Pew Forum - II

This follows up on a previous post on the report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, titled U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. I paired a summary of the study with a 10-year comparison of statistics for the Archdiocese of Boston on church membership and sacramental life in parishes. (Check the earlier post for some good comments and for links to the full report. Check here for Michael Paulson's excellent summary and graphics in the Boston Globe.)

The numbers are unsettling but they also provide a broader context for understanding declining numbers in the Catholic community. As significant as is the impact of the sexual abuse crisis and the closing of parishes, the study shows that there is a general national context which affects virtually all faith groups.

In 1998 there were 8,896 weddings celebrated in the Archdiocese of Boston. In the year 2,007, following an annual decline over the previous decade, the number of weddings in the Archdiocese was only 4, 213, fewer than half as many 10 years ago. In the same period, infant baptisms in the Archdiocese dropped from 30,110 to 17,360. I’m no statistician but I would wager a guess that as fewer Catholics choose to celebrate their weddings in the Catholic Church, the likelihood of those same couples presenting their children for baptism is also likely to decline. Of course we know that across the board many young couples choose to live together without benefit of civil or ecclesial sanction and that many couples plan small families – or no children at all. Whatever the reasons behind them, these numbers are cause for alarm.

Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College writes:

The idea that this country can return to an era in which God commanded and people obeyed is impossible, not because secular people demand control over the decisions that affect their lives, but because religious people do as well.
(The Boston Globe: 2/22/08, p. A15)

My own experience as a Catholic priest over nearly 35 years is that many Catholic people increasingly make decisions about how they live their lives independent of their Church’s teachings and expectations in both small and large matters. Without a doubt, the national and local numbers I quoted in my letter last week reflect a crisis in church membership but a more critical issue is the deeper one: strong membership numbers were once the product of the Church’s authority over peoples’ lives but that authority no longer has the muscle it once flexed.

It is rightly held that the abuse crisis and anger over parish closings have contributed to this crisis. True enough. But there is a broader, cultural secularization in the air we all breathe. That climate, in which personal autonomy trumps all authority, is the one in which we are raising our children. (My homily last weekend, on the cure of the man born blind attempted to get at this issue.)

I have no great solutions to these issues. Our parish experiences these realities in very real ways. However, a ray of hope shone locally last Saturday (through the falling snow) at a parish meeting including representatives from the Parish Pastoral Council, the Parish Staff, the Parish Finance Council and the many commissions, committees and ministries in our faith community. The purpose of the meeting was to look to the future with an awareness of the “state of the union” in the Church universal, in the American Church, in the Archdiocese and in Holy Family Parish. The Archdiocesan Pastoral Planning Report (see link to this report on the sidebar) was a significant basis for our meeting while the release of the Pew Forum study and the Archdiocesan stats was timely for our purposes. Our parish is but 3 years old following the closing of our two parishes of origin and it’s time for serious planning and goal setting as we, with the whole Archdiocese, face a future with many uncertainties.

A local, living example of what's ahead can be found just down the road apiece where the Catholic community in a part of Nashoba Valley consists of six towns, five parishes and three priests.

The three pastors, Fathers Edmond Derosier, Paul Ring and Shawn Allen, work together as part of the Nashoba Valley cluster, formed, in part, as a response to the priest shortage in the Archdiocese of Boston.... The cluster includes the towns of Ashby, Ayer, Groton, Pepperell, Shirley and Townsend. (Check the report on this cluster in last week's edition of the archdiocesan newspaper, The Pilot.)

The "landscape" of Catholicism in the Archdiocese of Boston not only reflects national trends but is already being shaped by them and by the circumstances in which we already find ourselves.

-ConcordPastor