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Pope Francis at World Youth Day
in Rio de Janeiro
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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.
