Monsignor George Kelly, one of the great churchmen of our time, turns a keen but loving eye on the contemporary Church in this magnificent new book. On several notable occasions in the past, Monsignor Kelly has set before his readers the status quo of Roman Catholicism in the United States. But in this new book, he combines as never before an unclouded vision of unfortunate aspects of the contemporary Church with a robust optimism concerning what lies ahead. He rivals John Paul II in his uncanny ability to go to the heart of the matter and put his finger on where things have gone wrong and are still going wrong. In Second Spring of the Church in America, his negative diagnosis and positive prognosis center on the role of the bishops. Readers will find here surprising revelations of just how bad it is in many areas of Catholicism in this country. But Kelly is not interested in amassing a catalog of errors for its own sake. His kindly pastoral eye is ever on the ready for a remedy. The still-imperfect renewal called for by Vatican II is a task for all, but in a special way the bishops must step forward, individually and collectively, to acknowledge what has gone wrong and to lead the Church into the third millennium. Perhaps no other living Catholic could have written this magnificent book, combining cold critique with warm-hearted confidence in what lies ahead for the Church in America.
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The Catholic Crisis
Its Nature and Scope
If the Vatican were to hire me as a management consultant, the first question I would ask is whether there is consistency of rhetoric throughout the organization. The Roman Catholic Church is at heart a service organization, and service organizations' primary contact with its customers is through its first-line staff. If those staff are not reflecting the objectives and philosophy of the management, or if those objectives and philosophy aren't clear, I would expect to find a good deal of organizational pathology. Were I to construct an index on which lay parish staff, parish priests, bishops (in private and in public) professional theologians and the Vatican are talking at rhetorical cross-purposes, I suspect the results would be alarming.
Charles R. Morris, author of 'American Catholic'
Crisis
Until recently, the Catholic Church in the United States was a model for its counterparts in Europe and the Third World. Today, however, it gives evidence of the same divisions and controversy that have, for several centuries, debilitated Christendom's ancient sees. Indeed, by all the quantitative measurements contemporary social scientists use to assay progress or depression, the American Church is in crisis. Her major vital statistics are down - Mass attendance, religious vocations, public influence, school attendance, Catholic fertility. Her signs of disarray are up - public scandals, broken marriages, leakage, financial problems, family breakdown, illegitimacy, intramural disputes, and so forth. The facts are indisputable. The deeper questions have to do with the quality of pre-Vatican II Catholicity compared to that which has taken its place, and with the justification of the supposedly remedial strategies since adopted which have in fact debilitated the Church even more, particularly in the United States. Debilitated her to the point that some now doubt whether the Catholic Church can anymore maintain a claim to unique authority over God's word.
In some respects the Second Vatican Council has failed to reform or renew the Catholic Church according to plan. Many changes were properly designed, some long overdue because popes were talking of them well back in the nineteenth century. Others which arose, as if by spontaneous combustion, have led to a "runaway Church. John XXIII, whose field of expertise was Catholic Europe, no doubt had hopes of invigorating the Continental Church, where nominal Catholics abounded. Post-factum, however, those Churches, with their glorious Cathedrals, are today worse off than before. One renowned French theologian, when asked in 1995 about regular Mass attendance in France, responded without hesitation: "Less than ten percent!" The Church of Holland, a model for Europe before World War II, has been substantially Protestantized. The Church of Belgium is said to be no better.
We do not speak here of the leakage that not uncommonly follows vast cultural change outside the Church. On the contrary, the 1960s were revolutionary within the Church. Leading Catholic opinion-moulders, using Vatican II as the excuse, undertook to undermine the historical tradition liturgical, doctrinal, moral - of the Church.
The one reliable means of testing the nature and extent of the crisis in the United States is, not by consulting elite writers, but at the parish level, and by evaluating the experience of faithful Catholics in the pews. Journalists and other professionals, in their estimate of Church well-being, often quote each other or rely on what they perceive to be optimistic numerical correlations and flow charts. Such elite structures rarely measure the spirituality and Catholic morale of those who have gone to Mass every Sunday all their lives. Footnoted reports are often intended to assure audiences, even during problematic and dangerous times, that "prosperity is always just around the corner," while the parochial roof falls in on ordinary people who least deserve more suffering. When the American bishops were called to Rome in 1962 for the Second Vatican Council, they hardly understood its purpose, since their Church was at the peak of her piety and development. Some of their successors, like the country's baby boomers, are too young to evaluate whether the revolution that has since occurred really helped or hurt Catholic religious life. Some might not even know that overnight revolutions usually do more harm than good, because those who are talented at tearing down old walls frequently prove inept at rebuilding the house.
During the crisis, the younger laity, and religious too, creatures of an intrusive secularist culture, never acquired a developed sense of Catholic community. If formative Catholic neighborhoods are hardly to be found anymore in large metropolitan areas, similarly scarce is the unified family-based parish as the source of internalized Catholic identity. During the present period, during which the Church seems to be muddling through a refashioning of its own priorities, young Catholics have come to associate religion with what they perceive to be the noblest aspirations of the secular American mores - free choice, autonomy, human rights, good works, brotherhood, fun, tolerance, and self-fulfillment. The chances are slim that they, unaided by a unified Church, have internalized a world view which accentuates the religious demands of a universal order of creation to which they are subject. In a divided Church, it is hard to see how they could recognize, with the surety of convinced faith, the Lordship of God the Father, and of Christ, absolute moral norms, or the destructive nature of human sinfulness and its peril to human unhappiness, here and hereafter. Elusive, too, might be their understanding of the redemptive significance of suffering and sacrifice with Christ as a model, and the place of meritorious atonement in their lives. If they have any value at all, statistics indicate that the young do not consider regular worship and the worthy reception of the sacraments as prerequisites for identifying themselves as Catholic.
