" Rod says here:
I kept thinking about the older Catholics I know who are faithful, but whose children have been lost to the faith. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but knowing them as I do, I think it's not an unreasonable thing to fear the effect of having no real parish support for orthodox Catholicism on raising Catholic children. As my kids have gotten older, I have been deeply impressed by the importance of community in supporting and reinforcing what parents teach. Most of my Catholic friends with kids are doing the best they can in a bad situation."
My oldest, 26 years old, tells me that he is the only one among his gang of friends (except for one special young Orthodox lady) who goes to Liturgy every week, or ever for that matter. All of his friends save two are born Roman Catholics. One of my best friends, a man I eat breakfast with every morning, is a very faithful Roman who attends daily mass. Not one of his three kids were married in the Roman Catholic Church or attend mass. Its tragic. In the meantime, fundy Protestant assemblies have sprung up around here like mushrooms...all filled with former Catholics. Clearly, at least around here, there is something very wrong. As I said earlier, it has been my experience that very few Roman Catholics become Orthodox (possibly for the reverse of the very reasons Kosta points out about why becoming Orthodox is no great change for them) while we have a steady stream of Episcopalians and evangelical Protestants. Personally, I find it hard to believe that Roman Catholics as a group leave that particular church over matters of deep theology. From what I have seen, the theological formation of most Catholics is limited at best and among those who are theologically educated, I should think that they would end up Orthodox, not in a Protestant ecclesial assembly. So why do they leave the Roman Church and drift into heterodoxy? The only thing I can think of is a perception of a lack of community in large Roman parishes. Just yesterday I had lunch with a monseignor, among others, who has a "small" parish of 1000 families! Absent a strong ethnic tie among those people and taking into consideration the top down management style traditional in the Latin Church, how do you create a sense of community in a group like that? Are there times when the whole parish gets together to work on the church building, or run the fundraisers or suppers? Do days come when parish council members or "selected" parishioners have to write personal checks to stave off a cut off of the water or the lights? If the diocese always picks up the tab, if people think their only obligation is a few bucks in the basket on Sundays and "Father and the diocese will take care of everything", then people won't care about each other and the children won't grow up surrounded by their "uncles and aunts" at church watching out for them. Another dear friend, a Latin rite priest for 40 years, once told me that when a parish hits 400 people, its time to open a new one...but at least up here there aren't enough priests.
The one thing that the Orthodox know that the Latin Catholics seem to forget is that Catholics don't want a mass that looks like the Fundy church up the street.
Get back to the traditions and the churches fill.
We have a very Historically Catholic parish, We are breaking out the back of our hall on Monday to begin building a new church. We need to seat the families that have joined. That amount has tripled in the last three years.
If you give them a Catholic Holy Mass, all the smells and bells. May Crownings, devotions, a sprinkling of Latin, they will come.
And our parish has an average age of 30. We have at least four "family buses" in the parking lot (6 kids and over)
The problem was the lack of catechesis or, rather, liberal Christianity in the place of Catholicism. It was not until My children got into college that I woke to the fact that they knew NOTHING about the teachings of the Church. In my inattention I failed to notice they were being turned into Episcopalians.
That is to be expected. 50% of all people formally affiliated with a Church in the US are Catholics. Therefore, its to be expected that most "ex-whatevers" are going to be "ex-Catholic" simply because of the sheer numbers of Catholics in the US.
Absent a strong ethnic tie among those people and taking into consideration the top down management style traditional in the Latin Church, how do you create a sense of community in a group like that?
In much of the country, the parish is territorial based and relatively compact. These thousands in the Catholic parish generally will be a plurality or majority of the neighborhood. The sense of community comes from there if you bother to look for it by speaking to your neighbors. If you live a life of isolation, of course you are not going to find community either in Church or in your neighborhood.
Great point. To big and it becomes a business, not a parish. Seen it happen to much.