Pope Benedict and American Catholicism: On The Titanic's Deck

[Guest guest]

Susan Jacoby

Author and reporter

Susan Jacoby is the author of " The Age of American Unreason, " to be

published in February by Pantheon.

 

Pope Benedict and American Catholicism: On The Titanic's Deck

 

The most significant fact about modern American Catholicism appears

in a recent report on the changing U.S. religious landscape by the

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Although 31 percent of

Americans were raised as Roman Catholics, only 24 percent consider

themselves Catholics today. One in ten adult Americans--a stunning

figure--have left the church for another religion or have abandoned

organized religion altogether. The saying, " Once a Catholic, always a

Catholic, " a favorite maxim of the nuns in the parochial schools I

attended, is no longer true.

 

In 1960, 5.4 million children attended American Catholic schools.

Today, the figure is down to 2.4 million and falling. More Catholic

schools close every day. Two-thirds of Catholic seminaries have

closed since 1965; during the same period, the number of young men

training for the priesthood dropped from 49,00 to 4,700. There were

nearly 180,000 nuns in 1965; today, there are fewer than 67,000.

 

Without Hispanic immigration, the situation of the American Catholic

Church would be even more dire. But the majority of Hispanic children

do not attend the declining number of Catholic schools, and, if the

history of immigration is any guide, the attachment of Hispanics to

the church of their parents and grandparents -- a critical part of

immigrant survival -- will diminish in direct proportion to their

assimilation into American life.

 

There are also many liberal Catholics--they are sneeringly

called " cafeteria Catholics " by the Catholic right--who go to church

but ignore the church's strictures on contraception, divorce, and

other sexual matters. These Catholics bear no resemblance to the

Catholics of the 50s, who accepted the Church's teaching authority.

These " cafeteria Catholics " also want the church to allow priests to

marry and to admit women to the priesthood--a move that would

eliminate the priest shortage overnight. But the old men in Rome who

fancy themselves the rightful heirs of the twelve male apostles have

simply ignored the wishes of the laity.

 

Then there is an aggressive right-wing minority of American Catholics

who still believe in papal infallibility. These are the Catholics--

Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel

Alito are among them--who have formed a political alliance with

Protestant fundamentalists. They are a minority within their church,

but they are often the public face of the church in America--thanks

to ignorant members of the news media who still think of Catholicism

as a monolith.

 

There is absolutely nothing that Pope Benedict can do to reverse the

decline of his church's l authority over American Catholics. Don't be

deceived by the television coverage of the pope's visit, which will

surely emphasize the positive--the crowd that will show up at Yankee

Stadium for the pope's public mass, the platitudes about religious

pluralism that will emerge from everyone's mouth as this man who

considers himself infallible in matters of faith and morals pretends

to be open-minded and tolerant.

 

The reasons for the degeneration of the Catholic Church in America

are complicated, and anyone interested in this subject would be well

advised to consult the works of Gary Wills (who is a practicing

Catholic).

 

I was brought up as a Catholic in the 1950s and early 60s, as the

child of an Irish Catholic mother and a father who was a Catholic

convert from lapsed Judaism. My parents were not particularly devout

or particularly strict in their interpretation of Catholicism and

they, like many American Catholics, became less and less observant in

the 60s. I probably would have become an atheist regardless of the

church in which I was raised, but the extravagant claims of

Catholicism--in particular, concerning the infallbility of the pope--

certainly hastened the development of my skeptical side.

 

During the early 60s, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council,

under Pope John XXIII, aroused the hopes of many Catholics who wanted

the church to abandon its strictures against contraception and

divorce, who wanted priests to be able to marry, and who later wanted

women admitted to the priesthood. When John died, and was replaced by

increasingly conservative successors, it became clear that those

hopes for liberalization and reform would not be realized. At that

point, many young nuns and priests abandoned their religious

vocations (though not always the church itself). Had the church

allowed priests to marry, I am certain that many more would have

stayed.

 

Nearly three decades later, the scandal of priestly pedophilia

finished the work that the disappointments of the sixties had begun.

The church tried to stonewall at first. When that failed, and an

angry laity took its case to the press (both Catholic and secular),

the church began to try to hush the victims of sexual abuse with

financial settlements. What the church did not do was acknowledge its

moral culpability as an institution and try to repair the lives that

its priests, in many cases with the full knowledge of their

ecclesiastical superiors, had devastated. I don't think anything that

Benedict could possibly say, at this late date, could restore the

kind of faith that makes even many former Catholics say, with

nostalgia, " It was the only THE church. "

 

As an atheist, I do not, of course, share this nostalgia. Claims to

the possession of absolute truth are dangerous--to individual minds,

societies, and the entire world. The pope is nothing more--or less--

than a fallible man " elected " to his office by a rather small group

of other fallible men. He holds some reasonable views (on peace and

poverty) and a host of other anti-rational views about the

supernatural. My deepest wish--one that will certainly go unfulfilled-

-is that no American politician will address the pontiff with the

ecclesiastical sobriquet, " Your Holiness. "

(And didn't like it when the Dali Lama was addressed that way

either.) Pope John XXIII also hated that title, and that is probably

why he has not been canonized by Their Holinesses, his successors.

 

I should say, by the way, that I hold no more animus toward the

Catholic Church than I do toward any other religion that claims to

possess absolute truth. These are questions about the pope, so my

answers naturally address themselves to Catholicism. Fundamentalist

Islamists, ultra-right Orthodox Jews mired in 17th-century thinking,

fundamentalist Protestant evangelicals, Hindu nationalists--take your

pick--are all a menace to free inquiry and free thought. As for

openminded people of every religious faith--those whose beliefs do

not impinge on the lives and thoughts of others--come, let us reason

together.

 

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