But let’s give credit where credit is due. The man is informed and conscientious about his research. He may pick the topics he chooses to study to further his agenda, but once he is engaged in the research he follows the data where it takes him. I offer as an example an article entitled “Why Aren’t Our Churches Full?” that appeared in the June 7th issue of America magazine.
I say he got the answer to that question exactly right. He has seen what all of us have seen, that our “churches, once filled on Sunday, are now half empty.” His explanation? “American Catholics changed their minds about hellfire and missing Mass as part of the same decision-making process that led them to conclude that birth control in the name of married love would not send them to hell either.” He calls this a “Catholic revolution, which immediately followed Vatican II and was continued by the ‘children of the council’ — Catholics born since 1960. In both cases, those who do not attend Mass regularly do not believe that they are committing a serious sin.”
It is by now a truism: Nearly everyone, row after row, receives Communion every Sunday, including those who will admit freely to living with a “significant other,” practicing artificial birth control and missing Sunday Mass on a regular basis. What Greeley offers is an explanation for why: They think they are in the state of grace, or that such concerns are an irrelevancy: “The council fathers poured new wine into the old wineskins, and the wineskins burst… Catholics decided that if the Church could change some rules, then it could change other rules too. If it was no longer a mortal sin that would send you to hell to eat meat on Friday or drink a glass of water before receiving Communion, then were you really likely to go to hell for missing Mass on Sunday or practicing birth control to hold your marriage together?”
It does no good at this point to raise the old arguments about the differences between the natural laws in regard to sexual behavior and Church rules such as not eating meat on Friday; to observe that the Church was free to change the latter at will, but not the former. The words will fall on deaf ears. Many, many, Catholics reacted to the changes in the Church’s teachings exactly as Greeley says they did. I don’t know about you, but his analysis of their thinking sounds very much like a social scientist’s rendition of a quip I have heard repeatedly over the last 20 years when the topic of someone violating the teachings of the Church comes up: “So what? Come on! Do you think he’s going to go to Hell?” A shrug usually follows.
This is what Greeley calls the “Catholic Revolution.” “It may be argued,” he says, “that the people had no right to change the rules, and that argument may be correct. The point is that they did it and that they are very unlikely to reverse themselves.” The recent sex scandals have only intensified this situation. There has never been a moment in my lifetime when I have heard as many practicing Catholics — even Holy Name and Altar and Rosary Society members — who will express an open disdain for the authority of the clergy.
Who is to blame? Greeley offers some possibilities: The “fathers of the council”? “Their predecessors who governed the Church with threats of sin and damnation?” Parish priests “who believed they could keep people in church on Sunday no matter how dull and boring the ‘celebration’ was? Priests who denied the evident truth that their homilies bored the laity to death? Liturgists whose fussy rubrical games were indifferent to the religious needs of the laity? All of the above?”
“Make your own choice,” says Greeley. “But do not blame the laity, as many priests and bishops do. The laity neither preserved the old wineskins beyond time nor poured new wine into them, nor did they fail to lead wisely in the years after the wineskins broke.”
Well, not exactly.
I take issue with Greeley on this last point. It strikes me that he is being overly tough on the clergy — and that he may be pandering to the laity. Don’t blame the laity? Why not? Greeley is not speaking as a social scientist when he advances that proposition. I say he lets the laity off the hook too easily. Probably he is right about the mistakes made by the leaders of the Church since Vatican II. But my hunch is that there was little they could do to hold back the waves of change that swept through the pews in the last quarter of the 20th century. Modern Catholics hold opinions that are near-to-indistinguishable from the population as a whole on abortion, extra-marital sex, birth control and on religion in general. Catholics bought into the counterculture, succumbed to the spirit of the times, knowing full well that the Church was teaching something else.
Why then should they be absolved from the consequences of that choice? I can remember Greeley making the point some years ago that the Church’s leaders must keep in mind that the modern American Catholic is more likely to have a graduate degree than be a peasant or uneducated blue-collar worker. If so, why is the leadership of the Church more responsible for the laity’s choices than the laity themselves? Why should the laity be absolved of their decision to follow the secular gurus in the academy, Hollywood and Oprah rather than the Magisterium? Why assume they knew not what they did? It should not be overlooked that the Catholics Greeley is writing about reject not just the Church’s teachings on birth control and the obligation to attend Sunday Mass; they dismiss the Church’s authority to teach in Christ’s name. That fits the textbook definition of a heretic; maybe an apostate.
It is true: We have no way of judging the guilt of those Catholics who no longer take the Church’s teachings seriously. We cannot read their minds. We do not know why they think as they do. I have never been able to track down the quotation that makes the point, but I have been told that St. Thomas Aquinas taught that, while we have an obligation to form our consciences correctly, we must follow our conscience even when it is in error.
But we must keep in mind as we ponder these things that the Nuremberg defense does not hold. The Nazi leaders were not absolved of their guilt because they were “just following orders.” They were expected to know better. So are we. I do not presume to know how modern Catholics will be judged when we meet our Maker, but I think it imprudent for us to assume that He will accept the defense that we ignored the teachings of the Church because the smart people told us to and that “everybody else was doing the same thing.” Peer pressure is not a sounder defense than “following orders.” And it does no one a favor to lead them to think otherwise.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
