http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20130222/COLUMNISTS22/302220141/Faith-Works-Decline-Catholic-baptisms-concern?nclick_check=1Written by Peter Smith
Feb. 22
courier-journal.com
My story last Sunday on the state of Catholic schools — with enrollment down overall despite increases in some growing regions — noted that there’s a downward sacramental trend as well.
The number of child baptisms went down in the Archdiocese of Louisville about a quarter from 1998 to 2011. The trend line looks similar to the enrollment decline, down a quarter from 2002-03 to 2011-12.
And the same thing is happening nationally. Catholic school enrollment is down over the past decade. So are Catholic baptisms (and marriages and burials, for that matter) — even though the church has recorded increases in membership over that time.
The canary in the coal mine, then, may not be in the schools, even though many face challenges of cost and cutbacks. It may be in the baptistery.
The question is why. Are Catholic parents distancing themselves from the church? Having fewer babies? Something else?
Georgetown University researcher Mark Gray — who is usually more optimistic than other pundits about the health of the Catholic Church in America in such areas as membership and Mass attendance — wrote that the decline in baptisms is serious.
“Polling has a big blind spot,” he wrote this month on his blog for the Georgetown-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, where he directs Catholic polls. “We generally only survey people ages 18 and older. We often don’t notice changes occurring among youth.”
The rate of Catholic baptisms to overall live births in the United States has dropped from one-quarter in the late 1990s and early 2000s to one-fifth in recent years, Gray wrote.
Some parents might be choosing to baptize their kids later — but that’s hardly the Catholic way of doing things. More than “nine in ten children entering the Church do so within the first year of their birth,” Gray wrote.
Other churches are also experiencing declines in baptisms or other key indicators of spiritual health in an era when nearly one in five American adults identifies their religion as none of the above.
Southern Baptists, while having a different style and criteria for baptism (immersing only those old enough to make a profession of faith), have sounded alarms about their own declining baptismal numbers.
The denomination — the second-largest in the nation behind the Roman Catholic Church — has seen baptisms decline nearly 20 percent since 2000, almost the same as the rate of Catholic baptismal decline. It’s prompted increasingly urgent calls among Baptists for more evangelistic work.
Gray wrote that the Catholic Church will not easily make up lost ground.
“Without many baptisms of tweens and teens the Catholic population percentage will begin to decline later in the next decade,” he wrote. That’s because as older Catholics die, there will be fewer replacements in the up-and-coming adult generation.
“But the news may be even worse,” Gray wrote. “Not all those baptized remain Catholic as adults. … It is true that the Catholic retention rate is among the highest of any of the Christian faiths. But this has also been declining in recent years.”
So why are baptisms declining?
Gray floats some possibilities: less interest in baptism among interfaith couples, unwed parents and Catholics in name only.
Net immigration from Mexico actually declined in recent years, Gray added, and since that was a major source of Catholics of child-bearing years, perhaps there are fewer Catholic babies to baptize.
Cradle Catholics who leave the faith (and take their children with them) mainly cited disagreement with church doctrine and morals or preference for Protestant worship services, according to a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey in 2009. Relatively few cited the sɛҳuąƖ-abuse scandal.
But if the reasons aren’t certain, the numbers are, Gray wrote:
“We’re not dealing with surveys that would have margins of error,” he wrote. “This is really happening.”
And while the new pope will have a global church to look after, parts of which are booming, one can only imagine he’ll have to give some attention to this growing trend in one of the world’s largest and most powerful national churches — and which is echoed in secularizing trends among Catholics in other Western countries.
In fact, the retiring Pope Benedict XVI has regularly promoted the “new evangelization” — finding creative ways of re-presenting the faith to cradle Catholics who have become distanced from or jaded by the church.
That matters because the ones who are making the baptism decisions are the parents — the young adults today, many of whom call themselves “spiritual but not religious.”
“While you can point to certain people who might” intentionally decide to leave the faith, many just gradually slip away from regular religious practice, Louisville Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz said in a recent interview.
“When I preach at Masses on Sundays, and especially in places where people come who might not otherwise be there (in church) — a confirmation, or a family event — I talk about how easy it is to get out of that habit,” Kurtz said.
“You get busy, you don’t go to church one Sunday, the next month you don’t go two Sundays and before you know it, you wake up one Sunday and you’ve fallen out of the habit of practicing your faith,” he said.
But many people, even if they’re distanced from church, still believe in God, prayer and spirituality, and that provides an opening for the new evangelization, Kurtz said.
Topic: Decline in Catholic Baptisms a Concern (Read 937 times)