I understand the intent here, but I think these sorts of analyses of pastoral initiatives miss the deeper point: religious practice is waning for reasons over which pastors have little or no control. Aparecida, no Aparecida, eucharistic revival, no eucharistic revival, latin mass, vernacular mass, Veritatis Splendor, Amoris Laetitia - none of these isolated items impact the massive, society-wide rejection of religion (not just Catholicism) going on in developed, Western culture. It's happening to Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, everybody.
I had a college football coach who was a salty Irish Catholic, former NYC cop, who had served in Vietnam. He was given to say: "there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole."
Not many foxholes in our comfortable Western lifestyle. We are inoculated from questions of deeper meaning by our comfortable life, and our melting pot culture leaves us with very few shared values outside of discussions about how the weather makes us feel and how our daily commute is annoying.
We should stop looking to our pastors exclusively to lead us out of this mess. Instead we should think about those little towns in France that Thomas Merton described in the Seven Story Mountain. Paraphrasing, he noted that every street in town was oriented in some way back to the tabernacle in the church in the center of town. We have to live our own lives with constant reference to our worship of God in the Eucharist and our love of our (often very non-religious) friends and colleagues (without hitting them over the heads with our beliefs). If our friends don't see that our faith makes us happier and better people and gives us something significant that is absent from their lives, nothing is ever going to change in these trends. Nothing.
Thank you for this comment. In particular, I agree that many in Western culture whose standards of living have improved over the years have forgotten their reliance on and need for God.
True, though the data make it hard to support the claim is that Aparecida somehow "worked" in South and Central America and so should be the model for North America.
Part of that issue is you don't get so much "Memento Mori" when a lot of that is hidden away.
I visit one of our local nursing homes for our parish, but we have trouble getting volunteers... it's mainly retired people (I'm one of the few who isn't retired), and it is disturbing to those who are old themselves and see that they're not that far away from that themselves.
But it's not merely that the life is comfortable, but that people don't think about the unavoidable mortality... and what that means.
If pastors have no control over whether laity learn, are formed, and are encouraged to live our lives with constant reference to our worship of God and love of our neighbor, then what exactly is the point of them? Why do they preach homilies? Hear Confessions? Order/lead parishes? Are they just convenient confectors of the Eucharist?
A priest is called "Father", not "Manikin-in-vestments".
We have very comfortable lives, an increasing rate of mental problems including suicide and other deaths of despair, a 25% rate of people who were sexually abused, a 50% rate of people whose parents divorced or never married, and an awful lot of people whose parents had their siblings murdered, given that abortion killed about a third of the Millennial generation. We aren't inoculated from questions of deeper meaning, but we have generally been deprived of people providing answers, since prior generations considered answers to be unknowable or an assault of children's freedom of choice. Even the Apostles, lifelong Jews, wanted to be taught how to pray.
We aren't going to get out of this nonsense without both cleric and laity praying, studying, living the Faith according to their state in life, and talking about it. A single priest doing that will have an impact on the entire parish - which will have an impact on everyone who knows someone in that parish.
I think what you're saying at a macro level is true. There are entire books written about this and I think everyone needs to acknowledge this. Having said that, the RCIA class in my parish has over eighty people in a rapidly growing urban city full of decadence. The bishops who know how to listen pay attention to this and do their best to support where the Holy Spirit seems to gently move.
Yes! The call is clear: build up your parish! Make it a place where parishioners can find activities as well as mass so we can find more of our relaxing and entertainment among other Catholics, at least once in a while. Start pickle ball! Restart the sewing/crafting group, the gardening group, etc. Ideas will happen. Little groups start to meet just because they want to. It's a beautiful thing, especially if a priest drops by for 5 minutes. Literally just 5 minutes even builds connection.
Your recommendation that we stop looking to our pastors to lead us out of this mess is truly wise. The most powerful point of the Pillar analysis is to provide evidence of WHAT DOES NOT WORK so we do not waste time and effort trying to implement it, especially when bishops and the Vatican are touting its success. Sometimes we have to stop looking to our “pastors” for leadership, not because they are already busy, but because they are apparently blind to the truth of the situation.
The first time I read the Cardinal's remarks, I admit that my first instinct was to doubt the actual effectiveness of Aparecida given what we know about the decline of Catholicism in the Americas (and I know I was far from the only one). Glad to see the Pillar doing a hard analysis of the data here to confirm people's suspicions. Granted, there certainly would have been a decline since 2007 with or without Aparecida, but I think it's clear that there is little to no evidence that it has been a success, even if you can't call it an outright failure.
I agree his claims are suspicious but I also think our ecclesial politics in general are a symptom of and/or exacerbated by the secularization that is hallowing out religious practice in general in the West. Ecclesiastics sense a generally low level of control over religious abandonment by their flocks and it can induce them (and us) to finger pointing. What we should be doing is making the Church the sort of place the “nones” need and miss. Instead we make it a circular firing squad.
Numbers are not the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Aparecida cannot be said to have "worked" or "not worked" based on Catholic demographics and that suggestion is rather silly.
Fair to a point. Didn't Pierre say that the aim was "Nothing else: Better evangelization"? As such, doesn't that imply either or some combination of conversions or increased participation? So it's natural to consult the numbers, but I expect that national level numbers are just too aggregated to see any effect.
I don't actually think better evangelization necessarily translates to higher numbers. better evangelization means, for example, that we trade what Francis calls "proselytism" for witness. witness is more faithful to the Gospel, but proselytism is primarily concerned about making people Catholic, using cheap apologetics and other coercive tactics, and could conceivably be more effective at getting people in the pews.
I think we are in agreement. I certainly dont advocate a technocratic approach of making the numbers as the goal. Surely genuine witness will grow the Church and deepen the faith of those already in the Church. Hopefully enough to grow the aggregate numbers ;)
When the numbers in question are the fundamental sacraments of public, Catholic life-baptism and marriage, I think that a consultation of the numbers is indicated.
I'm not advocating for people not to consult the numbers. I'm just saying that they don't tell the whole story. we could become a tiny minority, and still be growing in faithfulness to the love of Christ. I believe Joseph Ratzinger wrote about this- a smaller, poorer Church, freed from material concerns, less concerned with partisan politics and more aware of its identity.
I strongly suspect that until the Church effectively deals with the sex abuse issue, the numbers problem will remain. No matter how good your witness or mine might be, if people think of the Church as the place where their children will be raped, they won't be joining it.
Sigh. I like apologetics and have never understood why it's considered "cheap" to explain one's faith. I think CS Lewis when I hear the word apologetics. Bsh Barron does apologetics. Here's a small voice saying yay for apologetics.
sorry. I generally don't like apologetics and I think the entire USA apologetics industry does very little of value. explaining the faith and answering objections can be helpful in some circumstances, of course.
These graphs don't really show much. Catholic identification is pretty much flat. birth rates and marriage rates are declining (which is true nearly everywhere outside Africa, both among non-Catholics and Catholics) at similar rates across the different countries.
It's unreasonable to expect the effect of any single conference or leadership shift to be measurable in aggregate national statistics, especially within just 10 years, and especially when we are talking about beliefs and behaviors of hundreds of millions of people. So even if the graphs showed something noticeable (which I don't think they do), you still would have to establish whether Aparecida had anything to do with it or if there is some larger factor at play (e.g. 2007 global financial crisis , rise of evangelicalism in Brazil, etc)
For the same reasons, I'd like to know how Pierre believes Aparecida improved evangelization vs the status quo style of leadership. Even a few anecdotes would help since the link from "dynamic of working together" resulting in "better evangelization" comes across as an alchemy claim. It would help to get some examples to show the mechanism of how that occurred.
I don't expect the effect of a single conference with no noticeable effect over 15 years, to have any noticeable effect even given 100 years.
If you want a visible effect in a parish, the priest should establish at least 3 hours/week of Confession times, and preach on the Sacrament and how to examine your conscience a few times. If you want the effect on a diocesan level, the bishop should require priests to do that in every parish and provide formation resources to priests on how to do that well for those that were never taught. If you want it on the national level, all the bishops should do that.
We are not converted to the heart because someone was really good at talking (not that that's a bad thing), we are converted to the heart because we met Jesus. I would expect demographic changes within a few years of the time expansions, at whichever level of implementation.
Good follow up to the Cardinal’s claims. For many of the reasons noted in the other comments , hard to say how effective it was or wasn’t due to many other variables and questions of what the measure is.
Thanks for the insightful article. Just a note - I’ve noticed the first 3 graphs shown here (and several times in other articles) have for the horizontal line identifiers as “Jan 1 12 am, 1 am…” instead of the info the graph is actually identifying. Just wanted to share that feedback. Thanks for all you do.
I did snap some screenshots, but it isn’t letting me upload them on this thread. Let me know if there’s a way I can send it. I always read articles from the webpage through safari on my phone, so maybe that has something to do with it?
I understand the intent here, but I think these sorts of analyses of pastoral initiatives miss the deeper point: religious practice is waning for reasons over which pastors have little or no control. Aparecida, no Aparecida, eucharistic revival, no eucharistic revival, latin mass, vernacular mass, Veritatis Splendor, Amoris Laetitia - none of these isolated items impact the massive, society-wide rejection of religion (not just Catholicism) going on in developed, Western culture. It's happening to Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, everybody.
I had a college football coach who was a salty Irish Catholic, former NYC cop, who had served in Vietnam. He was given to say: "there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole."
Not many foxholes in our comfortable Western lifestyle. We are inoculated from questions of deeper meaning by our comfortable life, and our melting pot culture leaves us with very few shared values outside of discussions about how the weather makes us feel and how our daily commute is annoying.
We should stop looking to our pastors exclusively to lead us out of this mess. Instead we should think about those little towns in France that Thomas Merton described in the Seven Story Mountain. Paraphrasing, he noted that every street in town was oriented in some way back to the tabernacle in the church in the center of town. We have to live our own lives with constant reference to our worship of God in the Eucharist and our love of our (often very non-religious) friends and colleagues (without hitting them over the heads with our beliefs). If our friends don't see that our faith makes us happier and better people and gives us something significant that is absent from their lives, nothing is ever going to change in these trends. Nothing.
Amen to that, and thank you for a very insightful comment.
Thank you for this comment. In particular, I agree that many in Western culture whose standards of living have improved over the years have forgotten their reliance on and need for God.
True, though the data make it hard to support the claim is that Aparecida somehow "worked" in South and Central America and so should be the model for North America.
I agree with others: " very insightful comment." Thank you.
Part of that issue is you don't get so much "Memento Mori" when a lot of that is hidden away.
I visit one of our local nursing homes for our parish, but we have trouble getting volunteers... it's mainly retired people (I'm one of the few who isn't retired), and it is disturbing to those who are old themselves and see that they're not that far away from that themselves.
But it's not merely that the life is comfortable, but that people don't think about the unavoidable mortality... and what that means.
Or worse, they think that they'll be able to have their brain merged into a computer or robot and actually live forever.
If pastors have no control over whether laity learn, are formed, and are encouraged to live our lives with constant reference to our worship of God and love of our neighbor, then what exactly is the point of them? Why do they preach homilies? Hear Confessions? Order/lead parishes? Are they just convenient confectors of the Eucharist?
A priest is called "Father", not "Manikin-in-vestments".
We have very comfortable lives, an increasing rate of mental problems including suicide and other deaths of despair, a 25% rate of people who were sexually abused, a 50% rate of people whose parents divorced or never married, and an awful lot of people whose parents had their siblings murdered, given that abortion killed about a third of the Millennial generation. We aren't inoculated from questions of deeper meaning, but we have generally been deprived of people providing answers, since prior generations considered answers to be unknowable or an assault of children's freedom of choice. Even the Apostles, lifelong Jews, wanted to be taught how to pray.
We aren't going to get out of this nonsense without both cleric and laity praying, studying, living the Faith according to their state in life, and talking about it. A single priest doing that will have an impact on the entire parish - which will have an impact on everyone who knows someone in that parish.
I think what you're saying at a macro level is true. There are entire books written about this and I think everyone needs to acknowledge this. Having said that, the RCIA class in my parish has over eighty people in a rapidly growing urban city full of decadence. The bishops who know how to listen pay attention to this and do their best to support where the Holy Spirit seems to gently move.
Yes! The call is clear: build up your parish! Make it a place where parishioners can find activities as well as mass so we can find more of our relaxing and entertainment among other Catholics, at least once in a while. Start pickle ball! Restart the sewing/crafting group, the gardening group, etc. Ideas will happen. Little groups start to meet just because they want to. It's a beautiful thing, especially if a priest drops by for 5 minutes. Literally just 5 minutes even builds connection.
Your recommendation that we stop looking to our pastors to lead us out of this mess is truly wise. The most powerful point of the Pillar analysis is to provide evidence of WHAT DOES NOT WORK so we do not waste time and effort trying to implement it, especially when bishops and the Vatican are touting its success. Sometimes we have to stop looking to our “pastors” for leadership, not because they are already busy, but because they are apparently blind to the truth of the situation.
The first time I read the Cardinal's remarks, I admit that my first instinct was to doubt the actual effectiveness of Aparecida given what we know about the decline of Catholicism in the Americas (and I know I was far from the only one). Glad to see the Pillar doing a hard analysis of the data here to confirm people's suspicions. Granted, there certainly would have been a decline since 2007 with or without Aparecida, but I think it's clear that there is little to no evidence that it has been a success, even if you can't call it an outright failure.
I agree his claims are suspicious but I also think our ecclesial politics in general are a symptom of and/or exacerbated by the secularization that is hallowing out religious practice in general in the West. Ecclesiastics sense a generally low level of control over religious abandonment by their flocks and it can induce them (and us) to finger pointing. What we should be doing is making the Church the sort of place the “nones” need and miss. Instead we make it a circular firing squad.
Numbers are not the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Aparecida cannot be said to have "worked" or "not worked" based on Catholic demographics and that suggestion is rather silly.
Fair to a point. Didn't Pierre say that the aim was "Nothing else: Better evangelization"? As such, doesn't that imply either or some combination of conversions or increased participation? So it's natural to consult the numbers, but I expect that national level numbers are just too aggregated to see any effect.
I don't actually think better evangelization necessarily translates to higher numbers. better evangelization means, for example, that we trade what Francis calls "proselytism" for witness. witness is more faithful to the Gospel, but proselytism is primarily concerned about making people Catholic, using cheap apologetics and other coercive tactics, and could conceivably be more effective at getting people in the pews.
I think we are in agreement. I certainly dont advocate a technocratic approach of making the numbers as the goal. Surely genuine witness will grow the Church and deepen the faith of those already in the Church. Hopefully enough to grow the aggregate numbers ;)
When the numbers in question are the fundamental sacraments of public, Catholic life-baptism and marriage, I think that a consultation of the numbers is indicated.
I'm not advocating for people not to consult the numbers. I'm just saying that they don't tell the whole story. we could become a tiny minority, and still be growing in faithfulness to the love of Christ. I believe Joseph Ratzinger wrote about this- a smaller, poorer Church, freed from material concerns, less concerned with partisan politics and more aware of its identity.
I strongly suspect that until the Church effectively deals with the sex abuse issue, the numbers problem will remain. No matter how good your witness or mine might be, if people think of the Church as the place where their children will be raped, they won't be joining it.
Sigh. I like apologetics and have never understood why it's considered "cheap" to explain one's faith. I think CS Lewis when I hear the word apologetics. Bsh Barron does apologetics. Here's a small voice saying yay for apologetics.
sorry. I generally don't like apologetics and I think the entire USA apologetics industry does very little of value. explaining the faith and answering objections can be helpful in some circumstances, of course.
These graphs don't really show much. Catholic identification is pretty much flat. birth rates and marriage rates are declining (which is true nearly everywhere outside Africa, both among non-Catholics and Catholics) at similar rates across the different countries.
It's unreasonable to expect the effect of any single conference or leadership shift to be measurable in aggregate national statistics, especially within just 10 years, and especially when we are talking about beliefs and behaviors of hundreds of millions of people. So even if the graphs showed something noticeable (which I don't think they do), you still would have to establish whether Aparecida had anything to do with it or if there is some larger factor at play (e.g. 2007 global financial crisis , rise of evangelicalism in Brazil, etc)
For the same reasons, I'd like to know how Pierre believes Aparecida improved evangelization vs the status quo style of leadership. Even a few anecdotes would help since the link from "dynamic of working together" resulting in "better evangelization" comes across as an alchemy claim. It would help to get some examples to show the mechanism of how that occurred.
I don't expect the effect of a single conference with no noticeable effect over 15 years, to have any noticeable effect even given 100 years.
If you want a visible effect in a parish, the priest should establish at least 3 hours/week of Confession times, and preach on the Sacrament and how to examine your conscience a few times. If you want the effect on a diocesan level, the bishop should require priests to do that in every parish and provide formation resources to priests on how to do that well for those that were never taught. If you want it on the national level, all the bishops should do that.
We are not converted to the heart because someone was really good at talking (not that that's a bad thing), we are converted to the heart because we met Jesus. I would expect demographic changes within a few years of the time expansions, at whichever level of implementation.
Good follow up to the Cardinal’s claims. For many of the reasons noted in the other comments , hard to say how effective it was or wasn’t due to many other variables and questions of what the measure is.
i don’t usually read America but they had a decent subsequent article that at least asked a very good question- here https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2023/11/06/synodality-religious-orders-model-246435
Glad you liked my article! I'm hoping it starts some good conversations.
I enjoyed reading your article. You are a good addition to the America staff.
Thank you for posting the link. It is an interesting question and had a good discussion.
Thanks for documenting what most people suspected but couldn't prove. This is excellent
and necessary work. The clericalist calumnies of Christophe Pierre should be examined and refuted with data to minimize emotivist overreactions.
Thanks for the insightful article. Just a note - I’ve noticed the first 3 graphs shown here (and several times in other articles) have for the horizontal line identifiers as “Jan 1 12 am, 1 am…” instead of the info the graph is actually identifying. Just wanted to share that feedback. Thanks for all you do.
could you screenshot that for me? i dont see it.
I did snap some screenshots, but it isn’t letting me upload them on this thread. Let me know if there’s a way I can send it. I always read articles from the webpage through safari on my phone, so maybe that has something to do with it?
hmm. I don't see that on safari on my phone, but I'd like to.
jdflynn AT pillarcatholic DOT come