Meanwhile, what a church needs is a vibrant, participative community — and this is frustrated by the bad structure of the RCC. As Lamennais said, “Centralization means apoplexy at the center and paralysis in the periphery”. Our Church preaches subsidiarity to society but has failed to enact it itself. Episcopal collegiality, respect for the community of theologians, organization of the laity etc. etc. are all bypassed in the name of mass rallies or of jumped-up neoconservative movements like Opus Dei, Legionaries of Christ, Communio e liberazione.

The American Church will go the same way as the Irish Church, the Canadian Church, the Dutch Church and the Basque Church, if the laity cannot organize themselves, in the manner promoted by Leonard Swidler in his call for an American Church Council.

I will post a chilling article on the Irish Church.

Your information reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor and fellow student at an Episcopal seminary, which I attended for a quarter for post-Master’s work. The seminarian said he wanted to work with “post-college age” people, in their mid-to-late 20s. The professor reminded him that not everybody goes to college, to which the seminarian replied, “oh, these days everybody does,” to which I replied, “no they don’t.” He literally could not believe that most people in our area (central and southern Ohio) didn’t have a college degree, probably because he rarely met, let alone knew, someone who wasn’t like him. It is hard to reach out to those whom you can’t even begin to identify with. And I say this as someone who (despite being raised in a middle-class area where very few went to college) has trouble reaching out to the non-college educated. I admit it.

I agree with Kurt. Perhaps the reason for leaving is because of pastoral issues, not academic/philosophical ones (or likely a little bit of both, with some strong societal secularism mixed in).

I also think it is difficult to pin down reasons for church membership trends.
Part of this could be that some people were not really that “Catholic” to
begin with, but are now counted as “ex” Catholics. I remember on a call-in
show a guy identified as an Irish Catholic, later saying he was an
atheist. I suppose technically having been baptized as an infant, he may
be Catholic, but I would think becoming an atheist amounts to being
outside the church, an automatic excommunication due to apostasy. I suppose technically he is an ex-Catholic, but perhaps in the same way I am an “ex-Soccer player” since I played 5 soccer games for a junior league when I was in 5th grade.

The ex-Catholics I know left for rather pragmatic, rather than academic/philosophical/theological reasons. They wanted a divorce, wanted to use birth control without guilt, disliked certain Catholic doctrines and morals, wanted to be ordained but were not able to do so in the Catholic Church, and thought their parishes were asking for too much money. Some just found the mega church down the road to be more exciting, the local Episcopal church more liberal theologically, or the evangelical church in town more genuine and less hypocritical. Granted, because of poor catechesis, many of these folks did not reject actual Catholic Teaching, but a caricature of it, but nonetheless, they left the Church because it wasn’t always easy or fun to remain Catholic, and because fewer cultural and social pressures exist to remain Catholic these days as in the past. I expect there will continue to be a lot more Catholics leave the fold, especially as there seems to no longer be a search for what is True and Good, but what is fun and easy.

As economic conservatives hold that if you make the social elite even more wealthy, prosperity ‘trickles down’ so is there a theory among conservative Catholics that if the social and economic elite are evangelized, faith and grace will ‘trickle down.’

I think it is this theory that has caused some of the damage we now suffer. Less than 25% of Catholics have a college degree. While cases can be cited of heroic priests who minister to the less well off members of society, the lack of pastoral care of the poor, workers, immigrants and the socially marginalized is a disgrace.

The great numbers of former Catholics are not persons who left in disgust or over some dramatic issue but socially unimportant people who were quietly ignored by the Church and her pastors and slipped away unnoticed due to inattention.

Colleen Carroll, a conservative Catholic author recently wrote a book that she described as a study of young Catholic adults and what she termed as their return to tradition and conservative values. Every subject she considered was a college students or graduate, as if the non-college 75% of Catholic young adults do not exist. Imagine, 75% invisible!

I can’t really speak to your question about the eclipse of Rahner. I recall my theologian friends thought highly of him. But what has happened since the seventies has escaped me, probably because I moved away from teaching.

As to Barth, have you read Balthasar’s treatment of him in The “Theology of Karl Barth.” Here is a case where the Thomistic analogy of being and the Barthian analogy of faith are set in critical relationship. This, of course, goes to the question of the viability of the intellect and the person’s access to truth. I found this discussion on analogy helpful as a way to grasp what is going on in the world today, particularly as regards critical political issues. For instance, part of the failure to frame the culture wars correctly lies with the inability to appreciate the analogy of being and its role in practical reason. Thus we fail to make appropriate distinctions where necessary and end up demonizing individual behavior. Why? In large measure we do so because we have failed in the intellectual order and thus have no choice but to accept prejudice and sentiment as the primary foundation of moral judgment. Univocal thinking is too much with us. Indeed, our view of ethical behavior has been reduced to little more than an oily smear! There are no clear distinctions, but an abundance of judgment.

I agree totally. The metaphysical thinking of De esse et essentia, for example, is simply unsurpassed in the history of philosophy, as is the Thomistic notion of the analogy of being. These truths and their understanding are central to the Western intellectual endeavor.

As a side note, my original error was even worse, if it’s true that roughly 1 in 10 Americans are ex-catholics, 10/33 would put the Church above the national average of 25% in terms of people changing faiths.

-Mike