In Baltimore, the city I grew up in, 30% of the remaining Catholics schools are being closed. Only a handful remains in the whole metropolitan area, and it was the Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1852 that established the rule that every parish should have its parochial school.
Only 15% of the students in the Catholic schools in Baltimore City are Catholics.
In part, the racial and demographic changes of the past two generations are taking their final toll. Baltimore used to be a white, middle and working class city. Now it is a poor, black city with a few middle class neighborhoods, but the people who live downtown and around the renovated harbor do not have children.
The Catholic population has moved to the suburbs but the schools have not followed them. The archdiocese decided it was impossible to finance a Catholic school system when the religious who had staffed it were no longer available. And Catholics are having far fewer children, probably below replacement level for non-Hispanic Catholics.
Religious life in the United States is vanishing (see The Index of Leading Catholic Indicators). Some parishes pray for vocations, but the only contact that most people had with religious was in school. As the schools vanish, children have no contact with religious and therefore never even consider a religious vocation. That leads to an even lower number of religious, and so on in a downward cycle.
Some consider this situation decadence. But perhaps it is not. Religious life may have been suited to a certain phase of the history of the Church, and perhaps a Church that is 99.99% lay can be as vital as a Church in which priests and religious are the main carriers of religious tradition.
But Catholics in the United States relied upon Catholic schools, priests, and religious to transmit the faith, and nothing has replaced them. The European Catholics who constituted the bulk of the Catholic Church are either dying out or losing their faith; that group has suffered as severe a decline as the Episcopal Church has. Catholic numbers are increasing because of immigrants from Hispanic countries. But in those countries the surrounding culture carried and transmitted the faith, and that culture does not exist in the United States. The two or three hours of religious instruction a month that some Catholic children have until they are confirmed is really insufficient to form a Catholic identity.
A handful of Catholic families transmit both the culture and doctrines of Catholicism: they tend to be large, home-schooling families. The Catholic Church may end up like Judaism, with a small core of Orthodox families who produce children and an amorphous body of adherents who call themselves Catholic mainly because of lingering family traditions.
That’s definitely the trend here in Canada (and even more in Holland and many west European countries). My parish’s grade schools are payed for by the provincial government, a situation rooted in the peace terms English and French settlers came to in Canada during the 18th century. About 80% of the families represented in my schools do not practice or are non-Catholic. Of the 20% who do go to Mass, many of their kids drop out of Church in high school when the family no longer makes them attend. Whether we like it or not, we seem to be going back to the age of the catecombs. Catholicism is less and less even a cultural religion. As Ralph Martin says, people will be Catholics by convinction rather than by inertia. That will ultimately mean some big chnges in the accidental properties of the Church (eg manner of governance, life-style of Bishops, the papacy’s way of doing things). The substance (dogma and the sacraments in their essential forms) will always remain the same. I think it’s exciting.
Meanwhile, Catholic dioceses are selling worship space to Muslims — space they wouldn’t dare sell to Eastern Orthodox or Protestant Christians:
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=1617
I wrote the article linked above for Front Page Magazine.
Something is wrong w/in the Church that goes far beyond demographics and subservience to clerical culture.
This week, my pastor told us in mass that the school that had been close for some years will be rented to the board of education of New York city.
He was upset that the children were ‘force’ to come to mass on Sunday by showing a paper that have to be sign by the priests so will be a proof that the parents and children came to mass.
Sad, very sad! He had just been named a pastor and is changing things that have worked in the past.