CANADA
Macleans
by Brian Bethune on Saturday, March 23, 2013
Catholicism’s demographic shift out of the developed world and into the global south has been profound. A century ago, 75 per cent of Catholics lived in Europe or North America; now two-thirds are outside those continents. But that massive change is not fuelled entirely by the Church’s burgeoning growth in Asia and, especially, Africa. The flip side is the declining numbers in its Western heartland. Some 60 per cent of the French no longer ever attend services, and across Europe the rate of baptisms has fallen six per cent in the last six years. A tenth of American parishes have closed or merged in recent years, while six per cent is also the weekly mass attendance rate among Catholics in Quebec, once a Church bastion. In Ireland, which not long ago was a virtual priest factory for the world, not a single seminarian was ordained in 2005.
The ongoing clerical sex abuse scandals, meaning primarily the Church’s cover-up of them—which roiled Canada and Ireland in the last century, exploded in America in 2002 and again in Europe eight years later—tends, in popular opinion, to take the blame for this. But the roots of the alienation stretch back much further. Masked by the low numbers of mass-goers is the fact that on the issues that most sharply divide secular and Catholic morality, which all seem to revolve, one way or another, around sex—contraception, abortion, clerical celibacy, women priests, gay marriage—millions of cradle Catholics are effectively on the secular side. Catholic fertility rates in the West are indistinguishable from anyone else’s. Contraception, whatever it might mean to the hierarchy, is largely a dead issue for the laity. And, search their souls as they will, increasing numbers of Catholics cannot find the harm in what is currently the hottest of hot-button issues, same-sex marriage.
Poll after poll in the developed world, the latest in the March 6 issue of the New York Times, reveal a laity disquieted by a Church leadership they feel is out of touch and inconsequential, something that seems blindingly obvious to outsiders and internal dissidents, but puzzling to the hierarchy. The latter can point to a vigorously active Church—the Vatican’s militant anti-war efforts, the Church’s campaign for the global abolition of the death penalty, its criticism of global capitalism, its ecological position papers and efforts to help poor farmers in Latin America. But those disenchanted laity are correct about their bishops being out of touch with their concerns. The hierarchy is more conservative than it once was, after 35 years of episcopal appointments by Pope Benedict XVI or his predecessor John Paul II, celebrated among traditionalist Catholics as the pontiff who “stopped the drift toward the notion we have to listen to the modern world,” as Toronto’s late Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic put it after John Paul’s death in 2005. Meanwhile, large swaths of the Church, especially in the Third World but also within the most vibrant parts of northern Catholicism, don’t think the sexual morality issues are debatable or even particularly important.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.