Sandro Magister tells us why the discussions at the Synod are akin to arranging the deck chairs after the Titanic hit the ice berg:
There is a gaping divide between the issues debated around the thirty-five tables of the synod on synodality – according to its official reports – and what is happening outside the Vatican walls, in real life, “in our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel.”
The words quoted are from Benedict XVI, in the memorable letter that he wrote to the bishops on March 10 2009.
“The real problem at this moment of our history,” that pope wrote, “is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.”
From this stems what he indicated as “the overriding priority,” for the whole Church and in the first place for the successor of Peter: “to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God. Not just any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai; to that God whose face we recognize in a love which presses ‘to the end’ (cf. Jn 13:1) – in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.”
There is not a trace of this “priority” in the synod. And this just as the results have been made public of a survey that registers a real and proper collapse of the Catholic religion in Italy, the nation of which Pope Francis is the primate.
The survey was organized by the magazine “Il Regno,” a noble voice of progressive Italian Catholicism, and was presented on October 6 in Camaldoli, at the famous Benedictine monastery, by Paolo Segatti, professor of political sociology at the University of Milan, and by Arturo Parisi, for many years a professor of the same subject at the University of Bologna, a great analyst of Italian Catholicism, later also a member of parliament and minister of defense from 2006 to 2008.
A previous, similar survey was carried out by “Il Regno” in 2009. And it is from the comparison between the one and the other that there clearly emerges the progressive extinction of the faith in Italy.
Asked to say to what religion they belong, those who declared themselves Catholic fell in fourteen years from 81.2 to 72.7 percent, and so also the adherents of other Christian confessions, Orthodox or Protestant, from 11.7 to 7.9.
Conversely, those who say they are non-believers or atheists grew from 6.2 to 15.3 percent.
At this point the decline of religion is marked, but it cannot be called a collapse. But when the interviewees were posed with more specific questions about their faith, those who demonstrated belief in God dropped from 72 to 57 percent, while those who clearly did not believe in God grew from 26 to 36 percent.
This means that even among those who still declare themselves Catholic, there are a good number who no longer believe in God.
Religious practice, of course, reflects this decline in faith. Those who say they go to church every Sunday fell from 28 to 18 percent. Those who go two or three times a month from 16 to 10 percent; once a month from 14 to 9. (But keep in mind that another recent survey by Euromedia Research for “Il Timone” found that only 13.8 percent of Italians go to Mass on Sunday).
Conversely, there was a rise from 23 to 26 percent of those who go to church only two or three times a year, and from 19 to 37 percent of those who never go.
But the most striking data are those that tabulate religious practice and faith in God by age group.
Among those who go to church every Sunday, the decline is strong among those born before 1945 and more moderate in the middle generations. But among those born after 1980, attendance at Sunday Mass has now collapsed to 7 percent.
Go here to read the rest. The men who have run the Church the last few decades have been doing a lousy job at running the Church, unless their actual goal was the collapse of the Church. What makes this debacle even more enraging is the endless happy talk, the New Evangelization is just one example, which has surrounded it. Faithful Catholics have been played for suckers by grifters and far worse leading the Church.
Two of my three sons have abandoned the Church despite a father who is an altar server and belongs to the Knights of Columbus. The third son hangs by a thin thread to a non-Catholic worship community that saw a fair amount of growth during lockdown (in large part because said community did a fair amount of outreach during that time and bounced back immediately once our tyrant of a governor “allowed” churches to open.)
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There is only one young man (about age 20?) who comes, sometimes alone, to our parish. The vast majority of elderly; we do have some young families, but I often wonder if the children will remain once they leave the nest.
DJH – You and your family are in our prayers, that they may return to our Lord.
I am afraid that our One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostalic Church has forgotten that to address the ills of the world it should focus on the eternal. Faith will follow. Try to solve the ills and you just become a less efficient NGO.
My older son somewhat practices the faith and recently had his civil marriage validated. But he has yet to return to confession, although he says he will, and to weekly Mass on Sunday. My younger son believed the family of his protestant wife and left the Church when he married. Neither he nor his civil married wife attend church and they say they do not want children. This was not how they were raised! We never missed Sunday Mass and my husband and sons were all Knights of Columbus. My husband passed away. By the way, I did not attend either civil marriage but was pleased to be at the older son’s convalidation.
The competing paradigm of comfortable bourgeois secularism is more persuasive than what Catholicism is offering. And what the Catholic Church is offering is a God-tinted version of comfortable bourgeois secularism, and that version is being sold, by and large, by clerics who are understandably associated with generations of child rape.
Which means that even if the clerical regime preached a full-throated gospel, they would be as welcome and credible as other cold-call salesmen.
On the other hand, the secular paradigm is also running out of cash and credibility, and when it crashes, it will crash hard. Maybe by that point, Catholicism will have some leaders who believe what it has perennially taught and–this is essential–live it out. Until then, the corruption will continue until morale improves.
@Dale Price
It has occurred to me over the years that God may be allowing the persecution of the Tridentine Communities/Latin Mass in order to prune them and make them strong so when that hard crash hits there will be somewhere to go.
Much of the corruption of the Church happened before Vat II. It had to be cleaned out, and that takes a lot of time.
With the radical changes taking place in the Church and the noticeable silence around high court decisions etc etc we have sought refuge for mass in the locations with dedication to the TLM, the “ alphabet” Catholic Church chapels if you will, you can say what you want about these holdout splinter churches, but ppl are pouring in from the big “C” churches and most are bursting at the seams.
[…] Will ‘Synodality’ Go the Way of ‘New Evangelization’? – John L. Allen, Jr., at Crux Arranging the Deck Chairs on the Sinking Titanic – D.R. McClarey, Esq./The American […]
Attend an SSPX chapel that is packed every Sunday, and full of crying babies. If you’re not seated by no later than 15 minutes before the start of Mass, there’s a good chance you’ll be standing the vestibule for the duration. Were it counted as part of the diocese it’s located in, it would probably be the diocese’s largest parish by a factor of two, if not more. This sort of vitality could be the diocese’s, but they don’t want it. “We’re never going back!” seems to be the attitude.
We started attending when my son (our oldest) was 11. He’s now almost 17 and insists that wherever he resides, he will continue to attend the Mass (the “old” one) and seems to have it as part of his personal identity, and what makes him distinct from his friends and classmates. Only time will tell though.
Yes, indeed. These aging boomers and the Jesuit sycophants of Teilhard are on the road to nowhere. This synod is a crude and pathetic joke of a meeting.
DJH, our sons 41 and 43 do not practice their Catholic Faith. They have not since Cathollc H.S. They have dated Catholic women who also do not practice their Faith. All concerned have devout parents. Most of our Catholic acquaintances have children who have left the Church.
I pray for nephews and nieces and their friends to be sent a Catholic spouse who will bring them back.