MGB:_I would not call the situation of the Nones dire. As Matthew 25 makes clear, it is not affiliation which grants justification, it is action toward the least of these. I do not see that the Nones are doing less for Jesus hidden among their fellows. Indeed, they appear to do more.
It is the Church that is in trouble. Theology and morality are conversations, not facts, and they are renewed with each generation. When the conversation stops happening, it is gone. That is why the old headline ”Is God Dead?” is so important. While God is eternal, what we say about him is not. It is always time bound and something in our discussion is turning off both the young and, to an extent we don’t realize, their parents. Their parents are the ones who left the faith in college and came back to give their kids the Sacraments (as Chris Hitchens would say, just in case) and now prefer brunch to Church on Sundays. As Jesus would say about the Kingdom of God in the parable of the Sewer, the soil was not deep.
Until the late 60s, there was social pressure to go to Mass each week. Indeed, if your children were in Catholic School, it was expected. People lived near their parents and siblings and would visit on Sunday and remark on which Mass they attended. If you lived at home, you went. There was no option. That pressure has largely disappeared.
A large factor is the emptying of the convents, who used to provide slave labor to parish schools. While some parishes still have Nuns, there are not enough to keep most parish schools afloat, so students who would have had their example have gone to CCD, which is not enough for real immersion, and so have become Nones. This has left us with the problem of a more conservative parish environment, which alienates everyone else.
What we teach about Jesus, especially the Passion, as well as Original Sin, must change. The Eden myth was about blame, not disobedience, and the antidote is forgiveness and acceptance of the other (and the hierarchy has a long way to go on that front). The meaning of Eloi, Eloi, lama sabbacthani needs to be fleshed out, because it is central to understanding that the Sacrifice of Christ was a vision quest and not a payment for our fallen natures. In other words, the teachings of St. Anselm and the resulting moralism ARE NOT WORTH SAVING! Neither is the Relativism of Papal Infallibility, which gives us group truth and damns the rest. Vatican II was supposed to exorcise the demon, but did not, given St. John Paul and Pope Emeritus Benedict.
As I stated earlier, None move onto social action and responsibility. They just don’t source it in the Church, which is entirely the Chruch’s fault, especially when they ignore these issues or denounce those who raise them (and this is way beyond the Church’s original sin of child abuse).
The reality is that educated Catholics know more, especially about sex, which is a problem for the Church’s message. Indeed, they know more than the clergy, many of whom suffer from what used to be called an attachment disorder but is now simply another orientation, Asexuality. Aces in the hierarchy believed that their disordered feelings were the height of morality. That is simply not the case, from birth control and married sexuality to sacred continence to homosexuality to the ordination of women. Sadly, they are immune to the type of self-criticism that would have them do what it takes to reverse their errors: ordain married people and women, gay and straight and rethink sexual morality. Notice which comes first. Want to excite the Nones. Open ordination to everyone.
Abortion is the other issue. I am not arguing for a change in doctrine, aside from recognizing that for fairly obvious reasons, were Aristotle alive today he would say that life begins at gastrulation, which does not argue for legal protection at that point. The reality is that under a 14th Amendment milieu, Roe was rightly decided and the antidote for using viability as a marker for when abortion becomes infanticide is the Congress moving that marker (and only Congress). Without strong leadership, that will never happen because both sides benefit too much from fundraising on this issue, not to mention volunteer recruitment.
The problem is when the Bishops started going too far and equating opposition to banning abortion (support for abortion is irrelevant, it is the law and there is no bill in Congress to change it, other bills are unconstitutional) to actually promoting abortion as a solution to problem pregnancies. These are very different questions and equating them has had many ignore the bishops or leave the Church rather than actually changing their position, which is nonsense. Indeed, it is kind of a reverse Simoney were the Bishop have sold their office to the Republican Party, and for more reasons than abortion. We know who these bishops are and where they are. They need a bit of correction from Rome or different duties. They alienate more Nones than the unborn they would save.
Divorce is the another thing that alienates Nones. Many have parents who have divorced and remarried. While regularizing the second union is a start, recognition that some marriages may or may not have been flawed at the outset need to be ended, with one party at fault, would go a long way in moving from superstition to social reality. Even if you can almost certainly rationalize what was wrong from the beginning, it does not bring closure to the end. Religious divorce that blames one party, denying them future marriage rights unless forgiven by the damaged party, while freeing the other unconditionally, would be an improvement over the recent pay for play regime of annulments.
The identification of the Church with sexual purity is a way of fetishizing morality. It is the kind of inward looking nonsense that pushes charity and justice to the side. The Nones won’t have it anymore and neither will the rest of us.
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