As An Entire Country Closes Its Churches, One Cardinal Mentions Why?

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Presiding over the death of his Church?

Presiding over the end of his Church?

In the Netherlands a cardinal prepares his Catholics for the inevitable:

During Lent, Catholics in the Netherlands are getting accustomed to the vision of a future without churches. In this year’s Message for Lent, the President of the Episcopate of the Netherlands Willem Cardinal Eijk, announced that he will take on one of the most painful problems of the local Catholic community, i.e. the necessity to close the vast majority of churches in the country, in the near future. As a result of mistakes made by the local Church after the Council and the actual abandonment of evangelization, there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of faithful in in recent decades.

In all fairness Cardinal Eijk may not mean exactly what he seems to be saying here, but one couldn’t think of a more exact description of the problem, not just in the local Church, but the entire Church itself.

Card. Eijk stressed, that he never takes an initiative in this regard alone. For the “deconsecration” of a sanctuary, it is the parish council that writes a simple request stating that only a few faithful attend a church and therefore the parish does not have the necessary funds for its maintnance. The Utrecht ordinary stressed that the decision to deconsecrate is always taken with a heavy heart.

Card. Eijk therefore understands the bitterness of the faithful who find that their village or district will no longer have a church. He however cautions that this should not cultivate these sorts of negative feelings, because they can lead to permanent bitterness. It is important, however, to be open to God and to other Catholics, and with them deepen their faith through prayer, the Word of God and catechesis. Although church buildings might disappear, our faith and the will to be the Church does not disappear from our villages and districts – Cardinal Eijk writes in his message for Lent.

No the Faith won’t disappear.  They just won’t need very many Churches to hold it.

One would imagine that someone must have had this result in mind back in the 1960’s.  Was everyone misguided hierarch behind it just in the grip of some fantasy?

 

Liturgy of the New Evangelization: Forward Into What?

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Is this forward enough?

This isn’t turning back, right?

Pope Francis, standing on the site of Pope Paul VI’s formal suppression of the Ancient Mass, said, “We must go forward, ever forward.  To go back is wrong!”

CWR’s Matthew James Christoff  seems to wonder:

Forward into what?

Despite the fact the New Evangelization has been an ongoing emphasis by the Catholic Church for over forty years, it has failed to stem the disastrous losses of the faithful in the U.S. Since 2000, 14 million Catholics have left the faith, parish religious education participation of children has dropped by 24%, Catholic school attendance has dropped by 19%, baptisms of infants has dropped by 28%, baptism of adults has dropped by 31% and sacramental Catholic marriages have dropped by 41%. Something is desperately wrong with the Church’s approach to the New Evangelization.

One reason the New Evangelization is faltering is because it is missing men. The New Emangelization Project has documented the serious Catholic “man-crisis” in the United States. 1 in 3 baptized Catholic men have left the faith and of those who remain, 50-60% of them are “Casual Catholics”, men who don’t know and don’t practice the faith. Of those who practice the faith, many are lukewarm, not converted to the point of conviction, a conviction in which they are prepared to make disciples for Christ and His Catholic Church. The New Evangelization has largely ignored men, with no substantial or sustained efforts to directly confront the Catholic “man-crisis”.

The Catholic “man-crisis” matters. The souls of men matter and many are being lost; for example, two thirds of Christian men are looking at porn at least monthly and the numbers are much higher for younger men. The faith of the children matter and huge numbers of young people are leaving the faith because they have followed their fathers out of the Church. Without a New Emangelization in which millions of Catholic men become newly committed to Christ and His Church, there can be no New Evangelization.

While a complex set of forces have driven the Catholic “man-crisis”, including both massive cultural changes outside the Church and serious missteps within the Church, the lack of engagement of men in the Mass is a major contributing factor: men don’t understand the Mass and well-meaning, but misinformed priests in many parishes have de-sacralized the Mass causing many men to simply “drift away.”

Mass in my parish is not only profane, it’s also loud, distracting and ugly. It’s not just feminized, it’s Broadway-musicalized.  It’s homosexualized and self-centered. The flat screen TVs are over eight feet high.  The prayers of the faithful go on for years, and the pastor always teaches something angry, sentimental, and destined to carefully unravel your natural beliefs.

Men of unsure faith and keen sense find our Masses repulsive, directly contrary to their virtues and instincts, and in many ways they are.

Christoff asks:

Why is the Mass a key driver of the Catholic “man-crisis”? Research shows that almost 9 out of 10 Catholic men don’t participate in a Catholic activity outside of attending Mass; if men aren’t being reached in the Mass, they aren’t being reached. Only about 1/3 of Catholic men are attending Mass on a weekly basis. Only 1 in 50 Catholic men have a monthly practice of Confession, underscoring the fact that many are attending Mass without a proper preparation to receive the Eucharist. 48% of Catholic men are “bored” in the Mass and 55% of Catholic men don’t feel they “get anything out of the Mass.” These statistics confirm what dozens of the New Emangelization Project interviews with top Catholic men’s evangelists know: men don’t understand the Mass. No man can truly understand the Mass and be bored.

After noting Cardinal Burke’s courageous and necessary recommendation to correct the destruction of the Mass particularly in light of men, Christoff concludes.

After forty years, the New Evangelization has so far failed to reverse the growing losses of Catholics in the West. Rather than a continued parade of programs and events, the Church needs to get back to the basics; the Mass and men. When there is a Mass Conversion of Men in which millions of men and priests are evangelized and catechized to the point of conversion in the Mass, the Church will be renewed and the promise of the New Evangelization will be fulfilled.