01/11/07
The chickens have been coming home to roost (with some falcons) at 3211 Fourth St., NE, Washington, DC. Decades of evaporating credibility and its congenital irrelevance to the lives of parishes and individual Catholics are taking a financial toll on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Dioceses are not passing money up to the conference like they used to, a portion of said money being diverted by lawyers for settlements. Some of the 250 U.S. bishops have become Scroogey and wonder what the U.S. Catholic church is getting in return for the assessments that their dioceses have to pay.
All the years the conference has been trying to influence public policy, regular Mass attendance of American Catholics has dropped from 70% to 30%. The greatest losses of Catholics have occurred among blue-collar and other less-educated folk--including Hispanic immigrants--who quickly got bored with a church that has less pageantry, ritual and dictates and more reflection, meetings and people collecting paychecks. An embarassing number of Catholics now think that celibacy is an anachronism originally started to protect the church's real estate investments. Rare is the understanding that the male priest is standing in persona Christi or that contraception is saying, "I love you, but...."
This past November the bishops, at their meeting in Baltimore, voted to refocus their conference, eliminate about half of its committees and turn out sixty-three job-holders, details to be reported in April.
In coming years, there will be fewer bureaucrats cramming two hours of work into an eight-hour day among the sculpture in the conference's posh, fitness-center-equipped Washington headquarters. Those that remain are supposed to be looking inward to deficiencies of the U.S. church in the newly prioritized areas of marriage, family and prolife issues, sacramental practice, Mass attendance and vocations.
It sounds like an orthodox Catholic's dream agenda, but I imagine that most attuned orthodox Catholics are not doing cartwheels over the news and are muttering, "I'll believe it when I see it." And they are quite right in muttering so. The bishops will be marching in their new direction with fewer troops, but those fewer troops remaining in the phalanx will be the same old types.
These are types that have never demonstrated much sympathy for or even knowledge of the church's teachings and ancient traditions. They can tell you the seven habits of highly effective people but probably can't recite the mysteries of The Rosary.
Indeed it was the USCCB that sponsored the infamous Call-To-Action conference 30 years ago at which the most numerous were voices calling for the abandonment of celibacy, the all-male priesthood and traditional teaching on sexuality. Since then, the conference has always thrown itself at Democratic-Party-At-Prayer issues such as nuclear war and the death penalty more frequently and with more gusto than it has thrown itself at abortion. I believe that they are already on their third statement about the war in Iraq.
Mixed in with marriage, sacramental practice etc. is another new priority, "diversity." Again I can hear attuned orthodox Catholics muttering, "Business as usual!" "Diversity" will be about immigrants. There are scriptural and traditional bases for welcoming the stranger and addressing the immigrant population is very necessary. Like it or not, immigrants are not going away and if the church doesn't make an effort to lock them in the fold, civilize them and assimilate them, others, including ID-theft-rings, gangs, evangelicals, terrorists will get hold of them. Unfortunately "diversity" is a PC word which suggests that the USCCB will unconditionally ally with and encourage permanent sub-cultures and underclasses of unassimilated, law-breaking blighters. The recent words and actions of several bishops including those in Minnesota who are hollering about federal sweeps for illegals bear this out.
Aside from sincere desire to reach the bishops' new objectives, there is also the manner of attack. From what I've observed, the poindexters on Fourth St. NE are very ill-equipped to engage the faithful. How the average Catholic thinks--and one of the average Catholic's principle thoughts is that he doesn't want to think too much--seems to be a mystery to USSCB bureaucrats and their kind. They are "experts" with Ph.D.'s. Their element is one of committee meetings, conference junkets, memoranda-writing and deliberating things, often to death. A lot of them are priests and nuns whose desk-jobs are refuges from getting down and dirty in parishes etc. Their modi operandi involve meetings, processes, and working only through other experts, usually diocesan or parish bureaucrats. Many of these latter are themselves having to justify their existence as local churches remember that there was a time when they got along fine without DREs and Diocesan Coordinators of Yadayadayada and Blahblahblah.
How their efforts are going to reach the typical pew-warmer who hates meetings and reflection and whose only contact with the church is at Sunday Mass, is anybody's guess.
Copyright © 2007 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.