A Bright Future for the Catholic Church in America Bud Macfarlane

A Bright Future for the Catholic Church in America Bud Macfarlane a free booklet from the If You Really Like This Booklet Consider Giving it Away. The Mary Foundation, the nonprofit publisher of this booklet, invites you to order copies to distribute to your family, friends, parish, and associates. We are making this booklet (along with our hugely popular Catholic CDs and novels) available in large quantities for a nominal donation. We will even send you free copies if you write to us directly using the convenient order forms in the back of this booklet. See the back pages for more details or visit us online today at CatholiCity.com. About the Author Bud Macfarlane, a Notre Dame graduate, grew up in New Jersey with nine sisters and one brother. In 1991 he started the Mary Foundation, the world’s largest producer of Catholic CDs and booklets. One of the most popular Catholic writers in America, his three bestselling novels are available at saintjudemedia.com and on Kindle, and his long- running monthly email newsletter (read by over 50,000 people) is available at CatholiCity.com. Printing History: September 2013 (50,000) © 2013 Mary Foundation barely noticed but powerful transforma- tion has been taking place in the Catholic Church in the United States as a result of unprecedented growth among her most committed members. Every aspect of Catholicism in America will be impacted as the influence of these faithful Catholics expands almost geometrically over the next two generations. To grasp the implications of this tectonic spiritual and cultural shift, we must first briefly review recent history. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Catholic Church in America nearly self-destructed in terms of maintaining itself as a self-perpetuating or- ganization. Here we are considering the Church as an institution in a particular country, not as the mystical Body of Christ. Large numbers of priests left the priesthood, can- didates for the priesthood dwindled dramatically, and seminaries began to close down. Most of the clergy who remained embraced liberal views and practices justified as being supported by distorted, misleading, or downright contradictory interpretations of the teachings or purported “spirit” of Vatican II. The minority of faithful priests who remained were often persecuted or exiled to the smallest rural parishes. Congregations of nuns shrank dramatically in size or disappeared altogether. Sunday Mass attendance, as a rough and minimal indicator of the spiritual commitment of Catholics, dropped from large majorities of baptized Catholics (at 80%) to small minorities (at 20%). This 20% figure has held steady or fallen only slightly since the turn of the Millennium. Bright Future for the Church in America 2 Virtually all Catholics stopped going to Confession regularly, if at all. Married Catholics as a whole ceased to be open to having large families with numerous studies or surveys showing that almost all (perhaps up to 98%) actively rejected the Church’s rich teaching regarding the transmission of life. Liturgical abuse abounded in ways too numerous to describe here. Once stalwart Church institutions, from grammar schools to virtually all colleges, ceased to be authentically Catholic. Additionally, powerful cultural forces outside of the Church contributed to its disintegration: the widespread acceptance of the sexual revolution; post-modern secular philosophies (largely atheistic if not antagonistic to religious belief); the explosion of substance abuse; consumerism; secular feminism; the ever-spreading sleaze in the entertainment indus- try; along with the rapid increase of a largely anti- religious government intrusion into every aspect of life (the most horrid example being the legalization of abortion via judicial fiat by the Supreme Court). All these forces and more hammered away at the Church and her members. Many in the tiny percentage of faithful Catholics who remained placed responsibility upon ineffectual or openly liberal bishops and the liberal priests and nuns who dominated everyday life in parishes. I was assured by a very reliable source that a majority of our bishops were prepared to break away from Rome (schism) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. If you are nearing fifty years of age, you were a child when this implosion of the Church began playing out. Anyone younger can only glean how dramatically and quickly the Church fell apart from numerous books written on the subject (such as The Desolate City by Anne Roche Muggeridge, first published in 1986). In short, the Church hierarchy, her clergy (including most congregations of nuns, who administered and staffed a heretofore spectacularly 3 Bud Macfarlane successful alternative parochial school system), and virtually all of the laymen in the Catholic Church in our country failed to inculcate the one, true faith to tens of millions of souls comprising two generations of Catholics. This phenomenon was not limited to America, with the Canadian province of Quebec being the starkest example, transforming from one of the most Catholic societies in modern history to one of the least in less than a decade. European Catholicism had already been in decline before the 1960s. In August 2011, former Pope Benedict movingly acknowledged this tragedy by apologizing for “generations” of “cradle Catholics” who failed to pass on the true Faith. Tiny Remnant of “Evangelical” Families By 2010, based on our research at the Mary Founda- tion, including reviews of decades worth of polling bolstered by professional interaction with tens of thousands of Catholics, we estimate that fewer than five percent of Catholics in the United States believe and practice what the Church teaches as the Church herself teaches it. This tiny minority makes up a minority of the twenty percent of baptized Catholics who still regularly attend Sunday Mass. These statistics can vary greatly depending on the diocese and parish, but of the roughly fifteen million Catholic families in the United States, we estimate that there are only 150,000 families raising children under the age of eighteen who live in accord with the magisterial teachings of the Church—or a handful of families per parish. These families consider being de- voutly Catholic the unparalleled purpose of life. “So Thick You Can Cut It with a Knife” These devout families will never abandon the true Faith. Religion correspondent John Allen, in a com- mentary on the preponderance of the children of Bright Future for the Church in America 4 these families at the 2011 World Youth Day in Spain, accurately characterized “evangelical Catholics” as those whose faith is “seen as a matter of personal choice rather than cultural inheritance, which among other things implies that in a highly secular culture, Catholic identity can never be taken for granted. It al- ways has to be proven, defended, and made manifest.” He goes on to describe the children of the John Paul II generation thusly: We’re not talking about the broad mass of twenty- and thirty-something Catholics, who are all over the map in terms of beliefs and values. Instead, we’re talking about that inner core of actively practicing young Catholics who are most likely to discern a vocation to the priesthood or religious life, most likely to enroll in graduate programs of theology, and most likely to pursue a career in the church as a lay person -- youth ministers, parish life coordinators, liturgical ministers, diocesan of- ficials, and so on. In that sub-segment of today’s younger Catho- lic population, there’s an Evangelical energy so thick you can cut it with a knife. (“Big Picture at World Youth Day: It’s the Evangelicals, Stupid!” National Catholic Reporter, August 19, 2011) The Next Two Generations As we have seen, beginning in the late 1960s, the Church in the United States was severely damaged over a period of two generations. Yet out of the tiny minority of faithful Catholics remaining, counter- trends surfaced almost immediately in the 1970s, including the founding of alternative publishing houses (such as St. Ignatius Press); the birth of a handful of small, dynamic new Catholic colleges; the formation of new religious congregations; the reform of parts or offshoots of existing orders and congregations; and a movement that many now overlook, known as the 5 Bud Macfarlane Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which deeply and per- manently influenced the spiritual lives of hundreds of thousands of faithful in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lay media apostolates such as Keep the Faith (audio tapes) and Catholics United for the Faith were found- ed to help the devout minority resist the avalanche of confusing or contradictory teachings being dissemi- nated in parishes and educational institutions. Pope John Paul II was elected in 1978 and over the next three decades installed virtually all of the hundreds of current, more faithful American bishops as old-guard liberals retired or died. An achingly slow and often painful reform of seminaries began. John Paul II’s wildly popular Theology of the Body is just one example of how the Church responded to modern intellectual and cultural attacks on families. A master marketer, he introduced powerful concepts and pithy phrases such as “the New Evangelization” and “the Culture of Life” into the worldwide Catholic lexicon, while personally evangelizing every corner of the earth, including a special focus on reaching young Catholics through biennial World Youth Days. Additionally, he embraced the Internet, reformed the Code of Canon Law, and introduced the supreme- ly successful Catechism of the Catholic Church, which continues to be an invaluable resource for faithful Catholics. The new Catechism’s impact cannot be underesti- mated. For the first time in decades Catholic teaching was clear, detailed, annotated, and issued from an un- impeachable source. It became more problematic for liberal pastors and educators to frustrate initiatives by faithful Catholics by denying what the Church ac- tually teaches (an alarmingly common tactic).

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