A matter of survival
The late notable American theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles, S J., accuses the American Church of engaging in "accommodationalism." It is a charge we should take seriously.
He means that American Catholics have been more busy becoming American than Catholic. We have tended to "give away" some of our Catholic identity and therefore, presumably, some of our Catholic patrimony and values in order to fit into the American mainstream.
And while the "American vision" has given much to the modern Church, especially a sense of openness, fair play and democracy, can the Catholic Church survive in America when its people don't remember what it stands for?
As we become less informed about the tenets of our religion, as our children become more American in their value system and less Catholic, we will gradually sink into the great melting pot of America. We will diminish in numbers at first through gradual erosion of our young people, but later it will go faster and faster, until a remnant of "the elderly" will remain. Abandoned churches will not need priests-thus solving our vocations crisis. Just look at some of the mainline Protestant Churches to get a glimpse of where we are headed. Actually, like some of our Protestant brethren, we would already be at this point if it were not for the millions of Latinos and other immigrants who now fill our churches.
There are some who argue that American Catholic education is a major part of the answer to this deathly attrition. I agree with them. We desperately need centers of our own culture, places of learning and prayer on all levels so that the core of the faith can be passed on, not just as ideas but also as cultural values.
Many also argue that Catholic education is failing in its mandate to train specifically "Catholic" young people. We have done a passable job of teaching them to share and to love-although some would deny this emphatically-but that we have failed to teach them the basics of what it is to be truly Catholic. How many of our children really understand the Eucharist to be the Body and Blood of the Lord and not just a "symbol?" What about the Triune nature of the One God? The nature of Good and Evil? The reality of the Resurrection? The place of the Magisterium? On social issues, how many Catholics are grounded in our position on abortion, family life and service to the poor instead of on materialism and a "me-first" attitude?
The lack of such basics in our Catholic population is a time bomb for the future. It already shows in the numbers of young people who fail to attend church or who choose another church when they finally are ready to go back to one.
Sound Catholic education is necessary for survival. This means education from the elementary level through the university, and it must be extended in some way to public school children as well. In the present moral and cultural vacuum in our country, we have a marvelous opportunity to offer a strong focus of human and transcendent values.
But instead we have been too eager to unburden ourselves of the "problems" surrounding Catholic schools, and in our haste to rid ourselves of them we have taken another step toward diffusing and dismantling Catholicism. Particularly ominous is the "privatization" of so many of our parochial schools. Instead of being parish schools serving all members of the parish community (this would, of course, include the many recently arrived immigrants,) our schools have become private schools for the middle and upper classes. The present wave of immigrant children is the first group of immigrants in American Catholic history not to have the benefit of a parochial education.
The key for us is to understand that this is a matter of survival of beliefs and cultural values that we hold dear. When we understand this, we will sacrifice over and over again, like our parents, grandparents and great grandparents, to keep our schools and Catholic education at all levels alive and healthy.
By George Wesolek
George Wesolek is director of the Archdiocese of San Francisco's Office of Public Policy and Social Concerns.
From April 24, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
