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by Peter Steinfels Simon & Schuster, 2003 377 pp.; $26 |
No, not that crisis, the crisis. The horrors of the past two years are symptomatic of much deeper conflicts and discontents, which largely have their roots in the 1960s. In A People Adrift, Peter Steinfels, a loyal Catholic and a highly perceptive observer of the contemporary church, analyzes these long-term trends in a way that is obligatory reading for anyone concerned with the future not just of Catholicism, but of Christianity in the United States. His predictions for change may or may not prove accurate, the directions he wants those changes to take may be controversial, but the book is the best guide currently available to how this situation came to pass.
Steinfels begins with the observation that "Today the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is on the verge of either an irreversible decline or a thoroughgoing transformation." As he notes, a comment of this sort sounds like journalistic hyperbole, but in 2003, it seems quite justifiable. After the recent abuse scandals, the prestige of the Catholic clergy is at an all-time low. More important, perhaps, is the real resentment that many priests have expressed towards their episcopal superiors. According to critics, the bishops pursued irresponsible policies that allowed clerical molesters to pursue their careers; yet when public pressure became too great, the same bishops adopted stringent new policies that seemed to throw accused priests to the wolves.
Meanwhile, many ordinary Catholics used the perception of deep crisis to advocate their particular causes, which would (they believe) have averted the disaster. Liberals had their particular remedies—if only priests were allowed to marry, or women could have been ordained. Conservatives, too, felt they knew what had gone wrong: the crisis would not have occurred if homosexual clergy had not been tolerated, or if the seminaries had enforced both sexual and theological orthodoxy. What Steinfels terms simply "The Scandal" became a symbolic stage on which different factions could enact their particular scripts. It was depressing to see how predictably each side reprised its familiar role. As Steinfels comments about an earlier conflict, it confirmed a picture of "a church in which, at the leadership level, if not in the pews, everyone was operating on hair trigger, mental muscles tensed to think the worst, ready to perceive a doctrinally cautious appeal for dialogue as a subversive act."
The evidence that the American Church is in serious trouble is not in doubt, though the causes are debatable. Most serious, given the role of the clergy in this tradition, is the shortage of priests. The ranks of priests have thinned since the high-water mark of clerical prestige in the mid-1960s, while overall Catholic numbers have swelled. Today, the ratio of non-retired priests to Catholics is less than half what it was in 1965, and the corps of priests is aging. In 1965, the average age of diocesan priests in diocesan ministry was 45, whereas today it is 60. Many of these older priests may be superb pastors, but inevitably, they will be less in touch with the needs of rapidly changing congregations, especially so given the revolutionary ethnic changes now under way in American Catholicism. Reciting a series of similarly disheartening statistics, Steinfels concludes: "To ignore these indicators would be folly."
What does a clerically centered church do when it runs short of clergy? Does it seek new sources of personnel—most obviously, among women and married men—or does it shift its orientation to increase lay involvement? Or—the present situation—does it do nothing systematic, beyond waiting and hoping that things may change somewhere down the road? Steinfels generally favors the liberal approach to these issues, seeing the ordination of women as inevitable in the long run, and he may be correct. At least for the foreseeable future, though, American Catholics face a massive dilemma that results from the juxtaposition of those two potent words, American and Catholic.
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