Pope Francis Is Making More Catholics Excited about Faith, but Actions Slow to Follow

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post
March 6, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/poll-pope-francis-hasnt-yet-greatly-changed-catholics-level-of-active-faith-based-behavior/2014/03/05/a28c5d2e-a2ea-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html

Jahi Chikwendiu/Washington Post - Facundo Silva, front, says the election of a pope from his old neighborhood has sparked his interest in returning to the Catholic Church after two decades of being away from it.

In the year since he was elected, Pope Francis has become the most talked-about person on the Web. Millions are riveted by his words, and, to many, his very name signifies humanity and compassion in a world rife with divisions.

Still, he appears not to have had much impact on the number of Americans attending Mass, converting to Catholicism, giving to Catholic charities and other conventional measures, according to interviews with a wide range of U.S. church leaders, experts and other Catholics as well as early data released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

(Mario Laporta/AFP/Getty Images) - A mural by street artist Maupal depicts Pope Francis as a superman, flying through the air with his white papal cloak billowing out behind him and holding a bag bearing the word \"Values\" andscarf supporting an Italian football club.

It’s not clear that “there has been a so-called ‘Francis effect,’ a discernible change in the way American Catholics approach their faith,” according to the report.

And yet, his effect is undeniably everywhere.

Forty percent of U.S. Catholics polled by Pew say they’ve been praying more often in the past year, 21 percent say they’re reading the Bible “and other religious materials” more often and 26 percent say they’ve become “more excited” about their faith. Majorities say they haven’t changed their behaviors.

Anecdotally, officials at Catholic schools say students — and teachers — are showing a greater interest in discussing the pope. Catholic fundraisers are urging donors to “take advantage” of the Francis momentum. Church reformers seeking such changes as women’s ordination are rewriting their materials to remove words such as “hypocrisy” and “outrage” that won’t work in an era of pope love. Priests say they are watching the cost of where they eat and what they drive, following the example of their humble leader.

It’s still early in the Francis era, however, and experts say the standing of the Catholic Church in the United States will depend partly on whether Francis signals changes in areas where there is broad disagreement between American Catholics and the church hierarchy. That includes the ban on using artificial contraception and giving Communion to divorced Catholics who remarry outside the church. Frances has called for a rare “Synod on the Family” this fall to discuss these and related issues.

Equally important will be how grass-roots pastors and parishioners interpret the pope’s words and gestures. “The level of openness is totally different. What’s not clear is, when they go to church finally, do they find Francis, or do they find one of the ‘little monsters’?” said John Carr, a policy adviser to the U.S. bishops, using a term Francis coined for seminarians trained to overly focus on rules and obeying the hierarchy.

Meanwhile, Francis’s remarks and deeds are encouraging some Catholics and former Catholics to become more engaged with the church.

Ryan Argentieri of Arlington County, who is in her early 30s, is among them. She was raised attending Catholic schools and felt deeply fueled by Mass, but once she went off to college, she came to reject the idea of Catholicism’s claim on the truth. She later studied Buddhism before she felt her childhood faith call her in 2011 when the Dalai Lama appeared with Washington Catholic Archbishop Donald Wuerl during an intensive Tibetan Buddhist ritual.

It was this quasi-approval of the Dalai Lama, someone whose universalism she deeply respected, that let her start re­exploring Mass here and there. But Pope Francis’s election “opened the floodgates,” she said. His taking of the name and priorities of Francis and his openness, she said, “that was when I came full circle.’’

After Francis’s election, Argentieri joined Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Alexandria and now goes to Mass most weeks. “If it hadn’t been for Pope Francis, I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now,” she said. “He is someone who has articulated something I can stand for.”

For progressive advocates such as Kate Conmy, Pope Francis has upended the landscape. Conmy, assistant director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, said his broad tone has renewed interest from Catholics who had given up on such changes as women being ordained but also tamped down the intensity of liberals who suddenly want a less-demanding posture toward the Vatican.

“As soon as Pope Francis was elected, we started receiving pushback from members, claiming our tone was too harsh. Many members wrote and told us to ‘give him time,’?” Conmy said. Not all members felt this way, she said.

Advocates from her group and other progressive ones are now writing letters to Rome instead of sending petitions. Literature calls for such things as “a truly collaborative relationship with women” and “a more Pope Francis-like pastoral approach” instead of demanding “accountability,” she said.

It’s exciting, Conmy said, to see Catholics so encouraged about liberalizing reforms; indeed, the Pew report says that since a year ago, there have been jumps in Catholics’ expectation that women and married men will be priests in the near future. But she also feels discouraged to see less fervent support for full equality for women, gay men and lesbians.

“It’s a feeling like you’re the only sober person at the party. Like — ‘I hope I still get a piece of the cake,’?” she said. “Atmospherics don’t change real consequences.”

The explosion in the discussion about Francis’s words and actions appears to be everywhere in American Catholicism, the country’s largest single faith group at 75 million. Last year, Carr launched a center at Georgetown about Catholics and public life, and he remembers being told that he’d be lucky to get 200 people at his first event, in the fall, about Francis. He got 700. Washington’s Catholic Charities, the region’s largest private social-service organization, got 100 volunteers on a random recent sunny weekend morning to pack breakfast bags for the homeless — an unusually high turnout.

“Let’s face it: Lots of Catholics can feel crushed by the church, by something their priest did or the sex-abuse crisis. I think the pope saying, ‘Who am I to judge?’ — that one comment was the most important comment said in the past year by anyone,” said Monsignor John Enzler, a prominent D.C. area priest who now runs Catholic Charities, which serves Catholics as well as non-Catholics.

Daniel McMahon, the principal of DeMatha, a prestigious Catholic high school in Hyattsville, said it’s unlikely that most staff — never mind students — “except the most academic and devout” had read Pope Benedict XVI’s words. But probably 75 percent of DeMatha teachers had read Pope Francis’s conversational interview last year with America magazine, he said.

“Francis has caused people to think and listen in different ways,” he said.

Catholics will feel Francis’s impact most by the bishops he picks, said the Rev. Tom Gaunt, executive director of the Catholic research firm Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. Church watchers noted that the pope did not reappoint Cardinal Raymond Burke — a conservative culture warrior — to the Vatican’s bishop-picking committee and chose just one American: Wuerl, a moderate cardinal.

Last week, Francis made news when he told the committee that bishops should guard church teaching “not to measure how far the world lives from the truth it contains, but to fascinate the world .?.?. to enchant .?.?. to seduce it with the free gift of the Gospel.”

Although people may wildly share such quotes on Twitter, it’s hard to tell how many lapsed Catholics Francis can bring back to the church. That internal journey is unique for each one.

Facundo Silva is a case study. Growing up in the same Buenos Aires neighborhood as Pope Francis, the 39-year-old remembers losing interest in the church as a teen. He moved to the United States in his early 20s and slowly became an atheist.

Intrigued immediately last spring by the election of a fellow Argentinian, the Fairfax County firefighter downloaded to his iPad a book of interviews Francis had done with two journalists before becoming pope. He was strongly moved to learn that Francis had lived in Silva’s own neighborhood and gone to his same church and that they both loved soccer. But most of all was the tone of then-Cardinal Bergoglio.

“I felt as if it were me having those conversations,” he said.

He also learned in that book that as a divorced person who remarried outside the church, he was not eligible for Communion without getting an annulment. Silva’s girlfriend and her children are active in a Palisades parish in Northwest Washington, and his ex-wife recently brought their two children into the church as well. He wants to be a part and became open to trying.

Since January, he has been meeting one on one with the Rev. David Werning at Our Lady of Victory in the Palisades area. Silva doesn’t want to attend Mass when he can’t take Communion.

“Sometimes I think .?.?. Am I going to go back to being Catholic so I can sit in the back seat?” But he enjoys meeting with Werning and feeling the connection to his history. “Honestly, for me it’s going to be a process until I get to that point where I have the faith. .?.?. I want to have faith,” he said. “And Pope Francis, he has had such a big influence. He is what started it for me, this change.”