. If you want Catholics, MAKE DISCIPLES. If you want Mass attendance, MAKE DISCIPLES. If you want vocations, MAKE DISCIPLES. If you want people who will fill our Institutions and pay for them and care for them, MAKE DISCIPLES.

It is what our Lord has commanded us to do in every generation, but we thought that culture and institutions would do it for us. But those days are past.

More Sherry Weddell bait

A reader writes:

I'm reading a good book called "Almost Christianity," by Kenda Creasy Dean, a Methodist theologian who participated in the early part of the National Survey of Youth and Religion, a mammoth study best known to us for producing the concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. (Here's a Patheos interview with her, giving the basic outlines of her book's message.) Creasy Dean's book argues that we are losing the younger generations to MTD (a conclusion reinforced, I believe, by the Faith Matters surveys, the results of which were presented in last fall's big book "American Grace"), and she explores ways in which the church can counter this destructive trend.

The American teens who by far scored highest on the NSYR were Mormons. Creasy Dean devotes a chapter to looking at what Mormons are doing right, insofar as they are doing a spectacular job of involving their kids in their faith, teaching them about the faith in a theologically substantive way, and retaining faithful children from generation to generation. I don't know much about Mormonism, but it's extremely impressive to learn how much Mormon parents and church communities (their equivalent of parishes) commit themselves to the formation of their kids -- not only in individual families, but in the wider community. Creasy Dean writes:

Few religious communities are more insistent on modeling the use of their cultural toolkits for teenagers [by "cultural toolkits," she means the set of beliefs and practices particular to that culture, that help its members make sense of the world and their place in it] than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons invest heavily in teaching young people how to exemplify and promote Mormon beliefs and behaviors. By intentionally reinforcing the significance of Mormonism's particular God-story, by immersing young people in a community of belonging, by preparing them for a vocation and by modeling a forward-looking hope, Mormons intentionally and consistently create the conditions for consequential faith -- so much so that Mormon teenagers are more likely than teenagers from any other group to fall in the category of young people the [National Survey of Youth and Religion] called highly devoted.

I didn't realize until reading this book that during their last four years in high school, most Mormon teens wake up at 5 in the morning and spend an hour or so with their parents in what they call "seminary" -- intensive Scripture study and catechism. Can you imagine what we could do in our families and parishes if we had this kind of commitment? Our kids aren't teenagers yet, but my wife and I are now talking about what we can do along these lines to help build up our kids in the faith.

I ran across a line in "Almost Christianity" in which she said the NSYR data show that of the Christian faiths (including Mormonism), Roman Catholicism has by far the worst record of keeping their teenagers involved in the faith, and teaching the faith to them in a substantive way. (The categories she compares are Mormon, conservative Protestant, black Protestant, mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic.) I looked in Appendix C, where she lists a chart of "Characteristics of Teenage Faith, Summarized from NSYR Data," and my jaw hit the ground when I saw the figures for Catholic teens. In almost all categories, they are below the numbers charted by every other group, even the mainline Protestants; in most categories, they are significantly below in most categories.

Some of the results are stunning, and not in a good way. For example, on the question "Has had spiritual experience in worship that is moving/powerful," 76 percent of Mormon teens say yes, 70 percent of conservative Protestants, and even 64 percent of mainline Prots. Know what the Catholic number is? Only 37 percent. On the question of whether or not the "family talks about God/spiritual things once a week or more, the numbers are really high for everybody but mainliners and Catholics, who both come in at 34 percent (and who the Faith Matters survey found are, among non-Hispanics, the fastest-declining Christian churches in America). When asked if "faith shaping daily life is very/extremely important" and if "faith shaping major life decisions is very/extremely important," only Catholic teens reported in the minority (41 percent in both cases).

Why is this happening? On paper, it makes no sense to me, given how many strengths the Catholic faith has. But when I think back on my years as a Catholic, my wife and I were concerned about the culture within the Church that was going to make it especially difficult to raise kids in the faith -- we had this concern even before the scandal broke. In our last parish, my wife volunteered in the church library, and came home one day to say we weren't going to send our kids to CCD, because she had learned that the parish was letting women who didn't even attend mass teach classes to fulfill conditions to get them tuition discounts at the parish school. As someone who had converted to Catholicism from Evangelical Protestantism, that really shocked and set back my wife; she couldn't believe how unserious the parish was about preparing the next generation to be faithful Catholics.

The NSYR data are the first time I've seen any hard numbers on how the Catholic faith is held on to by Catholic teenagers, and they only surprised me at first. But on reflection, they are exactly what I would have expected from my own experience. My only prior experience was the mainline church in which I grew up, and frankly, I'm surprised that the numbers for mainliners are so high; ours was a MTD factory if ever there was one. As a Catholic, I came to realize over time that I lived in a Catholic bubble; my relationship to the Church was limited to First Things magazine, Ignatius Press books, and good Catholic friends who were all orthodox. None of us had any real connection to our parishes, because it seemed that our parishes generally followed another religion -- a religion that is precisely described by the phrase Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I didn't realize until I married and started having children how important it is to have a community of like-minded believers around you to reinforce what you teach at home. A religiously observant Jewish friend warned me before I had my first child that I would be wise not to think that my wife and I can raise our kids alone in the faith; the community around us will eventually be as strong or maybe even stronger than we are. He was giving me a friendly caution to be careful. Years later, reading the NSYR survey data, especially comparing Mormon youth at one end of the spectrum to Catholic youth at the other, I can see what he was talking about.

I would love to know what your readers think of this -- especially Sherry Weddell. I hope they don't get sidetracked into "but Mormonism isn't true, and Catholicism is." I get that. Though I admire them greatly, I don't even think Mormons are Christians. But they are doing something very, very right, and our side is not.

Sherry, you have the floor.

What Robin of Berkeley...

...gets right and what she gets wrong.

Prayer Requests

A reader writes:

Thanks for posting my earlier prayer request on your blog. Unfortunately, my cousin, Julien, passed away yesterday morning at 8 AM. Please pray for the repose of his soul, and for strength for his family at this time.

Father, grant eternal rest to Julien and consolation to all who love him through Jesus Christ. Mother Mary, for Julien and all who love him.

Another reader writes:

Since your blog-readers are so faithful in prayer, I was wondering if I could request prayers for Officer David Moore of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police, a high school classmate of mine who was shot four times during a routine traffic stop yesterday. Two of the shots were to the head, and he's now in a coma. I remember him as being a really nice guy in school, though we weren't close friends. Please pray for him and his parents, who are also police officers.

Father, grant healing in body, soul, and spirit to your servant David through your Son Jesus Christ. Grant skill to his caregivers and peace, strength and consolation to those who love him through Jesus as well. Mother Mary, St. Luke and St. Michael, pray for him!

Another reader writes to ask prayer for his son, whose marriage is breaking up.

Father, we ask that your love would triumph here and that you would protect him from the false charges his wife threatens him with. We ask that you would change her heart and grant her love and mercy through your Son Jesus. Holy Family, pray for them.

MTV to America

Kill Your Television--and homeschool.

When a media figure uses a phrase like "pushing the envelope", "breaking taboos" or "cutting edge" what he means is "perverse, evil, and aiming to break down your will to resist monstrous wickedness".

Pictures from the Walk for Life

In San Francisco.

The hard-working reader who took these writes:

I caught wind that the Walk for Life was coming up through your blog, and decided to go. I'd appreciate it if you shared my pictures. I woke up late and had 15 minutes to run 2/3 a mile lugging 17lbs of camera equipment in order to get to a train station so I could take the 1 1/2 hr train ride, and then another hard fast walk for 1 1/2 miles carrying the same 17lbs so I could get there in time to get pictures of Abby Johnson.

What strikes me about these demonstrations every time is how happy and joyful the prolife people look and what a pack of bitter dried-up prigs the pro-choicers are.

The Cuteness dons her dad's sweater and BEHOLD!

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A JEDI!

A reader writes...

A friend asked me today to check into resources for Catholic online graduate education, i.e. distance learning programs, regarding a Masters degree in theology or philosophy.

Do any of you have any opinions or advice? Specifically:

- Several programs my friend has looked at offer the same course work on campus as online. Are online degrees still looked down upon when looking for a job (e.g. a teaching position) in a Catholic context, or is the "I got my degree on the Internet" stigma going away?

- Have any of you heard of Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT? There's a JPII Center for Bioethics there that looks pretty good – are any of you familiar with professors or graduates from there? Are there any other distance learning programs available in the US that you've heard are good (or bad)?

I don't know from nuthin' about this. Anyone? Bueller?

"Evidence" for Reincarnation

I'm a long time fan of your writing. I really appreciate to hear a voice of reason in what I see as a society full of extremes with no moral compass.

I often have discussions on Facebook with a friend of mine who is of the Sikh religion. He tries repeatedly to show that Christianity has changed drastically over the ages and that it's not a dependable source of truth. In response to a discussion we were having regarding reincarnation, he offered me an article in which the author supposedly proves that early Christians including Jesus and certain sects of Jewish people fully suported the idea of reicarnation. It goes on to "prove" that us modern Catholics and Christians have simply disregarded what Jesus showed to be true.

After taking a quick glance at the article it is very evident that the author is totally misinterpreting scripture and is likely incorrect about most of the other "facts" that he claims to expose.

I thought you might enjoy the article. What do you think of this supposed
evidence? Have you ever heard of anything like this? I think it's articles like this that may take someone that's trying to learn more about Christianity and totally confuse them.

Hmmm... yeah. That was pretty much of a train wreck. It's a classic example of what happens when you go into Scripture bound and determined to hear what you want rather than what it says. So the whole "it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment" thing is studiously overlooked while an extremely dubious collections of misquotes and poorly construed misinterpretations is built up.

So some cardinal nobody has ever heard of is quoted as saying that reincarnation can't be disproven by reason. True, but so what? It's disproven by revelation.

Likewise, the words of Proverbs are read as being Solomon's past life autobiography instead of what they are: the words of anthropmorphized Wisdom.

And on and on it goes. The misquotes from source I know make me highly doubt the accuracy of from the sources I don't. Is it possible Philo believed in the transmigration of souls? I s'pose. But I know for a fact that St. Jerome didn't and when I check the supposed letter where he says he does, I find it was written by the heretic Pelagius and *preserved* by Jerome. Likewise, the extremely dubious exegeses of gospel texts I know ("Jesus says Elijah was reincarnated in John the Baptist") makes me doubt greatly the citations of Church Fathers I don't.

The simple fact is: Christianity is utterly unintelligible apart from the Resurrection. Appealing to early Christians as believers in reincarnation is something only somebody who stands outside the Christian tradition in complete ignorance of its inner contours could belief.

Moral: if you want to understand a religious tradition, get inside it and listen to what the people inside it think it means. Don't grab random texts and tell those inside what they mean. You will, infallibly, be wrong.

Apologetics Question

A reader writes:

First off, I truly enjoy reading your blog daily, it is easily one of my favorites. I also wanted to let you know that I am working my way through your Mary trilogy of books and have found them both informative and a great read.

Secondly, I am a theology teacher/campus minister at a Catholic high school in Michigan. We have a really solid theology program here; as a matter of fact this year we started using the Didache Series from Midwest Theological Forum. I am emailing you now to see if you would have any suggestions in regards to apologetics. I proposed to our administration and pastor in the fall that we offer a Senior theology elective on Catholic Apologetics in 2012. That proposal was accepted, and I will be teaching this class for the first time next year. I have already started to look for materials for the class. The one book that I thought would be a good "textbook" would be the 'Beginning Apologetics' series of books from San Juan Catholic Seminars. Would you have any recommendations, particularly in the area of multimedia tools like DVD's, which would be of benefit for this class?

Funnily enough, I have never compiled a list of fave rave apologetics books or media. I have certain books that mean a lot to me personally (stuff by Chesterton, Kreeft, Lewis, Thomas Howard, and sundry others). But it's not an organized list and I have not made a study of apologetics literature.

The places I'd go if I were you are a) Catholic Answers, or b) Steve Ray's site. They've actually done the heavy lifting of putting together either reading lists or just flat amassing a ton of material. Lots of it is accessible to high schoolers. There are other places to go too, of course, but I don't want to overwhelm you. I would also, of course, point you to my stuff for certain apologetics needs. My books are not an organized course, but I'm told that some of them have wound up on high school syllabi, so that's something, I guess.

Hope that helps!