Bring ‘Em Back! Part 2

This is the second in a series of articles aimed at helping you to get your lapsed Catholic loved one going to Church again and once again becoming a practicing Catholic.  

What caused your lapsed Catholic loved one to lapse?

Catholics leaving the Church is always disheartening. But just as disheartening is the fact that millions of Catholics have simply stopped going to Mass on Sundays.  They have also pretty much stopped practicing their faith.  Yet many of them still profess to be Catholics.

Priest, author, and lecturer Fr. Dwight Longenecker wrote fairly recently:

“When I’m out leading missions or speaking at a conference, in the meet and greet session afterwards, the most common conversation I have is with middle aged women who say, “Father, what can I do, my children have stopped practicing the faith!” or they tell me how their children have married Mormons or Methodists or Baptists and left the Catholic Church.”

Catholics who are no longer living their Faith or going to Mass are often called ‘fallen away’ Catholics.  The term ‘lapsed Catholics’ may be more fitting.  A person who has ‘lapsed’ has ceased to be ‘active.’  When someone is inactive, he/she just needs to be re-activated.

The New Evangelization

Mention “Vatican II” and you may get the attention of every Catholic within hearing distance.  Mention the “New Evangelization” and not so many ears will perk up.  But there is an intrinsic connection between the two.

The major reason Pope John XXIII called Vatican II was to address the growing problem of Modernism.  The Church needed a renewal to effectively  evangelize a world that was slowly giving in to modernism and becoming more and more secularized.

As Dr. Scott Hahn noted on EWTN’s “Catholic Answers Live” program a couple years ago, “the culture is awash in secularism and it’s not getting better but worse.”

Jimmy Akin was a little more blunt.  “Now we find ourselves in the awkward situation of needing to evangelize the Baptized, needing to re-evangelize the sacramentalized, as well as – and this is where apologetics comes in – sacramentalizing those who were evangelized.”

In short, there are a lot of lapsed Catholics out there.  We need to bring them back to the Faith.  Getting them going to Mass again is the critical first step.

In 1965 more than 55% of Catholics in the U.S. went to Mass on Sunday. Nowadays (post-COVID) it’s probably around about 12% of Catholics attending Mass every week.  And according to Pew Research roughly 20% of Catholics go to church “no more than a few times a year.”

So why have so many Catholics apparently decided they don’t have to go to Mass on Sunday?

Some Specifics

Most lapsed Catholics did not just wake up one morning and decide they would no longer go to Mass on Sundays.  For many of them it was probably a gradual process.  A missed Mass one month, then a couple more the following month, and over time, they just stopped going to Mass altogether.  Eventually Mass on Sunday, the sacraments, and the teachings of their faith became distant memories.

Over that same period of time numerous influences were fostering the notion that going to Mass on Sunday was really not that important – even though it is the single most important thing we do each week.

Protestantism

The United States has always been a mostly Protestant country.  And Protestantism has not been a good influence on many Catholics.

The result of an individualized Protestant system of belief is shown in a chart in an article entitled “The U.S. Is Retreating from Religion.” The chart projects that by 2035 the number of Protestants in the U.S. will drop to under 40% of the population from almost 70% in 1970.

Catholics are certainly leaving the Catholic Church (the green line in the chart), but Protestants are leaving their respective churches in droves (the orange line in the chart).

This makes sense since Protestants don’t have to belong to an organized church to be Protestants.  But this kind of thinking is also rubbing off on Catholics.  It’s also leading to the rise of the ‘Nones’ (no religious affiliation; the red line).

The Rise of the Nones

Many ‘Nones’ are practitioners of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” a term coined by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.

As summarized by Smith the creed of this religion is something like:

“1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.”

It stands to reason that the outgrowth of Protestantism would be something like Moral Therapeutic Deism.  If we don’t need a Magisterium to guide us, we can just listen to our own poorly formed consciences and do whatever we choose.

The ‘Sexual Revolution’

Some have argued that the Anglican Church’s approval of artificial birth control for married couples at the 1930 Lambeth Council began society’s downhill slide.  If the slide did begin then, the pill and the sexual revolution of the 1960s made the slide faster and slipperier!

Numerous experts have addressed the impact of the sexual revolution on religion and society.  There’s no need to say more here.

Vatican II, Progressivism, Confusion

Vatican II (VII) gets slammed by progressive and traditional Catholics alike.  For some progressives VII did not go far enough.  For some traditionalists V2 went too far.

VII could not and did not change any first or second level truths/doctrines taught by the Magisterium.  But some “common teachings” did get “updated,” and some traditional practices got changed.

Most older Catholics, however, remember VII as the Council that gave us the Novus Ordo Mass – the “New Mass.”  But VII did not mandate many of the changes to the Mass celebrated in many parishes.  Progressive clerics and laypersons introduced these unapproved ‘innovations.’ Many traditionalists contend the New Mass is a big reason why so many Catholics stopped going to Mass on Sunday.

But in 1968, Pope Paul VI dropped a bomb.  He issued his Encyclical on artificial birth control, Humanae vitae (HV).   Many lay Catholics, clerics, and theologians disagreed with HV quite openly.

According to a 2016 Pew Poll only 8% of U.S. Catholics think artificial birth control is “morally wrong.”

In much the same way that HV was problematic, Pope Francis’ 2016 Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia (AL) has become a stumbling block.  It, too, has created controversy.  Once again Catholics are choosing sides.

The “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” published in 1992, clearly spells out Church Teaching.  But there still exists today a great deal of confusion, uncertainty, and dissidence regarding Catholic teaching.

Poor Catechesis

Much of the confusion that exists today may also be due to poor catechesis.  Many essays have been written over the last 50 years supporting the contention that Catechesis has not been passing muster.  I added my two cents in a 2-part CS article (Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.)

Poor Leadership

During the 70s, 80s and 90s, and even today, many priests and bishops seemed to be more concerned with social issues than doctrine.  Worse still, far too many parish priests delivered ‘feel good’ homilies instead of talking about the sanctity of marriage, abortion, the immorality of sex outside of marriage, and sin.

In more recent years, many clerics have failed to speak out against the sinfulness of homosexual acts, same sex-marriage, and transgenderism.

In 2017, according to a Pew Survey a whopping 67% of Catholics approved of same sex marriage.   Yet Catholic Doctrine clearly teaches homosexuality is an “objectively disordered” behavior (Catechism of the Catholic Church #2357) and the Bible tells us that sodomy is a perversity (Romans 1:24-27).

Dr. Neil E. Whitehead, a research scientist from New Zealand, reviewed all the scientific research on homosexuality in his book “My Genes Made Me Do it! Homosexuality and the Scientific Evidence” (the title is intentionally facetious).  According to the Whitehead, “the more recent the research the more it strengthened the book’s original conclusions” that homosexuality is not genetic.

So, both science and the Church say homosexuality is a disordered behavior.  Gender dysphoria is also a psychological problem. But today society says the abnormal is normal.

The Sexual Abuse Scandal

The sexual abuse scandal that came to light in 2002 certainly did not do the Church any favors.

While there is no question that some Catholic clerics were guilty of Pedophilia (the sexual abuse of a prepubescent child), the real problem was homosexual priests.  Over 80% of the reported cases involved homosexual priests and adolescent and teenaged boys.  The mainstream media greatly exaggerated the scandal.  It was only too happy to ‘stick it’ to the Catholic Church by focusing on pedophilia rather than homosexuality.

Relativism, Secularism, Scientism, Modernism

Today there are no longer any moral truths because moral truths are not facts – they are opinions.   This is “relativism” and it is what our children have been hearing in school for many years now.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) warned the world about the dangers of relativism in May 1996, and again in his “dictatorship of relativism” homily given at the Vatican Basilica on April 18, 2005.

Ask most people what ‘secularism’ is, and the response will probably be something like ‘separation of church and state.’  But a secularist society just doesn’t separate religion from politics; it emphatically rejects or excludes religion from all social systems altogether.

Scientism can be summed up in one sentence:  Science has all the answers.

Taken together, Relativism, Secularism, and Scientism add up to modernism.

Pope St. Pius X warned the faithful about the evils of modernism in 1907, in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis.  In short, modernism is taking the spiritual out of religion and replacing it with ‘humanism.’

Father Longenecker summed up modernist thinking in an article at Patheos:

“[People] concluded that if religion was really only about peace and justice and social work, then why did one have to get up early and go to church and sing dreary hymns and listen to a long, badly prepared homily by an uncomfortably over fed windbag? Why go to church anyway? If it was really only about social work, then why the early weekend pep talk with music? Why not sleep in?”

The Root Cause

In December 2017, I received an email from a local golf course announcing its annual New Year’s Eve Party.  The theme for 2017 was “7 Deadly Sins.”  At the bottom of the announcement it said:

OPTIONAL PARTY TIP: DRESS IN THE COLOR OF THE SIN
YOU ARE MOST LIKELY TO COMMIT TONIGHT:
SILVER FOR GLUTTONY, PURPLE FOR PRIDE, HOT PINK FOR LUST,
BLUE FOR SLOTH, GOLD FOR GREED, RED FOR WRATH,
GREEN FOR ENVY, OR BLACK FOR ALL OF THE ABOVE!!

That’s quite a comment on what society values these days.

For quite some time now the devil has been hard at work turning Western culture into an increasingly secular one.  And he is the root cause of the problems we are dealing with today.  The devil is why there are so many lapsed Catholics today.

Next Monday, Part 3: Understanding the Excuses and What to do.

Part 1 is here.