Michael Den Tandt: Catholicism's 'mainstream' is not in Canada
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Michael Den Tandt
CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty Images)
Tuesday, Mar. 12, 2013
In fact, that view is based on a set of assumptions that are almost completely false.
Not only is it extremely unlikely that any of the 115 cardinals now sequestered in the Sistine Chapel would choose to bring about such reforms, but the vast majority of churchgoing Catholics in the world today would be uninterested in them — including, arguably, in Canada. The Roman Catholic Church has, quite simply, moved on.
Let's deal first with the commonly repeated nostrum that the Church is waning. It isn't. In the past 100 years, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, the global Roman Catholic population has tripled, from just over 290 million in 1910, to 1.1 billion in 2010. In sub-Saharan Africa, where there were an estimated one million Catholics in 1910, there are now 171 million. In Asia, a century ago, there were an estimated 14 million Catholics. There are now 131 million.
Even in North America, where the Catholic Church has been hammered in the past decade by the scandal of sexual abuse of children by criminal priests, Catholicism is on a long-term growth track, according to Pew. North America accounted for 15 million or five per cent of the global Catholic population in 1910. By 2010 it was 89 million or eight per cent.
Here's what has changed, quite dramatically, even as the Church has grown: Its internal weighting has shifted south and east. A century ago the top three Catholic countries by population were France, Italy and Brazil; they are now Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines. Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo are now among the top ten Roman Catholic nations by population, whereas in 1910 that list was dominated by Europe.
In Europe and North America, socially moderate heirs of the Enlightenment, sex and gender and the discussions surrounding these are dominant and have been since the post-Vatican II period, in the 1960s. Not so in the new Roman Catholic regions of the world. "In Africa it's 'how do we interact with Islam' " says Jim Farney, a professor of political science at the University of Regina who specializes in the intersection of religion and politics. "In Latin America it's social justice. In Asia it's a whole other bundle of stuff."
In other words, "modernizing" Church teachings related to gender, celibacy and sexuality may seem important to disgruntled North American Catholics who remember with fondness the relative liberalism of the sixties and seventies. But it's unclear why the Vatican would expend energy and capital on such reforms, at the risk of offending congregants from more socially conservative regions of the world, which now account for the Church's greatest numbers.
Moreover, there is statistical evidence to suggest that, even in Canada, the grassroots pressure on the Vatican to liberalize is overstated, for the simple reason that the most vocal liberal reformers are often no longer churchgoers. Indeed, among the 13, 376 Catholics surveyed by pollster Ipsos Reid in its massive exit poll of 39,000 Canadians on May 2, 2011, nearly 80 per cent reported attended mass less than once a month. Only 14 per cent of Canadian Roman Catholics attend church at least once a week, Ipsos found.
If anything, the trend among younger churchgoing Catholics — the 30-and-unders who have never known a pope other than John Paul II or Benedict XVI, or a Vatican that was not forcefully, socially conservative — is against reform. "Vatican II for them is their parents' generation," says the University of Regina's Farney. "They've chosen a church that many of their peers have simply left. There's been a self-selection there. If you go to a Latin mass in Toronto it's a reasonably young congregation. It's small, but it's young."
So this would be the conservative Roman Catholic's point: If you wish to be a congregant in a Catholic Church that ordains women, allows priests to marry and has liberal views on sexuality, you can do that: It's called the Anglican Church. The communion rites are virtually identical. King Henry VIII spent quite a bit of time arranging this some years back. If even the Anglicans are too stodgy for you, why, there's the United Church, with its avowedly liberal social slant. Why insist that Roman Catholicism should change, when the majority of its bishops, priests and many of its most active congregants feel otherwise?
There's a tendency, particularly in the media furor surrounding a conclave, to universalize the Roman Catholic Church, and thus assume everyone has an equal stake and a right to criticize. My strong suspicion is that the assembled cardinals will feel quite differently — and that many churchgoing Catholics do, too.