Evangelical Catholicism And The Critical Need to Keep Going Forward

Pope Francis at World Youth Day

in Rio de Janeiro 

An interesting article in the New York Times this morning about the Church in Latin America.  On the one hand there is new vitality for the Catholic Church South of our border.  Sixty years ago the nations of Latin America were dependent on missionary priests and sisters from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.  Today, while the Churches of Europe and North America are lacking in sufficient clergy for their own needs, the former missionary countries of Latin America are actually sending vocations to the United States.  At the World Youth Day last year we saw the tremendous energy of the Church in Brazil and surrounding countries.  The key to renewal has been threefold: the growth of small base communities (communidades de base) where people reflect together on the scriptures, the culturalization of the liturgy where an intelligent participation in prayer is made more easily accessible, and liberation theology where the lived experience of the faithful is brought into dialogue with the ancient tenets of the Church.  That is the good news. 

The bad news is that while sixty years ago you had a Church that was dead in the water with no vocations, with 15% Mass attendance, and with a symbiotic relationship with right-wing dictatorships, you also had 90% of the faithful identifying themselves as Catholic.  Today you have almost 20% of the population identifying as Protestant and another 11% saying they are religiously unaffiliated. 

Secularization is a problem throughout the developed world and it should not be surprising that the majority of those who identify themselves as without religious affiliation come not from the poorer elements of society but from the upper Middle Class that have more in common culturally with North Americans and Europeans than with the poor of their own countries.   As a Church we need to develop a strategy to effectively address the challenges secularism presents to society.  But perhaps the more pressing thing to look at is why there has been such a shift from Catholicism to Protestantism.   The New York Times article says:

Latin Americans who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism most often said they did so because they were seeking a more personal connection with God. 

I think this is something that we must pay great attention to as I believe holds the solution not only to the loss of Catholics to Protestantism in Latin America but to the empty pews here at home.  

I remember running into Pastor Lon Solomon of McLean bible Church in McLean Virginia about fourteen years ago.  I was on a “Footsteps of Saint Paul” pilgrimage in Greece and Pastor Solomon was leading a group of his congregants on a similar expedition.  Our different busses both pulled into the same restaurant for lunch.  I am not sure quite how the conversation started between us but he told me some interesting things about McLean Bible.  I was familiar with MBC as I have at various times lived in the Washington DC metropolitan area but Pastor Solomon told me that perhaps half of his 13,000 members were or had been Roman Catholics.  (I say “were or had been” as a number of them—including some friends of mine from Great Falls—still consider themselves to be Catholics only that they more often attend McLean Bible Church rather than their local parishes.)  why are Catholics being drawn to Evangelical Churches like McLean Bible?  To be honest McLean Bible is no hell-fire and damnation church.  But people want a deeper and more personal relationship with God than they are getting in most Catholic parishes.  The sad thing is that if we Catholics knew our own heritage, we would be the target churches for those who were seeking that relationship. 

I mention McLean Bible, let me also mention Tara Brach and the Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC.  Dr. Brach teaches Buddhist Vipassana meditation.  Her Wednesday night teachings, held at River Road Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda MD draws hundreds of people each week.  It draws young people—people in their thirties and forties—the sort of people that we aren’t seeing in our Catholic and Lutheran and Episcopalian and Presbyterian Churches on Sundays, the sort of people we usually associate with “secularism.”  Dr. Brach, in fact, offers a spirituality that well suits the young and the intelligent in today’s world.  And on my visit there I was surprised to hear her cite not only Buddhist scriptures and teachers, but Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross as well as Thomas Merton and contemporary Catholic authors. 

Catholic author, the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, writes:

….we are reaping the rewards of such repression.  Much of the Western world has given up on the church and is going other places for wisdom.  Unfortunately, in these other places they are sometimes “willingly filling their belly with the husks the pigs are eating” (Luke 15:16) But we in the church must ask ourselves if we have not been the parent who sent them away because there was nothing trustworthy or life-giving at home.

We have a rich heritage of spiritual authors that we keep as if under lock and key.  Can’t we see we are only beginning the renewal called for at the Second Vatican Council?  What has happened so far is mostly “clearing the ground” so that we can build a strong Church for the future. 

Again, I have reservations on George Weigel’s book, Evangelical Catholicism, but his basic premise is, I believe, spot on.

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

As a Church, as the Community of the Body of the Risen Lord, we need to provide people with that friendship—that personal relationship—with Jesus Christ.  We have the scriptures, we have the Liturgy (the sacraments), and we have a rich tradition of spirituality (prayer)with which to do this.  We have the tools.  Pope Francis is right, we need to stop the screaming about abortion, about same-sex marriage, about the “evils of the modern world” and pick up the tools the Holy Spirit has given us to deepen our own faith and to bring that living faith to others.  The protection of human life, the moral and spiritual renewal of society, will all follow.  

Spiritual Malnutrition in Modern America

I was surprised to hear that Ann Romney had been Episcopalian and converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon faith) when she met and was dating Mitt.  When I heard that her family was of Welsh background I was particularly curious as while there are some Welsh Anglicans they are fairly rare, the Welsh being mostly evangelicals—Baptists and Wesleyans in particular along with various “free Church” Congregations.  The Anglicans in Wales are usually quite Low Church but high income—the upper crust sort of people.  Working class Welsh—and Mrs. Romney’s grandfather was a miner—are either non-religious or, as I said, evangelicals.  It turns out that Edward Davies, Mrs. Romney’s father, an immigrant, had been raised in the Free Church tradition but was strongly opposed to organized religion.  This may have been due to the heavy and rigidly Calvinist bent of the Welsh Evangelicals which is dour enough to suck all joy and life out of you like one of Harry Potter’s Dementors.  The Davies family rarely went to Church and while Ann identified herself as an Episcopalian, I can’t find any mention of her ever being formally received into or confirmed in the Episcopal Church. 

But it isn’t Ann Romney whom I want to write about today. It is rather the Episcopal Church.  Thinking—until I started to research—that Mrs. Romney had been a cradle Episcopalian I was going to bring up the subject of how the Episcopal Church has been gutted of its membership—dropping 40% of its membership over the last 40 years.  What has caused this loss?

Actually I think the loss is even more dramatic—many of the Episcopalians I know, indeed most, are people who have joined the Church over the last 40 years meaning that the number who have left is even greater than 40%, the converts taking the place of perhaps another 20 or 30%.  An Episcopalian priest friend of mine—who himself is a former Catholic priest—says that about two-thirds of his congregation of 350 members joined the Episcopal Church as adults.  Many of these are, like the priest himself, former Catholics.  They feel more comfortable in the Episcopal Church because they are in second marriages, or they are in gay unions, or they feel emarginated in the Catholic Church because of their support for “liberal” causes.  “Father Joe” said too that there are a number of regular attendees at his parish who still call themselves Catholics but are just more comfortable worshipping in an Episcopal Church because it is more “inclusive” and “welcoming.” 

“Father Joe” said that in addition to converts from Catholicism he has about an equal number of people who have come from other Christian faiths—particularly evangelicals—who are drawn to the Episcopal Church (they say) by the more formal liturgy.  “They like the music—and the language of the Prayer-Book.  These are the ones who are most resistant to liturgical innovations and they love the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’.”  Some of these “pass through the gastro-intestinal tract of the Episcopal Church and into the Roman Catholic Church because they want even more ritual than we can give them, but they tend to become Latin Mass Catholics.  I even know of one or two,” the priest said, “who used the Catholic Church as a changing station for Russian Orthodoxy.  But people on that sort of spiritual journey are generally just restless and not religious.” 

What has caused the exodus from the Episcopal Church?  Liberal Protestantism in general has gone into decline since the heady years of their support for the Civil Rights movement and Anti-War movement of the Vietnam years.  Those were exhilarating times for liberal Protestants in general and Episcopalians in particular.  But the subsequent causes—feminism, abortion rights, gay rights—the Churches have embraced have been much more polarizing.  Yet I think the affinity for the Episcopal (and Presbyterian) Church for liberal agendas doesn’t really answer the question of why their membership has declined.  While a minority of former Episcopalians have either gone into the schismatic Anglican groups such as Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) or moved to more evangelical Churches, the majority have just stopped going to any Church or attend a church of their choice on a sporadic basis or as need for a funeral or wedding occur.  American society is overall far less churched in 2012 than it was in the Ozzie and Harriet years of the Eisenhower administration. 

I think—and I could be wrong—that another reason that Church attendance and membership has dropped in the mainline denominations, including the Episcopal Church, is that the churches had become little more than a social event.  The preaching is often bland and sufficiently vague to make sure that no one is offended and the liturgy is often the triumph of form over substance.  I think a focus has been lost on the saving work of Christ and how that saving work intersects not with some future afterlife, but with the demands of faithfulness in the here and now world.  This brings me back to one of my theme songs—the lack of substantial spirituality in contemporary American Christianity.  I have written before on this issue as it relates to Catholicism, but I think the problem is much wider.  Anglicanism has a strong spiritual tradition both with the Caroline Divines and the Oxford movement.  Methodism too in Wesley has a strong spiritual heritage that leads the Christian to look honestly at himself and what much change for fidelity to Christ.  I think the various “Bible Churches” and other pseudo-evangelical groups present a distortion of this spirituality—not a willful distortion just a failure to capture the real thing—in the sort of emotional theatrics of mega-church worship and people find their “faith” satisfied even as a child would rather fill-up on Cotton Candy rather than Broccoli and lean meats.  The meat and potato spiritual diet found in Ignatius Loyola or John of the Cross or John Wesley or Teresa of Avila or Lancelot Andrews or Jeremy Taylor requires a discipline that the musical surge and stage lighting of a Joel Osteen or a Pete Wilson or a Brad Powell or a Pat Robertson supplants so that the believer can “feel the feeling” without having to confront the challenge.   The mainline denominations, Catholicism included, needs to get back to its deep spiritual roots and find the sort of faith that sustain contemporary Christians in a post-Christian world.