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The Forum: Today's somber 200th anniversary  
by Phil Lawler
special to CWNews.com

Boston, Apr. 8, 2008 (CWNews.com) - April 8 should be a festival day for Catholic Americans. But America's oldest Catholic communities aren't really in a mood for celebration.

On this date in 1808, the Vatican established three new dioceses to serve the growing Catholic communities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The Baltimore diocese, already in existence, was elevated to the rank of archdiocese on the same date; and a fourth new diocese was set up in Bardstown (now Louisville), Kentucky, for Catholics on the western frontier.

Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, those young Catholic communities prospered. Immigrant families poured into the East Coast cities, gained a foothold, and quickly began the massive project of building parishes, parochial schools, convents, and seminaries. Once viewed with suspicion by nativists as an alien presence, Catholics won grudging acceptance into the American mainstream. The grandchildren of illiterate immigrants who had huddled on Ellis Island now sat in corporate board rooms and city-council chambers. Soon the Catholic presence was indelibly stamped on the culture of each city.

But after all those decades of spectacular successes, and East Coast archdioceses face their bicentennial celebrations with a somber frame of mind. Catholic influence is visibly waning. Parochial schools are being closed; parish churches shuttered and sold. Attendance at Sunday Mass has been dropping for years. If Catholic politicians call attention to their faith, it is frequently by defying the teachings of their Church; if clergymen are in the headlines, it is usually because of their scandalous behavior.

The sex-abuse crisis has rocked the Church in America, and made it possible once again, for the first time in a century, for "respectable" critics to voice anti-Catholic sentiments in public. But the downward tend in Catholic influence was visible long before the eruption of this scandal. For more than a generation-- since the 1960s, when a period of radical social change coincided with widespread doctrinal and disciplinary uncertainty following the Second Vatican Council-- Catholic influence has been on the ebb.

Early in March, the Pew Forum's comprehensive "US Religious Landscape Survey" confirmed what perceptive observers already knew: "No other major faith in the US has experienced greater net losses over the last few decades as a result of changes in religious affiliation than the Catholic Church." One-third of the adult Americans who were raised as Catholics have left the Church, the Pew survey found. Former Catholics now account for 10% of the nation's adult population.

Thanks to the large number of Hispanic Catholic immigrants, the Catholic proportion of overall US population has held steady in recent years, the Pew Forum found. But apart from those immigrants, for every adult convert who enters the Catholic community, four "cradle Catholics" leave. In other words the Church is hemorrhaging believers, with the effects only masked by constant transfusions. This is not the portrait of a healthy community.

So the 200th-anniversary festivities will be muted, if there are festivities at all. A celebration of the past invites comparisons with the present. It is all too painfully evident today that the engine of growth that propelled American Catholicism for some many decades is now sputtering. Investment bankers and corporate lawyers are somehow unable-- or rather unwilling-- to keep open the suburban parishes that were built with the nickels and dimes sacrificed by bricklayers and housemaids.

Yet the future of American Catholicism need not be grim. Indeed when Pope Benedict XVI (bio - news) arrives on these shores later in April he will bring a message of hope for the future, as well as guidance on how that hope can be fulfilled.

Coming from Europe, where the process of secularization is much further advanced, the Pope sees America as a churchgoing society, still open to the message of the Gospel. In his appearances in Washington and New York the Pontiff will make it clear that evangelization is an indispensable duty for all Christians. Pope Benedict-- who recently risked the wrath of the Islamic world by personally baptizing a prominent Muslim convert at Easter-- insistently recalls the message of St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans (1:16): "For I am not ashamed of the Gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith."

Such energetic proclamation of the Christian message may be unwelcome in some fashionable secular circles. But Pope Benedict will remind us that the faith is not a museum piece, to be admired as it gathers dust. A Church is a living organism, which will either grow or wither.

Catholicism may face obstacles, even outright hostility, in America in the early 21st century. But the immigrant churches of 1808 thrived and flourished amid much greater adversity. The papal visit will remind American Catholics that they built up the Church once; now they can, and must, do it again.