UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Another Prediction for 2014: Talk of the Dying of Catholicism Even as Lay-Led Catholic Movements Flourish
Another prediction I’d be willing to go out onto a limb and make as the new year begins: we will be hearing more in this year about the death of the Catholic church in this culture and that culture–though counter-indicators in many of these cultures will indicate that Catholicism is alive and well within the culture. But the Catholicism that is flourishing in these cultures is often a new (and simultaneously old) expression of the Catholic tradition.
What is dying in many Catholic cultures is the clericalized notion of Catholicism that dominated the Catholic imagination from the Counter-Reformation period up to Vatican II.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these themes since news broke of the meeting of Pope Francis with the Dutch bishops this last December. One of the themes of that meeting is that perhaps two-thirds of Catholic parishes in the Netherlands will soon have to be closed, because churches are empty. “The Catholic church is dying in the Netherlands,” many news outlets stated following Francis’s meeting with the Dutch bishops.
And yet this comment at a recent National Catholic Reporter thread by a Dutch lay Catholic, as well as many articles I’ve read in the past decade or so, suggest to me that Catholicism remains alive and well in the Netherlands even as parishes close. It remains alive and well as a lay phenomenon with lay leadership.
What has begun to die–what is rapidly dying or now all but dead–in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Catholic Europe (and parts of the U.S.) is a clericalized understanding of the Catholic faith that hinges everything on the presence of an ordained man as the leader of each local Catholic community of faith, dispensing sacraments available only at the hands of that man, and indispensable for the salvation of the members of the community of faith.
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