Twenty-one percent of the 261 million people who make up the adult population of the United States according to the Pew Research Center.
That’s 54,810,000 Catholics in America, and apparently not even one works for the Associated Press — at least, not one who knows what he’s talking about.
The AP tried its hand last week at moral panic, fretting that young Catholics are moving away from liberal liturgies and toward more traditional ones. The AP’s reporting is chockablock with quotes from irate worshippers, some of whom have renounced Catholicism entirely, complaining that conservative clergy have destroyed their places of worship.
“It was like a step back in time,” a former parishioner of St. Maria Goretti in Madison, Wis., told the AP on condition of anonymity.
Another ex-parishioner at the same church said of its new pastor and his conservative reforms, “You’d leave Mass thinking, ‘Holy cow! What just happened?’ . . . I’m a lifelong Catholic. I grew up going to church every Sunday. But I’d never seen anything like this.”
The reforms are so terrible, the AP reports, that some worshippers have “gone to more liberal parishes.” In fact, “some joined Protestant churches. Some abandoned religion entirely.”
“I’m not a Catholic anymore,” one woman said. “Not even a little bit.”
What, exactly, have the traditionalists done?
They’ve brought back sacred worship, including Gregorian chant, the trappings of the old rites, including incense, and a renewed focus on the sacraments and the human condition. They’ve done away with Boomerific antiques of Vatican II, such as the guitar mass, “African drum circles,” and the vapid I’m-okay-you’re-okay Sunday sermons so popular in parishes that boast that they are “middle of the road.” Most importantly, the younger, more “conservative” priests don’t equivocate on the more unpopular points of church teaching. They preach eagerly against abortion, contraception, and homosexuality.
In other words, these upstart “conservative” Catholics are just . . . Catholics. There is no going off script. There is no theological freelancing. They are simply adhering to church teachings on abortion, premarital sex, contraception, etc., as laid out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Yet the AP writes of these traditionalists as if they are fringe radicals or some theological version of Gorillas in the Mist.
“The orthodox movement can also seem like a tangle of forgiveness and rigidity, where insistence on mercy and kindness mingle with warnings of eternity in hell,” it reports.
That’s Catholicism! That’s the act of contrition (“I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven, and the pains of hell . . .”).
The report also includes these lines, which are equal parts amusing and insulting: “[Traditionalists] often stand out in the pews, with the men in ties and the women sometimes with the lace head coverings that all but disappeared from American churches more than 50 years ago. Often, at least a couple families will arrive with four, five or even more children, signaling their adherence to the church’s ban on contraception, which most American Catholics have long casually ignored.”
It’s upside down that a large Catholic family should be viewed as the outlier. Why are those who follow the doctrines of their faith being cast as something akin to cultists? And what a weird thing to suggest anyway. Maybe — just maybe — these large families want children. Maybe their beliefs about contraception never played a role in their family-planning decisions. Maybe they took scripture seriously when it exhorted them to be “fruitful and multiply.” Maybe they’re just being . . . Catholics.
Elsewhere, at Benedictine College, the AP notes that pornography and premarital sex are “forbidden” — rules that seem “like precepts of a bygone age.”
Bygone age? The church holds a firm position against both matters. The church never abandoned or “evolved” on these issues; American Catholics simply stopped listening, and Catholic leadership in the U.S. all but resigned itself to a quiet defeat. That American Catholics are slacking doesn’t mean the church is “changing with the times” or that those who held fast against the self-devaluing slide into modernity are now backward upstarts. It means only that Catholicism in the United States is badly wanting for decent shepherds.
The article continues, digging into the position that traditionalism and faithful adherence to church teaching is somehow odd, revolutionary, and even problematic.
Writing about parishioners of a church now led by conservative leadership, the AP reports that one “family eventually left the church, describing the 2021 promotion of a new pastor, and a sudden focus on sin and confession.”
In case the point isn’t clear, elsewhere it mentions other worshippers’ complaints: “There was more incense, more Latin, more talk of sin and confession.”
Still not clear? There’s more: “Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession.”
A Catholic Church that would talk about fallen nature and the Sacrament of Reconciliation? What next? Transubstantiation? Papal infallibility?
More seriously, what, exactly, does a Catholic Church talk about, if not the sacraments and eternal salvation? Fish fries?
That these parishioners recoil in horror before Catholic doctrine as a vampire would before garlic is not an indictment of the traditionalist. It’s an indictment of the dwindling champions of Vatican II, whose legacy will be that they allowed the church in America to crumble to a point where congregants are uncomfortable with mere mentions of sacraments and fallen nature.
The entire AP article reads as if it were written by a person who has never understood the most basic facts about the Catholic Church. It’s written as if its authors believe that an organized religion is defined by popular opinion rather than its official teachings. Its authors seem genuinely disturbed that Catholics would actually take seriously what their church says.
Most of all, the article misses the point. That the aging leaders of the church in America have allowed large numbers of Catholics to lapse on essential points of faith and morals is ignored almost entirely as a significant failure. Instead, the focus is put on faithful Catholics who prefer traditional worship and who are unafraid to preach official church doctrine. The crazy thing is that the article recognizes, unwittingly, that post–Vatican II leadership has been an objective disaster for the Catholic Church in America.
“In 1970, more than half of America’s Catholics said they went to Mass at least once a week,” the article states. “By 2022, that had fallen to 17%. . . . Among millennials, the number is just 9%.”
It adds, “Even as the U.S. Catholic population has jumped to more than 70 million, driven in part by immigration from Latin America, . . . infant baptisms have fallen from 1.2 million in 1965 to 440,000 in 2021, [and] Catholic marriages have dropped by well over two-thirds.”
The article notes that large numbers of self-professed American Catholics simply disregard the church’s sacred teachings: “Surveys show most American Catholics are far from orthodox. Most support abortion rights. The vast majority use birth control.”
But the journalists who published the report don’t understand enough about the church to frame these facts as indicative of a massive failure of Vatican II’s liberalizing forces. Nor do they know enough to consider that the general deterioration in the church in America suggests something negative about liberalization. Indeed, rather than provide a serious investigation into what facilitated the great dwindling, which would be a genuinely interesting read, the AP ends up giving its readers this:
The Catholic Church in America is certainly not what it once was. Marriage is down, baptisms are down, adherence to teaching is down, and church attendance is down. But let’s not lose sight of the real threat to the church in America: smells and bells.
The AP had a chance to do a story on the forces that led to across-the-board declines for Catholics in America, as well as the forces that oversaw the 20th-century epidemic of clerical sexual abuse. But the news agency could not help itself. Faced with the aftermath of the destructive forces of 1960s-style liberalism, the AP chose instead to worry that, in America, a hollowed-out church could mean opportunities for conservatives to seize power.
BECKET ADAMS is a columnist for National Review, theWashington Examiner, and the Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center. @becketadams
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