The Achievement Of Ratzinger
When Walker Percy's novel "Love in the Ruins" imagined Catholicism in the United States splitting in three — a progressive church modeled on liberal Protestantism, a right-wing "American Catholic Church" that plays the "Star-Spangled Banner" during Mass, and a tiny remnant loyal to Rome — it seemed more like prophecy than fiction.
It was the work of Ratzinger's subsequent career, first as John Paul II's doctrinal policeman and then as his successor, to re-establish where Catholicism actually stood. This was mostly a project of reassertion: yes, the church still believes in the Resurrection, the Trinity and the Virgin birth. Yes, the church still opposes abortion, divorce, sex outside of marriage. Yes, the church still considers itself the one true faith. And yes — this above all, for a man whose chief gifts were intellectual — the church believes that its doctrines are compatible with reason, scholarship and science.
It was understandable that this project made Ratzinger many enemies. It turned him into a traitor to his class, since it involved disciplining theologians who had been colleagues, peers and rivals. It disappointed or wounded the many Catholics who couldn't reconcile the church's teachings with their post-sexual-revolution lives. And it obviously did not solve the broad cultural challenges facing institutional Christianity in the West.
But it did stabilize Catholicism, especially in America, to an extent that was far from inevitable 40 years ago.
This is a good balance. I would only dispute Ross's assertion that Catholic mass attendance has stabilized. That's a true statement, but somewhat misleading. As Putnam & Campbell write in their landmark American Grace, social science research shows that the US Catholic church is "hemorrhaging members." They report that more than half of Americans raised in Catholicism either leave the faith entirely, or lapse so seriously in their practice of it that they barely count as Catholic. Thanks to Hispanic immigration, the Church's numbers remain stable, but Putnam & Campbell say that if previous patterns hold, Hispanics will leave the Church in high numbers as they assimilate. If you take the Hispanic population out, the decline of Catholicism looks a lot like the decline of mainline Protestantism, they say.
CARA, a Catholic research institution, provides an interpretation that intends to ameliorate the direness indicated by these numbers. For example, CARA points out, quite rightly, that all institutional church affiliation in the US is declining, so it's wrong to single out the Catholic situation as unique. Still, if the decline in US Catholic numbers, when Hispanic immigration is factored out, is comparable to the (relatively liberal) Protestant mainline, then that argues against Ross's point that the conservatism that Joseph Ratzinger, first as JP2′s doctrinal watchdog, and then as pope, stood for made much of a difference in the US church's situation.
I would like to think that it did so, but I'm not confident that that judgment is sound. Putnam & Campbell point out that the influx of converts to Catholicism is a trickle compared to the outflow, but it is true that I became a Catholic convert in part because of the witness of John Paul II, which captured my imagination as a young man. Yet in my 13 years as a practicing Catholic (1993-2006), I found that more often than not that the great things being said by the pope were barely if at all spoken by the priest, or embodied in the ethos of parish life.
