To Be Catholic, and Proud of it! # 1 of 2

To Be Catholic, and Proud of it! # 1 of 2

Saturday, March 1, 2008
This article written by Russell Shaw appeared in the Knights of Columbus’s Columbia in August 2001. There is a paragraph in there that blew me off my seat. It is the paragraph I will start with in conclusion tomorrow. Here is the article.

“Catholics make up one-fourth of the entire U.S. population, but their clout is nowhere as great as that would suggest. Why not?
The story goes like this. During the 56 years since the end of World War II in 1945 American Catholics more and more have been assimilated into American secular culture – they entered the mainstream. In many ways, that was good. In many other ways, though, it was not.
For Catholics, as for other groups sloughing off old values and beliefs and replacing them with new ones from the secular culture. A problematical process in the best of circumstances, it has particularly troubling implications in this case, since American secular culture during this time was growing ever more hostile to religious faith and morality.
Still, American Catholicism might have withstood assimilation reasonably well, except for something else. Beginning in the last 1950’s and continuing until now, the Catholic subculture pretty much collapsed.
It had been built by several generations of American Catholics with enormous sacrifice and effort. And although it had its limitations, by the middle of the 20th century it was a thriving enterprise, embodied in and sustained by a vast institutional infrastructure – schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, institutions and organizations of all kinds, and all resoundingly Catholic and proud of it.
This subculture could have mediated the assimilation process for Catholics, helping them retain a strong religious identity even as they were merging with the mainstream. But something else happened instead.

Catholic intellectuals, academics and opinion leaders soured on the subculture, set out to dismantle it, and have largely succeeded. Much of its infrastructure disappeared. Much that remained became CATHOLIC IN NAME ONLY. (As an organization, I am proud to say, the Knights of Columbus withstood this assault – something whose importance is by no means as widely recognized as it deserves to be).”

So it wasn’t secularism or the ACLU that did us in. It was our own leadership. What a sad and tragic historical decision. Now let us move ahead and read of another catastrophic consequence of the above decisions.
Survey Finds Religious Landscape in Flux Eric Gorski, AP – Feb. 25, 2008

“The study release Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is unusual for it sheer scope, relying on interviews with more than 35,000 adults to document a diverse and dynamic U.S. religious population….
The Roman Catholic Church has lost more members than any faith tradition because of affiliation swapping, the survey found. While nearly one in three Americans were raised Catholics, fewer than one in four say they’re Catholic today. That means roughly 10 percent of all Americans are ex-Catholics.”
This means that about 30 million Americans are ex-Catholics. All the Saints and in particular St. Dominic would be crying and weeping to learn of this. And what are we as faithful Catholics doing about this tragedy? (Cont’d tomorrow)

George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish or Vietnamese