Once in America the faithful knew just what to do. They knelt dutifully at Mass every week, some every day. They confessed their sins and took penance without question.
Men married women and stayed married, having babies until their bodies said no more. Their eyes, ears and hearts were forever turned toward Rome for guidance and instruction.
They were called Good Catholics.
Then the world started spinning faster. Medical science saved lives once dismissed as lost. Pregnancy was easily prevented. Or, they were created in laboratories. Divorce was no one’s fault. Women, people of color, gay men and
lesbians all found their voice and demanded their place.
Technology marched and society shifted, in many ways swifter in the past 50 years than it had in the thousand that had come before. What once defined a Good Catholic became less certain.
In April, just hours after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed nearly three-fourths of America’s Catholics would follow their own conscience over papal authority in a difficult moral question.
Such rebellion seems to underscore a loosening of the church’s hold on America. Weekly Mass attendance already has dropped from 79 percent in 1955 to about 45 percent today.
But those numbers do not tell the whole story. Many parishes are not only growing but bursting. Look inside those and you will find a vibrant Catholicism, especially among young families who crave the holiness and tradition their grandparents sought.
In Highlands Ranch, a suburb once depicted by National Geographic as the quintessential example of modern growth and sprawl, one such parish flourishes.
Pax Christi Catholic Church is filled with young, mobile, suburban families tilting toward the upper end of the middle class and leaning right politically.
Many of today’s faithful find their way into parishes like Pax Christi, where, unlike urban churches, no generational allegiances exist because everyone is too new. Last year baptisms there outnumbered funerals 115 to 9.
They come on their own terms, looking for a faith that will fit their life rather than the other way around. All of which prompts the real question facing a divided church today: Can you be a Good Enough Catholic?
Traditionalists say absolutely not. “If a person does something that mortally sinned against God, I don’t know how a bunch of other good things makes up for that,” says Bishop Michael J. Sheridan, who heads the Colorado Springs Diocese, which oversees Pax Christi.
Sheridan came to national prominence last fall when he wrote to those in his diocese and urged them not to vote for abortion-rights candidates in the November election, including Sen. John Kerry for president and Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar for U.S. Senate. Further, he suggested any Catholic who did so should be denied Holy Communion.
“I don’t know how you can be a good Catholic and still think you can alter what God has taught so it will fit you better,” he says.
His words have found a home for those who welcome a tightening of the reins, who declare American Catholics weak. They reject the notion that simply evoking personal conscience on matters of divorce, abortion, homosexual relationships or birth control buys you a free ride to the communion rail.
Rules are rules. Catholic doctrine flows from The One Truth as it has for 2,000 years. It may be a hard faith, but what better test as it smacks against the secular world?
Earlier this month the Vatican released a position paper lamenting how too many divorced people were receiving communion. It also suggested a return to more traditional services to counteract the growing casualness of Mass.
At a Good Friday prayer this year, the man who would be pope, Cardinal Ratzinger, declared that the Roman Catholic Church, especially in the Western world, could use a good pruning. “In your fields,” he said, “we see more weeds than wheat.”
Yet on the other end of the continuum, more liberal voices worry that the new wind blows too harshly. They say traditionalists hold to a rigid and punishing view of Catholicism.
“The Catholic Church today is a wide, sprawling tent,” says Paul Wilkes, author of “The Good Enough Catholic” and “Excellent Catholic Parishes.”
“In one corner you have bongo drummers, and in another Opus Dei. You have hip-hop Catholics, progressive and conservative Catholics. I don’t push anyone out of the tent because they are not good, pure or holy enough. Christ didn’t do that. They’re trying to work this thing out the same way I am.”
The question of what makes a good Catholic forms the basis of the 2001 book “American Catholics: Gender, Generation and Commitment,” by William D’Antonio, a sociologist and research professor at Catholic University of America.
He asked this question in 1987, 1993, 1999 and again in 2005. His findings revealed a clear delineation between the laws of faith perceived to be made by God and those made by man.
While the majority of today’s American Catholics consistently believe in the physical resurrection and that the bread and wine truly become the body and blood of Christ, they have felt free to practice birth control, get divorced or skip Mass.
By some counts nearly 85 percent of American Catholics now use or approve of birth control.
D’Antonio scoffs at the traditionalist argument that church teachings are unchangeable. He points to the 1951 approval by Pope Pius XII of the “rhythm” method of birth control now called natural family planning.
Birth control is birth control, whether you fill a prescription or use a calendar to determine ovulation and block conception, he says.
On the surface, the chasm between conservatives and progressives seems unbridgeable. But the true picture of the state of American Catholicism in 2005 is like a child’s finger game of church and steeple. Open the door and look at the people.
WHAT CATHOLICS SAY
When Catholics were asked in April whether the Roman Catholic Church is in touch with American Catholics. Of those who had an opinion:
– 44 percent said it
is in touch.
– 52 percent said it is out of touch.
– 4 percent had no opinion.
When the same question was asked in October 2003:
– 34 percent said in touch.
– 2 percent said out of touch.
– percent had no opinion.
When the same question was asked in October 1995:
– 38 percent said in touch.
– 58 percent said out of touch.
– 5 percent had no opinion.
Source: ABC News/Washington Post poll, April 24, 2005