What Reformation is Not

Managing Decline is Not Growth

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

All Things New

Real Presence, Real Future

On Mission for the Church Alive!

These are the names of ongoing special projects in three American dioceses which are in decline in various ways and need to shutter parishes and schools before their retreat becomes a rout, and many more such projects are underway all over the country. When it is necessary for a diocese to manage institutional decline, it should of course be done well so that whatever can be saved is saved and nothing is wasted or simply abandoned. But notice the strange character of the names of these projects, especially the exclamation mark after Alive!

The language is chosen to suggest a bright future filled with energy and possibility, when in fact these diocesan churches are diminishing because of what I call the Great Apostasy, the falling away from Christ in our time which has caused Catholic numbers to plummet in Mass attendance, Baptisms, Marriages, and Ordinations. Throughout the developed world the Great Apostasy has been happening in slow motion for decades but has accelerated in the last decade to near free fall, and it has many causes, the nature of which is a subject for constant debate within the Church - a debate usually organized around the theological and liturgical loyalties of the debaters.

But what is unfolding now was foreseen two generations ago by a young priest then not widely known outside his native Germany, Father Joseph Ratzinger. During a radio program in 1969, Father Ratzinger said: “From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge - a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members … But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the Triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.”

Happy talk and magical thinking (of the On Mission for the Church Alive! variety) are dishonest and cowardly, but Ratzinger’s analysis is honest, insightful, and penetrating. Dioceses, parishes, and religious communities that are shrinking should speak the truth in simple and candid language like Father Ratzinger did. Instead, bromides are offered to spin the obvious truth in cheerful ways that suggest it is a good thing that a religious community hasn’t had a new member join since Richard Nixon was president or that a diocese is in decline because few young men will offer themselves as a living sacrifice to be priests there. The truth is that such communities in decline usually lost their way decades ago and attract no new members because there is no purpose to such a life, and dioceses without priests have usually become sterile and lifeless places because the Gospel is not preached there with conviction or believed with conversion and the sacred liturgy has become a bare, ruined choir of trendy mediocrity and kitsch.

Institutional decline, even when well managed, is not reformation. Authentic reformation in the Church - when it is christocentric, scriptural, sacramental, and ecclesial - may not quickly result in statistical growth, but it does lead souls to understand the vision of Jospeh Ratzinger and find with full conviction that which was always at the Church’s center: “faith in the Triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.”