By Cathy Lynn Grossman
USA Today
April 15, 2008
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-04-14-catholics-pope-visit_N.htm
When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Washington, D.C., today on his first U.S. papal visit, he'll see a Catholic Church of great vitality — facing great uncertainty.
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| Rev. David Gill blesses Ineliz Camposas her mother, Maribel Campos, waits for Communion during the Spanish Mass at St. Mary of the Angels church in Roxbury, Mass. In an effort to save money, the Boston archdiocese has tried twice to close the parish in an impoverished and high-crime area. Photo by CJ Gunther |
"People are excited that he's coming. He's saying, 'You matter in the universal church,' " says Sheila Garcia of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' office for the laity. "But for most laity, the church is what happens in their parish.
"Participation is what this country is all about. We believe people have a right to bring their gifts and talents to their church. If they don't, many ministries won't get done at all."
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If Benedict could visit just three places beyond his six jam-packed days in Washington and New York, he would see — in a struggling urban outpost in Boston, a Phoenix megachurch booming with Hispanics and two stalwart small-town Iowa parishes that share a priest — much of the promise and the problems in U.S. Catholic life today.
It's not like the Catholic church in Europe, with its empty pews, or the Third World, where one in four parishes has no priest, or in Islamic countries, where Catholics can't build churches.
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The USA's 67 million Catholics live in a vibrant world of faith and service, rooted in nearly 19,900 parishes. Lay people, particularly women, have risen to new heights of participation and leadership. Where priests are scarce and overburdened, they keep the lights on.
Yet this is a church under duress.
It's challenged by intense competition from secular culture and other religions. About 10% of people born Catholic say they're no longer Catholic, according to a February study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Of Catholics, 55% say they practice their religion, and 61% say sacraments are "essential to my faith," finds another study, released Sunday by Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University.
The number of priests has declined for decades.
And faith in the leadership of the bishops was shaken by the clergy sexual abuse crisis, which exploded into the headlines in 2002 in Boston and reverberated nationwide.
"The church is on its heels in this society — divided and demoralized and damaged. It really needs this pope to come and talk about the good things — to America's witness for life, its rich parishes and ministries, its remarkable efforts for social justice," says R. Scott Appleby, a professor of Catholic history at the University of Notre Dame.
He hopes the pope will "offer a powerful, charismatic, healing word about the abuse crisis to the laity, who need to hear this, and hear that the work of the Holy Spirit continues to be good and give life."
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That's a message Catholics can take home to their parishes, the heart of the church.
Changing urban churches
The Catholic Church in America looks in some ways like Boston's St. Mary of the Angels, a century-old parish, embattled but still standing, offering a multicultural ministry in the impoverished and crime-ridden Roxbury neighborhood.
Founded by Irish and German immigrants, it is now the parish home of African-Americans, Caribbean blacks and immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic who go to English or Spanish Masses.
The Boston archdiocese, wounded spiritually and financially by the abuse crisis, tried twice to shutter the parish in an economic move as the archdiocese confronted shifting demographics, declining attendance and $85 million in settlements with abuse victims and legal fees.
Although the nationwide costs of the abuse scandal were estimated by church studies at about $2 billion, population shifts out from inner cities were the primary reason dioceses closed 2.7% of parishes nationwide between 2000 and 2006, according to CARA.
Of the 20 dioceses that closed more than 10 parishes in that period, all were in Northeast and Midwest dioceses, "where Catholics have migrated away to the Sun Belt or the suburbs. These changes would have occurred on their own, yet were likely quickened by the sex abuse crisis," says CARA researcher Mark Gray.
St. Mary's was spared after nearby business and community groups joined parishioners in pleading its case. Still, the parish is short on funds. Day-to-day administration is run by two aging staff members, a retired executive doing the books and a nun covering many of the ministries. An annual intern from the Jesuit Volunteer Corps works with service programs. Volunteers do the janitorial work.
"After two years of frantic efforts, we've taken a deep breath and carried on to the next crisis," says St. Mary's pastor David Gill.
He celebrates six Masses a week at St. Mary's, teaches classical languages at Boston College and serves as a chaplain for a lay Catholic community. "The parish has to think about what happens when I can't do this anymore," Gill says.
A shortage of priests
PORTRAIT OF THE FAITHFUL
A new survey of Catholic adults' beliefs and practice finds:
77% agree, "I am proud to be Catholic."
68% agree, "I can be a good Catholic without going to Mass every Sunday."
66% agree, "Helping the poor and needy is a moral obligation for Catholics."
61% agree, Catholicism's seven sacraments "are essential to my faith."
55% agree, "I think of myself as a practicing Catholic."
43% agree they look to church teachings, the pope and bishops "in deciding what is morally acceptable."
More than 17% of the 18,891 U.S. parishes in 2005 had no full-time priest. Overseas, the shortage is more acute: 24% of parishes have no resident priest. But prospects are brighter abroad: From 1975 to 2005, U.S. ordinations fell 40.8% but climbed 59.9% for diocesan priests worldwide.
Gill is 73 and worries, "Will they close the place when I leave?"
St. Catherine of Siena parish in Phoenix is home to 4,500 families, including Mexican-born Ramon and Rosa Ramirez, who bring their 13 children here to be formed in the faith.
Of U.S adults, 24% say they are Catholic. But 46% of immigrants say they are Catholic, compared with 21% of native-born U.S. adults, according to the Pew Forum.
The real numbers may be higher. Hispanic Catholics are less likely, culturally, to register with a parish, says St. Catherine's pastor, the Rev. David Sanfilippo.
This week, 96 of his parishioners, including Ramon and Rosa Ramirez and eight of their children, plan to be in Washington, and 71 will follow Benedict to New York. Most of these pilgrims don't even have tickets to the public events: They just hope to catch a glimpse of their pope.
"The Vicar of Christ is coming to us. The least we can do is be present for him," says Rosa Ramirez, 42. "We are concerned about people who suffer spiritually, who lose hope, whose lives can be meaningless. We worry about Catholics slipping away."
Most Catholics say they are proud to be Catholic. But only 43% say church teachings, the pope or bishops guide them in "deciding what's morally acceptable," according to the CARA survey.
"We need Benedict to address our real crisis. It's not the priest shortage or the sex abuse crisis. It's education," says Greg Erlandson, publisher of the Catholic weekly newspaper Our Sunday Visitor.
"Young Catholics today don't know the basics, and, often, their parents don't, either," he says. "How are we handing down the faith?"
Catholic America also looks like the stalwart little Iowa parishes of St. John the Baptist in Mount Vernon and nearby St. Isidore the Farmer in Springville.
They share one priest, while administrator Sue Schettler and her all-female staff run the day-to-day ministries, supported by legions of male and female volunteers.
Lay ministries abound
More than 30,000 lay people are specially trained in ministry, and 80% are women, Garcia says.
Almost half of diocesan administrative posts (48%) are filled by women, according to a 2003 study, the most recent available, by the National Association of Church Personnel Administrators.
Their numbers climbed sharply after 1983, when revisions in canon law, which are the laws that govern the church, permitted laity to take on roles once reserved for priests.
Lay people can now take on positions from becoming chancellors, which are similar to chief operating officers for dioceses, to reading Scripture during Mass, says Mary Jo Tully, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., since 1990.
Not everyone is satisfied with this progress. Some fear that female lay leaders will be barely seen and not at all heard by Benedict.
"I'm glad he's coming to see a world beyond the Vatican," says author Joan Chittister, a Benedictine sister in Erie, Pa. "But if he's not here to learn from the nature of the church, its needs and questions, then what good will it do? If half the Catholic world, the women, are left out of the discussions, what can he learn?"
Many protest groups are clamoring for Benedict's attention. Calls will ring out from various Catholic groups for more transparency in church governance, greater acceptance for gays within the church, ordination for women, permission for priests to marry, punishment for bishops who failed to protect young people from abuse, and stronger opposition to the Iraq war.
However, administrators Tully and Schettler have no complaints for Benedict. Neither could break away to see him. Neither seeks his acknowledgment.
"I don't do this because I'm looking for thanks," Schettler says. "I do it because I'm serving the people of God. I always assume I'm in the pope's prayers on a daily basis."
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