The latest indication of such stirrings on the left that I’ve come across is an op-ed piece by Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus. “If current trends hold,” Marcus writes, “within a few years, less than half the U.S. adult population will be married.” And that, she adds solemnly, is bad news.

Bad news indeed, but not exactly new. The numbers have been piling up for a long time. The U.S. marriage rate (marriages per 1,000 population) was 8.4 in 1958, 10.9 in 1972, and 10.6 in 1981. But by 2009, the rate had fallen to 7.1 and in 2010 it declined still further, to 6.8. The birth rate has followed a similar trajectory, falling from 23.7 in 1960 to 13.5 in 2009.

One obvious reason for what’s happening is that people are marrying later. The median age of first marriage in 1960 was 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women, but by 2003 it had risen to 27.1 and 25.3 respectively.

Another large part of the explanation, however, is that more people aren’t getting married at all. Put the late-marriers and the non-marriers together and then add people who are in-between marriages, and you find that while nearly three-fourths of Americans 18 and older were married in 1960, the figure was a measly 51% in 2010, with the trend still headed down. (Among the college-educated, 27% say marriage is obsolete, while the percentage is 45% among those without college educations.)

Drawing her numbers from a new Pew Rearch Center study that Marcus calls “startling and disturbing,” the Post columnist informs us that the falling marriage rate “isn’t just a social problem. It’s also an economic problem.”

Well, yes. There’s a very visible correlation between marriage and education (nearly two-thirds with college degrees are married but fewer than half of those with high school diplomas or less) and between education and income. (The more education, the higher the income.) As marriages decline, the gap between rich and poor grows wider.

But even though the cluster of problems here has very real economic dimensions, reducing it all to economics while ignoring the links to cultural pathologies and destructive personal values is a mistake. Marcus touches on this other dimension when she speaks of “generational impact”—the impact on children of being raised by cohabiting parents or a single parent. Less education and lower income are part of it—but so are psychological and behavioral difficulties expressed in dropping out of school, law-breaking and incarceration, and other life-destroying behaviors including those that militate against stable marriage.

Unfortunately, Marcus weakens her argument by knee-jerk sneering at  conservative “rhapsodizing about the benefits of marriage.” (Maybe good secular liberals don’t  rhapsodize.) Remember: “promoting marriage among welfare recipients was a big deal during the George W. Bush administration.” Which makes it wrong? Ideological blinders like that are obstacles to seeking and finding solutions.

Catholics both share in and contribute to the multiple problems of marriage in America. But that subject requires another column, where there may also be an opportunity to suggest a modest solution or two. For now, it’s enough to face up to the fact that we’ve got a marriage crisis on our hands.

I was chatting with a priest who is a judge with the marriage tribunal of his large Eastern diocese when he shared an interesting tidbit of information. In his diocese and the other dioceses of his state, the number of requests for marriage annulments has lately fallen by 10%.

Good news? Fewer marriages on the rocks? Not really, he explained. “People are getting married later, some don’t bother to marry at all, others marry outside the Church, and others don’t come to the tribunal when their marriages break down.”

“Then,” I hazarded, “this 10% drop is just a new phase in the same old set of problems?” The tribunal judge nodded—that was the size of it.

All of which is confirmation that the Catholic sector of the crisis of American marriage is going strong. The most telling statistic may be the sharp drop-off in the sheer number of Catholic marriages. Back in 1990, with the Catholic population at 55 million, there were 334,000 of them; in 2010, when Catholics numbered 68.5 million, marriages had fallen by nearly half to around 179,000.

If it’s any consolation, what has been happening to Catholic marriage reflects developments in American marriage. Marriages in this country dropped from 2.44 million in 1990 to 2.08 million in 2009, even as the population of the United States was rising 60 million. A Pew Research Center study says that just 51% of American adults are married now. (The figure in 2000 was 57%.)

Many factors combine to account for the decline of marriage—from economic pressures to the campaign to recognize homosexual relationships as marriages, which undermines the unique status of traditional marriage understood to be a relationship between a man and a woman—and only that.

Among Catholics, poor religious formation—or none—very often has a central role. Undoubtedly, too, divorce plays a key part, especially no-fault divorce, which Michael McManus says should be called “unilateral divorce.” There have been more than a million divorces yearly in the United States since 1975, and very many of these were of the no-fault variety.

Significant in this context is the huge increase in cohabitation—523,000 cohabiting couples in the U.S. in 1970 and 7.5 million in 2010. McManus, a non-Catholic journalist who is founder of a group called Marriage Savers, says the rise is driven partly by “understandable fear of divorce” among couples who anticipate fewer hassles ahead if they don’t bother marrying at all.

The social costs of divorce are well established, and to a great extent it’s the children of divorced couples who are paying them. Kids from non-intact families are three times as likely as other kids to be expelled from school or become teenage out-of-wedlock parents, six times as likely to live in poverty, twelve times as likely to land in jail.

Various solutions have been proposed to the no-fault plague, among them legislation called the Second Chances Act. It provides a one-year waiting period before divorce along with education in reconciliation as an option. Sponsors William J. Doherty, a University of Minnesota scholar, and Leah Ward Sears, former Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, cite studies showing that among 40% of divorcing couples, at least one spouse is open to reconciliation.

McManus scoffs at the cliché “you can’t legislate morality.” He writes: “Nonsense. For forty years public policy has been legi1slating immorality by favoring divorce and cohabitation over marriage, and the consequences have been devastating….The timeless institution of marriage can be revived.”

It’s sure worth a try.

Good news? Fewer marriages on the rocks? Not really, he explained. “People are getting married later, some don’t bother to marry at all, others marry outside the Church, and others don’t come to the tribunal when their marriages break down.”

“Then,” I hazarded, “this 10 percent drop is just a new phase in the same old set of problems?” The tribunal judge nodded—that was the size of it.

All of which is confirmation that the Catholic sector of the crisis of American marriage is going strong. The most telling statistic may be the sharp drop-off in the sheer number of Catholic marriages. Back in 1990, with the Catholic population at 55 million, there were 334,000 of them; in 2010, when Catholics numbered 68.5 million, marriages had fallen by nearly half to around 179,000.

If it’s any consolation, what has been happening to Catholic marriage reflects developments in American marriage. Marriages in this country dropped from 2.44 million in 1990 to 2.08 million in 2009, even as the population of the United States was rising 60 million. A Pew Research Center study says that just 51 percent of American adults are married now. (The figure in 2000 was 57 percent.)

Many factors combine to account for the decline of marriage—from economic pressures to the campaign to recognize homosexual relationships as marriages, which undermines the unique status of traditional marriage understood to be a relationship between a man and a woman—and only that.

Among Catholics, poor religious formation—or none—very often has a central role. Undoubtedly, too, divorce plays a key part, especially no-fault divorce, which Michael McManus says should be called “unilateral divorce.” There have been more than a million divorces yearly in the United States since 1975, and very many of these were of the no-fault variety.

Significant in this context is the huge increase in cohabitation—523,000 cohabiting couples in the U.S. in 1970 and 7.5 million in 2010. McManus, a non-Catholic journalist who is founder of a group called Marriage Savers, says the rise is driven partly by “understandable fear of divorce” among couples who anticipate fewer hassles ahead if they don’t bother marrying at all.

The social costs of divorce are well established, and to a great extent it’s the children of divorced couples who are paying them. Kids from non-intact families are three times as likely as other kids to be expelled from school or become teenage out-of-wedlock parents, six times as likely to live in poverty, twelve times as likely to land in jail.

Various solutions have been proposed to the no-fault plague, among them legislation called the Second Chances Act. It provides a one-year waiting period before divorce along with education in reconciliation as an option. Sponsors William J. Doherty, a University of Minnesota scholar, and Leah Ward Sears, former Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, cite studies showing that among 40 percent of divorcing couples, at least one spouse is open to reconciliation.

McManus scoffs at the cliché “you can’t legislate morality.” He writes: “Nonsense. For forty years public policy has been legislating immorality by favoring divorce and cohabitation over marriage, and the consequences have been devastating…. The timeless institution of marriage can be revived.”

It’s sure worth a try.

The latest indication of such stirrings on the left that I’ve come across is an op-ed piece by Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus. “If current trends hold,” Marcus writes, “within a few years, less than half the U.S. adult population will be married.” And that, she adds solemnly, is bad news.

Bad indeed, but not exactly new. The numbers have been piling up for a long time. The U.S. marriage rate (marriages per 1,000 population) was 8.4 in 1958, 10.9 in 1972, and 10.6 in 1981. But by 2009, the rate had fallen to 7.1 and in 2010 it declined still further, to 6.8. The birth rate has followed a similar trajectory, falling from 23.7 in 1960 to 13.5 in 2009.

One obvious reason for what’s happening is that people are marrying later. The median age of first marriage in 1960 was 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women, but by 2003 it had risen to 27.1 and 25.3 respectively.

Another large part of the explanation, however, is that more people aren’t getting married at all. Put the late-marriers and the non-marriers together and then add people who are in-between marriages, and you find that while nearly three-fourths of Americans 18 and older were married in 1960, the figure was a measly 51 percent in 2010, with the trend still headed down. (Among the college-educated, 27 percent say marriage is obsolete, while the percentage is 45 percent among those without college educations.)

Drawing her numbers from a new Pew Rearch Center study that Marcus calls “startling and disturbing,” the Post columnist informs us that the falling marriage rate

“isn’t just a social problem. It’s also an economic problem.”

Well, yes. There’s a very visible correlation between marriage and education (nearly two-thirds with college degrees are married but fewer than half of those with high school diplomas or less) and between education and income. (The more education, the higher the income.) As marriages decline, the gap between rich and poor grows wider.

But even though the cluster of problems here has very real economic dimensions, reducing it all to economics while ignoring the links to cultural pathologies and destructive personal values is a mistake. Marcus touches on this other dimension when she speaks of “generational impact”—the impact on children of being raised by cohabiting parents or a single parent. Less education and lower income are part of it—but so are psychological and behavioral difficulties expressed in dropping out of school, law-breaking and incarceration, and other life-destroying behaviors including those that militate against stable marriage.

Unfortunately, Marcus weakens her argument by knee-jerk sneering at  conservative “rhapsodizing about the benefits of marriage.” (Maybe good secular liberals don’t  rhapsodize.) Remember: “promoting marriage among welfare recipients was a big deal during the George W. Bush administration.” Which makes it wrong? Ideological blinders like that are obstacles to seeking and finding solutions.

Catholics both share in and contribute to the multiple problems of marriage in America. But that subject requires another column, where there may also be an opportunity to suggest a modest solution or two. For now, it’s enough to face up to the fact that we’ve got a marriage crisis on our hands.

Speaking last month at United Nations offices in Geneva, Clinton first sought to spin a muddled synthesis linking gay rights and religious faith. In part, this was how it came out:

“Our commitments to protect the freedom of religion and to defend the dignity of LGBT people emanate from a common source. For many of us, religious belief and practice is a vital source of meaning and identity, and fundamental to who we are as people. And likewise, for most of us, the bonds of love and family that we forge are also vital sources of meaning and identity. And caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human. It is because the human experience is universal that human rights are universal and cut across all religions and cultures.”

With all due respect—what on earth does that mean? The strikingly confused venture into reasoning in this passage would provide rich material for a logician’s intellectual scalpel. And just what is this common source from which the protection of religious freedom and the defense of LGBT people are said to proceed? One can favor both things, as I do, without succumbing to the sentimental fallacy of an unnamed “common source.”

But set that aside for now. What’s really troubling about Clinton’s text is what comes next: “While we are each free to believe whatever we choose, we cannot do whatever we choose, not in a world where we protect the human rights of all.” On the surface, that’s true to the point of banality. But what lies below the surface? The answer is: coercion on behalf of LGBT interests.

“Progress comes from changes in laws,” Clinton explains. “In many places,  including my own country, legal protections have preceded, not followed, broader recognition of rights. Laws have a teaching effect….It is often the case that laws must change before fears about change dissipate.”

Take that out of the realm of abstraction, and the classic case to illustrate the point is abortion, where the U.S. Supreme Court rammed legalization down the nation’s throat by an act of what one dissenting justice called raw judicial power.

And now it’s LGBT’s turn? Acting under the aegis of anti-discrimination laws, government agencies move to enforce the newly discovered right of same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, the right of gay partners to rent the local K of C hall for their wedding reception, the right to have pro-homosexual indoctrination inserted into public school textbooks, and on and on, as “rights” sprout like mushrooms in the fertile soil supplied by the state.

“The Obama administration defends the human rights of LGBT people as part of our comprehensive human rights policy,” Secretary Clinton affirms. And to those who object, remember: “laws have a teaching effect.”

Clinton and the administration she serves aren’t bad people. But they’re secularists at heart (though sometimes with a superficial religiosity) and committed to enactment and enforcement of an expansive program for the bestowal of rights upon causes they favor—abortion rights, LGBT rights, whatever. Woe betide those foolish enough to object in the face of the coercive power of the state.

There’s a hint of it in something written by Father Alfred Delp, S.J., a German priest executed by the Nazis near the end of World War II. Speaking of Christ’s coming, he said:

“All these are not merely one-time historical events upon which our salvation rests. They are simultaneously the model figures and events that announce to us the new order of things, of life, of our existence….

“The world is more than its burden, and life more than the sum of its gray days. The golden threads of the genuine reality are already shining through everywhere…Hope grows through the one who is himself a person of the hope and the promise.”

Jesus commonly is said to save us from our sins. That’s surely the heart of it. But besides simply saving from sin, redemption is empowerment. In the Son of Man, the world, including ourselves, is restored, renewed (cf. Eph 1,9-10). In Jesus, we are co-redeemers, participants in building the kingdom of God.

The Second Vatican Council expands on that in an extraordinary passage in Gaudium et Spes (the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). Speaking of God’s entry into history as a man, and recalling the scriptural promise of a “new earth” to come, the council teaches:

“Far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectancy of a new earth should spur us on, for it is here that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come….When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise—human dignity, brotherly communion, and freedom—according to the command of the Lord and in his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom….

“Here on earth the kingdom is mysteriously present” (Gaudium et Spes, 38-39)

Co-redeemers with Christ, Jesus’ collaborators in building God’s kingdom—the kingdom that will last forever—these are the roles Christ’s coming opens up to us. If that sounds grandiose, so be it. In fact, it’s very grand. But for most of us, it’s realized in quite ordinary ways, much as Jesus’ coming took place in the ordinariness of a stable.

St. Josemaria Escriva underlined that in a Christmas homily in 1963:

“Can it be said also of you who have been called to be another Christ, that you have come to do and to teach, to do things as a son of God would? Are you attentive to the Father’s will, so as to be able to encourage everyone else to share the good, noble, divine and human values of the redemption? Are you living the life of Christ in your everyday life in the middle of the world?

“That is the triumph of Jesus Christ. He has raised us to his level, the level of children of God, by coming down to our level, the level of children of men.”

And that is why we ought to put aside the mistake of expecting too little of Christmas.

In a perverse way, American policy in Iraq has been a model of consistency from start to finish. The original decision to invade back in 2003, based as it was on faulty intelligence and mistaken expectations about Iraqi receptivity to democracy, can now be seen to have been grossly in error. As for the here and now, it’s less obviously, but very likely, a parallel error for America to pull out prematurely, as in fact we now seem to be doing.

Yes, the Iraqi government refused to give the Obama administration what it wanted by way of a status of forces agreement that would allow American troops to remain. But it’s difficult to believe the administration truly pushed all that hard for a deal or was all that disappointed at not getting one.

So who won this war? For the moment at least, the answer to that also seems clear: the big winner was the deeply anti-American regime in Iran whose influence in Iraq appears likely to increase enormously after the Americans are gone. And who lost? That also is an easy one. The losers were Saddam Hussein, the United States, and the Iraqi Christian community. And, oh yes—probably Iraq itself.

Naturally there are people who dispute all this, especially apologists for the Obama administration. There also are people, I suppose, who still believe Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction are out there somewhere in a cave in the Iraqi desert, just waiting to be discovered. As far as I can see, neither group makes an especially persuasive case.

Thus the paradox stands. Someone trying to form a moral judgment of U.S. actions in Iraq can reasonably hold (as I do) that it was wrong for America to go to war in the first place and it’s wrong to quit now. The first conclusion is based on the fact that Saddam was not attacking or threatening to attack any American vital interests when we attacked him. As for the second, having barged into Iraq and, with much bloodshed, turned it into a shambles of doubtful governability, America should have the decency to stick around and help clean up the mess.

But it’s probably too late to do much for the Christian community of Iraq. Face to face with hostile Islamic fundamentalism after the fall of Saddam Hussein, most Iraqi Christians have fled the country. The need now is to help them find new homes and new lives.

A similar process of analysis should now be applied to Afghanistan as well as to other places in the Arab world where the United States has one or more fingers in the pie. Increasingly it appears that the merry talk of the self-deluded American media, suggesting that democracy was on the verge of breaking out on the heels of the Arab Spring, was so much wishful thinking. It’s good to see the tyrants go, but what happens next in places like Egypt, Libya, and Syria is anybody’s guess.

American security interests will be in play in the Arab world for years to come. If the U.S. has a longrange policy there that’s both realistic and morally sound, I haven’t noticed it. How long can we afford to wait?

That’s really strange, I thought. After all, even as it stands, World Communications Day isn’t exactly a red-letter event in most people’s calendars, and giving it an obscure theme like that one is hardly calculated to help.

For those who may not know—and that’s probably quite a few people—World Communications Day is one of several annual “world days” sponsored by the Vatican to focus attention on particular issues and the apostolates of the Church: World Day of Peace, Mission Sunday, World Day of the Sick, and so on.

They generally don’t get a great deal of attention from the media or the public, but they do provide a measure of recognition from the Church for important causes. The World Communications Day has been on the list ever since Vatican Council II called for it almost a half-century ago.

But the theme chosen for 2012, with its emphasis on silence, struck me at first as passing strange. As I thought about it, though, it began to grow on me.

Spiritual writers have always stressed the importance of silence as a necessary setting for contemplative prayer. It’s virtually impossible, after all, to speak deeply to God and hear his reply in the midst of a constant racket. And that message may be more needed than ever today, when, as Pope Benedict remarked recently on a visit to a Carthusian monastery in Calabria, “some people are no longer able to bear silence and solitude for very long.”

This is true, but it’s also a familiar thought. Where the Communications Day theme adds a new twist is precisely in linking silence and communication. At first that may seem like an uncomfortable fit. But is it really? The brief Vatican statement announcing the theme puts it like this:

“In the thought of Benedict XVI, silence is not simply an antidote to the constant an unstoppable flow of information that characterizes society today, but rather a factor that is necessary for its integration. Silence, precisely because it favors discernment and reflection, can in fact be seen primarily as a means of welcoming the word.”

Now here is an interesting and important insight. In today’s media-saturated world, where all of us are at constant risk of inundation by the sheer quantity of communication, making sense of media requires regular cultivation of reflective silence to sort out all those incoming messages.

Which of the multitude of factoids constantly demanding my attention on the grounds of being “news” do I really need to notice? Which of the pundits night and day clamoring for my ear deserve to be taken seriously—and which do not? And—most important perhaps—have I taken trouble to weigh conflicting points of view, or gone the easy route of hearing only those messages that reinforce my prejudices?

To judge from blog postings and letters to the editor, some people have mastered the art of being discerning, informed media consumers. But many haven’t, instead preferring slogans lifted from ideological sources to the hard work of silent study and analysis.

“Silence and the Word”—that theme for World Communications Day is onto something important. Put the media aside at some point during the day, settle down a bit, and just think. You might even find that you enjoy it.

Against this background, it’s a pity that friends and foes of the Vatican’s new statement on international financial reform hastened to all but torpedo the document’s reception right at the start. Issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace with an eye on an economic summit of world leaders, the Holy See’s proposals deserve a lot better than that.

For my money, the best one-paragraph explanation of the Vatican’s initiative was provided by The New York Times: “The document grows out of the Roman Catholic Church’s concerns about economic instability and widening inequality of income and wealth around the world, issues that transcend the power of national governments to address on their own.” With the possible exception of people nostalgic for the protectionism of the 1930s Smoot-Hawley Act, it would be difficult to find any sane person who takes exception to that.

The friends and foes of the document nevertheless seemed to go out of their way to undermine it by likening it in some way to the Occupy Wall Street movement. On the face of it, this was more than slightly absurd.

Occupy Wall Street is after all an amorphous, leftwing gaggle whose most notable feature up to now has been its lack of any clear program. By contrast, the Catholic Church has been developing a body of social teaching since the days of Pope Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century and continuing through Benedict XVI. The result by now is a well articulated and sophisticated set of principles addressing social and economic issues.

Still, what really produced “hyperventilation” (Bill Donohue’s word) among critics of the Vatican statement was undoubtedly its advocacy of a “global public authority” as a key component of a new international system committed to the common good.

It is not a new idea. Popes including Benedict XVI have been suggesting the same thing for several decades. And although it appears to conjure up images of the proverbial black helicopters among some, it should be borne in mind that the statement says the supranational authority it has in mind should be “set up gradually,” should be friendly to “free and stable markets,” “cannot be imposed by force,” and must arise from a “maturation of consciences” after extensive consultation. There is no suggestion in the document that the Pontifical Council imagines this will happen either soon or easily.

Perhaps the strongest argument for something of the sort is the process of globalization that is already such a marked feature of the contemporary world. Years ago, globalization fans like Thomas Friedman were touting its advent as something very like a panacea. In a day and age when the threat of a possible Greek default can rattle markets around the globe, however, it should be abundantly clear that globalization has minuses as well pluses. Here is a truism sufficient in itself to underline the need for some kind of global monitor—a “supranational public authority” in fact—with scope and outreach comparable to globalization itself.

The Holy See’s document is an invitation to a conversation, not a final word. The foes and friends have done their worst. Now let the conversation begin.

Be careful what you ask for—you may get it. The persecution of religion in America has begun, with the Catholic Church a prime target.

Don’t think I’m making the wild-eyed claim that this new persecution either is or ever is likely to become a bloody one resembling the purges of the French and Mexican Revolutions or the Communist war on religion—eruptions of violence in which thousands of clergy, religious, and lay faithful were killed. It won’t be a repetition of the Spanish civil war, just 75 years ago, when death squads of the anticlerical left executed the incredible total of 12 bishops, 283 religious women, 4,184 priests, 2,365 religious men, and an unknown number of laity whose only crime was to be faithful Catholics.

No, the persecution of religion in the United States won’t be like that. It will be a tight-lipped campaign of secularist inspiration in which the coercive power of the state is brought to bear on church-related institutions to act against conscience or go out of business.

As a case in point, consider what’s been happening lately in Illinois. Catholic Charities in the Dioceses of Rockford and Peoria has abandoned the foster care field rather than fall in line with a new state law requiring placements with unmarried couples living in civil unions. (Three other dioceses are continuing to fight the law in court.)

Currently, too, the Supreme Court, having heard oral arguments, is mulling a case involving a teacher in a Missouri Synod Lutheran school who claims her rights were violated because she lost her job after getting sick. At the heart of the dispute is whether the government or the church gets to decide who is and isn’t a “minister” of religion.

During oral argument, the attorney representing the Obama administration said in effect that government could compel the Catholic Church to ordain women priests if it reached the point of wanting to do that in the name of enforcing anti-discrimination laws. Never mind the First Amendment.

These and other such controversies revolve around efforts to invoke government power against religious bodies on behalf of rights claimed by groups that range from homosexuals seeking same-sex marriage to federal bureaucrats pushing coverage for contraception and sterilization in religious employers’ health plans. Church-related schools, hospitals, and social services are targets now, but who can say tell where it might end?

Yes, there’s a silver lining. Pope Benedict pointed it out during his September pastoral visit to Germany (as secularized a Western country as now exists). The lesson of history, he said, is that secularization aimed at reducing the worldly power of the Church often has the unintended consequence (unintended by the secularists anyway) of purifying the Church for its spiritual mission.

That’s a comforting thought. But even so, religion has a duty to fight back against the secularist impulse—not least, in the United States, in defense of a church-state arrangement that’s served the nation well but now is at risk of falling victim to power-hungry secularism.

In a letter to President Obama protesting administration moves against the Church, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the Catholic bishops’ conference, warned of a confrontation threatening “a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.” The persecution has started.

Those boxes and lines could lead the beholder to suppose that if the pope says something on Monday morning, then by the following Sunday evening a billion or so Catholics around the world will have a pretty clear notion of what he’s said. The Church’s network of dioceses, parishes, organizations, institutions, and media all but guarantees that happy result.

The same is true of other communications by other communicators all up and down the line in the Church. Messages constantly flowing, messages constantly being received. Correct?

Sorry, my friend, but if you think it really works like that, all I can say is: dream on. People who’ve spent some time in communication in and around the Catholic Church can tell you the reality is vastly different.

I was reminded of this by news of a study showing only 16 percent of American Catholics recall even hearing about the most recent of the “political responsibility” statements published quadrennially by the American bishops. And three-quarters of those who’d heard of it said it had “no influence at all” how they voted in 2008.

Yes, a small number of professional church watchers have argued about these documents ever since the U.S. bishops’ conference began publishing them in 1976. They have been, and to some extent still are, a big bone of contention between liberal and conservative activists. Whether that will be true of the version forthcoming for next year’s election—which, the bishops say, will simply be the 2007 text, with an introduction added—remains to be seen.

But hold that argument for another day. The point here is that, except for the activists, few Catholics have read or heeded these much-discussed documents.

It’s no surprise. As somebody who drafted many bishops’ statements some years ago and did media relations on behalf of many others, I have no hesitation saying it’s been this way a long time. Not just with bishops’ documents either. The same is true of documents from the pope and Roman Curia. Catholics by and large don’t read them or know what they say.

There are several reasons. Church documents tend to be long and difficult for people without much practice reading them. These days they’re readily available on the internet, but people still must make a small effort to access them—and they don’t. Priests rarely preach on them, and while Catholic papers faithfully report on them, many Catholics can’t be bothered to read the Catholic press to find out what’s going on.

Thus, what many Catholics know about the Church and the teaching of the Magisterium comes to them largely (if it comes at all) from the reporting of the secular media. And secular media generally do a better job covering high school field hockey than reporting important statements by the bishops and the pope.

As suggested, though, the largest part of the problem lies elsewhere—with the lethargy and indifference of the numerous Catholics who know little about their Church and won’t make the effort it would take to know more.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. No one has to read an encyclical or a bishops’ statement to go to heaven. But at a time when the faith is commonly either ignored or misrepresented by secular purveyors of information and opinion, you’d think more Catholics would make that effort. Or am I the one who’s dreaming?