Florida Catholic | Editorial

Shrinking numbers a wake-up call

Published: 03.07.08

We don’t need more rules; we need to be more welcoming. We don’t need more barriers; we need more Catholics to invite people to know Christ through our witness of faith and our example of love for one another”.

At a mid-February meeting of bishops from the Americas, Archbishop James Weisgerber of Winnipeg, Manitoba, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that in his diocese, as elsewhere in the Americas, “people are not finding life in the Catholic Church. They are declaring themselves to be secular or are joining evangelical churches. We have to find ways to be more joyful and let the Gospel transform us to be witnesses.” That experience was borne out in the results of a poll released Feb. 25 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which noted that more than a quarter of American adults have left the faith in which they were raised as children.

Archbishop Weisgerber said pastoral conversion is not just a change of structure, but also “a change of hearts. … It is a very serious matter that calls for a fundamental re-examination of one’s heart and the faith — and we don’t do that easily.” Speaking at the same conference about the final document from the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, which took place in Aparecida, Brazil, last May, Tucson Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas, vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told CNS that the Aparecida document “is visionary.”

“The big challenge is always programmatic,” Bishop Kicanas said. “We need to form a bond or relationship with Christ which sends us on a mission to bring to others what we have come to know ourselves.”

The Pew report, based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans conducted between May and August 2007, noted that the percentage who claim no religious affiliation, 16.1 percent, is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. For the 18- to 29-year-old demographic — the young adult group the Catholic Church tries valiantly but often fails to reach — the rate is even more profound: one in four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

“Everybody in this country is losing members; everybody is gaining members,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, during a teleconference to announce the release of the report. “It is a very competitive marketplace and if you rest on your laurels, you’re going to be history,” he added.

While it’s sometimes shocking to think of faith as a marketplace — didn’t Jesus drive the moneychangers out of the temple grounds for that same attitude? — we must understand that the church is “marketing” a “product” similar to others. We believe we have the best product, the one true faith that stands the test of time. But apparently, we are not doing well at persuading others.

“Those that are growing as a result of religious change are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members,” the Pew report reads. “Conversely, those that are declining in number because of religious change simply are not attracting enough new members to offset the number of adherents who are leaving those particular faiths.”

The report further states, “Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one in three Americans (31 percent) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one in four (24 percent) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration.”

We cannot simply watch as more people leave the church, or provide no spiritual home for more and more young people. This is one of the reasons many declare no religious affiliation. They may be searching, but they don’t know where to turn and they have not found a place that welcomes them and invites them to share in the love of God. As Archbishop Weisgerber said, “We have to find ways to be more joyful and let the Gospel transform us to be witnesses.”

We should take the opportunity provided by the Pew survey to analyze what we are doing in our parishes and in our dioceses. We don’t need more rules; we need to be more welcoming. We don’t need more barriers; we need more Catholics to invite people to know Christ through our witness of faith and our example of love for one another.

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Shrinking numbers a wake-up call

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