The Catholic Weakness (on marriage)

Last week I wrote about one piece of data that jumped out from the Austin Institute’s fascinating new study, Relationships in America: the Mormon advantage in transmitting traditional Christian practice and views on many things, from life after death to sex and marriage.

Judging from the comments, many people have a hard time separating a sociological analysis from a theological one. Even many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints understandably believe that their particular strain of theology is the key to their relative success. Maybe so. Certainly there is an obvious reciprocal relationship between orthopraxy and orthodoxy (right action and right belief).

But until quite recently, historically speaking, theologically diverse Christian denominations successfully transmitted a marriage culture to their next generations. And other groups in America, with quite different theological views than those of Mormons (for example Modern Orthodox Jews) are also relatively successful at sustaining a distinctive child-rich marriage culture. (The Austin Institute study did not break down Jews into subcategories because the sample size was not large enough to do so.)

Speaking as a Roman Catholic and as an intellectual observer, I want this week to point to another large and important insight that leaps out from the new study data: the relative Catholic weakness. In some sense this is not, of course, news. New York is merging and shutting down parishes to cope with population losses. Progressives are blaming “culture warrior” Cardinal George for a similar loss in the Catholic population of Chicago. Without an influx of Latino immigrants, the shrinking of the Catholic Church in America would be even starker.

The Catholic Church, unlike many other Christian communities, faced a postmodern sexual revolution while in the middle of absorbing massive new changes in church practices, as well as what a fair observer would call equally large disruption in authority structures, after Vatican II. Many Catholic institutions began to lose their distinctively Catholic identity markers: Nuns threw off their habits; Catholic colleges aspired to compete with and resemble their increasingly progressive secular counterparts; partnered gay men became Catholic-school teachers and principals. Cafeteria Catholicism was born and it flourished.

For the Relationships in America study, the Austin Institute interviewed a nationally representative sample of 15,783 people between the ages of 18 and 60; the study separates Catholics by whether they consider themselves “traditional,” “moderate,” “liberal,” or some other kind of Catholic. It also looks at each subgroup’s views and practices by church attendance.

The first thing that leaps out is how divided the Catholic Church in America is, two generations after Vatican II. Traditional Catholic are 5.7 percent of the population; liberal Catholics are slightly more numerous, at 5.8 percent; the plurality of Catholics — 7.5 percent of Americans — dub themselves “moderate,” while 3.2 percent of Americans choose the label “other” Catholics. The wording of the question may not perfectly map orthodoxy (“traditionalist” Catholics in my world are those who support the Latin Mass, for example, which many perfectly orthodox Catholics are not especially interested in attending).

But the labels are clearly capturing something real, because by every measure in this study (and unsurprisingly), traditional Catholics are more supportive of Catholic teaching and practice than are liberal Catholics, with moderate Catholics falling in between and “other” Catholics generally less actively involved than liberal Catholics. Traditional Catholics are three times as likely as liberal Catholics to attend mass in a given week, for instance (58 percent to 21 percent). They are ten percentage points more likely to say they believe in one of the most basic Christian teachings: life after death (85 percent to 75 percent). Each week in Mass, Catholics like me recite the Creed, which includes our faith in the “resurrection of the dead and life in the world to come.” Traditional Catholics are twice as likely as liberal Catholics to say they believe in the resurrection of the body (51 percent to 24 percent). Thirty-five percent of liberal Catholic men consumed porn in the last week, compared with 21 percent of traditional Catholic men, to pick just one measure of self-reported behavior.

From the comments:

Grizzly • a day ago

My dad was in high school during Vatican II, and my mom is about 8 years younger than my dad. They did the whole thing—Catholic schools, fish on Fridays, Latin Mass, and so on. My dad once told me that the Catholic church died the day they brought in the acoustic guitars.

My parents made me go to church until I was about 16; the whole huggy-huggy touchy-feely thing didn’t do it for me, plus the fact that Sunday school was like daycare for 8 year-old girls.

My parents stopped making me go when the scandal got really big in the 90s. They knew I wasn’t into church, but after that I became downright hostile to it and so they let me stop going, in some kind of silent understanding of my disgust at the whole thing.

The child rape scandal seriously damaged the church. It was so bad and went on for so many years that it repelled lots of people, especially men and boys because almost all of the victims were boys. If you chase them off you cut your membership in half, plus they don’t raise children in the church.

I think it also created a problem in a lot of people’s minds—since such a large portion of the church hierarchy obviously rejects Catholicism as evidenced by their protection of child rapists, then why should the individual support Catholicism?

I think this is kind of at the core of the problem. Looking from the outside in, it seems like the church is either unwilling or unable to support its own beliefs and assert its position in society.

Take no-fault divorce. It is completely antithetical to Catholic belief, and has proven itself to be a terrible social evil on par with drug addiction. It destroys families, leads to behavioral problems amongst children, and prevents family formation because men see the threat of divorce outweighing the benefits of marriage. Where are the church leaders organizing people to repeal no-fault divorce laws? Why aren’t they getting in the faces of the politicians and judges?

The same goes for abortion, gay marriage, and all the other areas in which the church can legitimately claim absolute and unquestionable moral authority. The church seems to be doing nothing to stop these evils, despite claiming authority direct from God himself. Thats a sign of fundamental weakness, and people can see that. The church just doesn’t seem that enthusiastic about what it teaches.

Its as if the Church has forgotten its role in the history of Western civilization.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.