MN-Skeptic wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 12:57 pm
RTH10260 wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2024 10:27 am
‘A step back in time': America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways
By TIM SULLIVAN
Updated 6:07 AM GMT+2, May 1, 2024
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — It was the music that changed first. Or maybe that’s just when many people at the pale brick Catholic church in the quiet Wisconsin neighborhood finally began to realize what was happening.
The choir director, a fixture at St. Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone. Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe.
So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned.
At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell.
“It was like a step back in time,” said one former parishioner, still so dazed by the tumultuous changes that began in 2021 with a new pastor that he only spoke on condition of anonymity.
It’s not just St. Maria Goretti.
https://apnews.com/article/catholic-chu ... 3ffc8ed487
While some folks are nostalgic for the 1950s, there's a reason we've moved on from that time period.
The following essay is a general observation about organizations, not specific to the Catholic church, and is not a criticism of any particular religious doctrine. It's an observation about how many different types of organizations tend to behave when their viability is under duress, and how churches are handicapped in their potential responses in ways purely commercial organizations aren't.
Becoming more hard-line seems to be a universal behavior of many types of organizations that are facing a potentially terminal decline that they may not be able to counter. Religious affiliation seems to be declining globally, as many mainstream deominations have long been shrinking, and even some of the higher-control more extreme groups are starting to see declines. Even in theocratic states, people are becoming more secular -- only a minority of Iranians go to the mosque weekly, 50 years after the "revolution" that was supposed to bring about paradise on earth by enforcing universal belief in their flavor of Islam.
A quick check of stats suggests that the Catholic church is nowhere near as central to American life as it was 50 years ago. Catholics are now down to about 25% of the US population, over 50% of which says they're not members of any church, even if they say they believe in God. In the 1960s, over half of Catholics attended Mass weekly; today, it's about 1 in 6. 20% of American Catholics describe themselves as Catholic but say they are not affiliated with a parish.
So what can religious groups do about declining membership (and economics)? Few denominations facing long-term decline attempt to "rebrand" themselves to appeal to a broader swath of "customers" the way a struggling restaurant chain or clothing boutique can. When your "product" is doctrine, and when your doctrine says that you've got the only valid take on life, it's pretty difficult to pop up one day and say, "you know that stuff we've been teaching you for X hundred years, well, we've thought about it a bit and we're gonna totally reinvent what we believe to appeal to the young 'uns."
One would think that the Mormons would be in better shape than other denominations because they are able to have doctrinal flexibility via "new revelations" that completely overturn long-held beliefs such as formerly denying Blacks the priesthood. But even far greater doctrinal flexibility than most other religions doesn't seem to be helping them hang on to the younger generation or to converts for other reasons I won't go into here.
Absent the ability to make massive doctrinal changes, the two most common strategies that religious organizations typically pursue is either to (a) revert to doctrine of an imagined "golden age" of the past or (b) to increase mechanisms for controlling the lives of customers/members, to detect disaffection earlier and make it more costly to leave the group.
An example of increasing control: The Jehovah's Witnesses, who grew quickly for decades, are seeing members drift away in most developed economies, and they're doubling down on keeping the ones who are left by trying to control members' lives more through soaking up more time in church, opposing higher education for their members and a whole nest of other things. I've long said that the JW's aren't a cult despite their odd beliefs and annoying attempts at evangelism. However, they are indeed becoming more cult-like in their attempts to control people's lives to keep them in the pews.
An organization with the size and prominence of the Catholic church can't really control members' lives in the way that smaller, under-the-radar groups like the JWs can, or the way that cults like Scientology can, even if they wanted to (which they don't). So they can go the route of reviving the old traditions. There's a natural tendency to look at the past where the pews were full and think that the expression of doctrine in services back then was the cause of that. One of the biggest traps in logical thinking is mistaking correlation for causality, so it's pretty natural to think that if you resume Latin masses, people turned off by Vatican II will come back. Unfortunately, the people that enjoyed Latin masses are now aging out and most Catholics don't remember life before Vatican II.
But doctrinal change is way less likely to drive the decline of American Catholicism than secular factors. Demographics is probably the most important. Surprisingly, the stereotype of Catholics with tons more kids than Protestant families is no longer true -- White Catholics now have
significantly fewer kids than Protestants, which I was surprised to discover. And Catholics are delaying having kids even longer than Protestants.
I didn't take time to try to discover the deconversion rate for kids rejecting their parents' faith for Catholics versus Evangelicals (who are now seeing over 50% of their kids walking away from their parents' religion). So a dramatically lower birth rate is likely a key causal agent -- not the presence of guitars, folk songs and long hair on Sundays. Geographic dispersion of families is probably a big factor on all religions, where kids move away for college or jobs, which weakens family bonds and likely drives a drop in church membership among 20-somethings. I don't have metrics on rural versus urban religiosity at hand, but I'm sure there are significant differences, even in bright red states.
I won't go into the effects of child sexual abuse scandals (and, in Ireland, the workhouse scandals) on church membership in general and Catholic church membership in particular. Even high-quality efforts to measure this are always difficult to assess, but it's almost certainly significant.
To forestall criticism, please recall that I have consistently said in my posts here that child sexual abuse by clergy is a religion problem, not a Catholic problem.
Since I first said that here and in other fora many years ago, my educated guess is now well documented fact. Many large Protestant religious denominations (Southern Baptists, JWs, others) have engaged in systematic efforts to hide abuse by clergy and discredit victims, to a much greater degree than I had expected. Most of those organizations continue to be in denial about the extent of the problem, even though they are increasingly facing existential danger from litigation.
Also recall that I have on numerous occasions given the Catholic church props for being far more up front about dealing with this problem than most other religious groups, even though I am well aware that their efforts are inconsistent, as one would expect in an organization of its size. I have always said that the Protestant problem is going to be harder to eradicate because of the less centralized organization of those churches.
At this point, the more insular the group, the more likely it is that its clergy is abusing kids. Some people working with the Orthodox Jewish community in New York
estimate that 50% of boys are molested by clergy and there are plenty of articles about how these groups agressively obstruct investigations.
Companies under duress can take the same unworkable path as religious groups and cults when they're in decline. Perhaps the best example is Tesla and Twitter under ElMo's enlightened leadership. He only wants "hardcore" employees who will work themselves to death without questioning the Great Visionary's brilliant ideas. Multi-level marketing organizations are also declining so they're putting in place lengthy "training programs" and expensive inventory buy-ins to keep recruits in place.
I am not suggesting that all church leaders cynically step outside their faith to make secular-style business decisions about how to turn their groups around. Most clergy struggling with declining membership are undoubtedly sincere in their beliefs and are trying to find a theological basis to grow their congregations. There are some complete charlatans like prosperity gospel televangelists, but most are probably sincere.
I'm not religious so I'm not going to get into a discussion about whether any changes in religious doctrine in the modern era is "wrong" and should be discarded in favor of the old stuff or vice-versa. My point is that economics/business strategy research can explain the decline of religious organizations and can predict the trajectory of organizations under duress better than theological arguments, even if church leadership believes itself to be wholly guided by their theology. As a result, I'm not optimistic that a return to the "good old days" will solve the problems of American Catholics or any other religious group.
– the Pope channeled his inner von Strudel! But that movement was very much one of elderly people refusing to change, giving it limited appeal and a finite lifetime.
