Inside or outside church structures, Catholics engage change

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 6, 2006 by Joe Feuerherd

"In every assessment, Catholic laity reported that sacraments and charity toward the poor were central to their understanding of the essence of Catholicism," Hoge said at The Catholic University conference. "Devotion to Mary the Mother of God was almost as central. Creedal beliefs such as Jesus' resurrection were central. By contrast, other elements came out consistently low: specific moral teachings about the death penalty and abortion, and specific church rules, for example, requiring personal confession or saying that only celibate men could be priests."

From their very different perspectives, McCarrick and Sipe share one belief: Change is coming. The U.S. church's growing Hispanic population, Said McCarrick, has "a sense of the church that many of us have lost." The "renewal in Catholic education" presents a "new frontier" of opportunity, he said. The "age of the laity" envisioned by Vatican H and Opus Dei founder St. Josemaria Escriva is here, said McCarrick. He noted the presence of women on Vatican congregations and in high-ranking positions in diocesan bureaucracies as signs of progress.

Five days prior to the McCarrick keynote, Sipe told the Celibacy Is the Issue audience: "You are a reformation."

If clericalism is the chief culprit in the church's ills then it is a problem with a potential solution in the making: the priest shortage.

Said Hoge: "Let us look ahead 20 years, when the number of priests is down by about 25 percent, the number of Catholics is up by over 20 percent, and the number of professional lay ministers is up by 25 to 50 percent. Parishes will be run by lay staff and lay committees more than by priests. Many parishes won't have a resident priest."

It's already happening.

"Today," David DeLambo, associate director of pastoral planning for the diocese of Cleveland, told The Catholic University audience, "the number of lay parish ministers in paid positions on parish pastoral staffs (30,632) exceeds the number of priests in parish ministry. By some estimates, it is nearly double. And the number of lay parish ministers continues to grow. Whereas 54 percent of parishes employed lay parish ministers in 1990, two-thirds of parishes employ them today." Highly educated, predominantly female, and familiar with local concerns (many volunteered in the same parishes where they are now employed), the growth of parish lay ministry, said DeLambo, represents a "development of revolutionary proportions."

Still, one person's revolution is another's slowly ebbing status quo--too little, too late, never enough.

Thousands of American Catholics have abandoned the institutional church--not for mainline Protestant denominations or evangelical churches or even Sunday afternoon football. Instead, Regis College sociologist Kathleen Kautzer told the Celibacy Is the Issue gathering, they seek out communities that have the look, feel and even smell of Catholicism without formal ties to the established hierarchy. Kautzer is completing a book on the phenomenon.