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The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America

I finished a fascinating book recently: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America by David Carlin. Unlike many liberal or progressive Catholic authors he recognizes that the U.S. Church has been in a steep decline in the post-Vatican II era, and he does not prescribe married and women priests or the election of bishops by the laity as the solution. On the other hand he is no traditionalist either, he calls Vatican II an historically necessary event and does not call for a return to the Tridentine Mass and a retreat into the “Catholic ghetto.” So what does he believe?

Well, his basic thesis is that three forces came together at the same time to knock our Church on its heels: Vatican II, the acceptance of Catholics into mainstream American culture, and the rise of secularism as the dominant force in that culture. Carlin makes the case that from the founding of our nation until the 1960's America had a Protestant culture, and Catholics were an excluded and sometimes persecuted minority within that culture. While this position had many drawbacks, one benefit to living in the “Catholic ghetto” was that it tended to preserve the solidarity and cultural identity of Catholics while shielding them from the influence of the broader culture.

This isolation was not just an American phenomenon, rather Carlin asserts that is was in part a deliberate strategy put in place by the council of Trent and the counter-Reformation. In response to the threat of the Reformation, the Church defined Protestantism as enemy number one and created a “fortress” mentality to protect the Church. By the time of Vatican II however, the Church fathers judged (in Carlin’s view correctly) that Protestantism was no longer a major threat and thus the “fortress” was no longer needed; in fact it now served as a barrier preventing the Church from effectively evangelizing to the world, hence the need for “aggiornamento.”

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, many Americans during the 1990's falsely assumed that there were no more enemies left in the world and that foreign policy was no longer relevant. In a similar way American bishops blindly assumed after Vatican II that the Church had no enemies left worth fighting and were caught completely unprepared when the cultural revolution of the Sixties overthrew American’s “Judeo-Christian” culture and replaced it with the rampant secularism that predominates today. Vatican II may have been necessary (though Carlin never fully explains why) but it came at the worst possible time; the Church threw open the gates of its fortress just as a brand new enemy arrived on the scene to storm the walls. And all this at the very time that socioeconomic forces were bringing more and more Catholic families out of the old ghettos and into mainstream American suburban middle-class life.

So what do we do now? Carlin admits he doesn’t have all the answers, but proposes that the first order of business is to officially declare that “secularism” (for lack of a better term) is the new enemy number one. He points out that people often define themselves as much by what they are against as by what they are for, consider for instance the recent elections. For the past 500 years many Catholics defined themselves as not Protestant, and now we can forge a similar unity by aggressively defining ourselves as not secularist.

Carlin was a Rhode Island state senator for over a decade and clearly he understand party politics. He draws a second analogy from politics and suggests that the Church needs to “tend to its base.” Politicians who spend all their time courting “middle of the road” voters while ignoring their hardcore supporters tend to lose elections; Carlin suggests that the Church has spent too much time and effort trying to make itself appealing to lukewarm and largely secularized Catholics while ignoring the needs and demands of the most orthodox and loyal Catholics who make up its base.

None of these ideas were entirely new to me but Carlin brings them all together in a compelling and readable book. I highly recommend it.

posted by The Jabberwock @ 1:28 PM