UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

by Bill Tammeus on Jul. 11, 2012 A small c catholic

Like the oblivious frog sitting in the pot of water that’s slowly coming to a boil, we often find it almost impossible to discern even historic changes while they’re happening.

And sometimes when we guess at seismic shifts that may be occurring, we’re embarrassingly wrong: Thomas Watson, IBM chairman in 1943, is (maybe falsely) reported to have said then: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

So I acknowledge I could be way off-base here. But from my Protestant, outside-Catholicism perspective, it looks as if the current hierarchical institutional expression of the Catholic church is dying and will be essentially gone in a few generations — certainly in the U.S. Whether another form of the church will survive is unknowable.

As educator Richard Giannone correctly notes in his new…