A Response to the Catholic Church Synod
It is no secret that attendance in many churches has been dwindling. In some, it has completely collapsed. In recent years, it seems as though the church, as part of a misguided attempt to increase its visibility and attendance, has dumbed itself down while at the same time insisted on its relevance and importance. Scriptures and biblical teaching are complex and hard to understand in depth; instead we have been presented with an uninteresting and over-simplified version of them, rather than an opportunity to truly understand our faith. Unsurprisingly, this did exactly the opposite of getting more people coming through the Church’s doors.
What Should the Catholic Church offer?
Community. This is the very foundation of a parish. In the community of the Polish diaspora in the UK, our parents and grandparents moved here in the latter half of the 20th century and built their tight-knit community around their church. And what did this community provide? For infants, it was a baptism celebrated with family and friends; for children, it was attending a nursery school housed in the church and learning about their faith in preparation for their first communion; for young adults, it was a place where new friendships could be made and a place to learn in more depth about the Catholic faith (even if it was done reluctantly, as is the case for many teens); and for the elderly, it was social events for seniors and weekly mass. In the case of the Poles in Slough in the UK, where a particularly large amounts of Polish and other Eastern European migrants settled, it was a community literally built from the ground up.
What Does the Catholic Church Not Do Well?
Unfortunately, in the case of the Polish Parish and many other parishes, years of hard work to build a community and a parish has been tragically undone in just a few months by arrogant and out of touch clergymen. That’s not to say that all churches are being destroyed by appalling and inept clergymen. But it makes it obvious that it is a difficult job to lead a parish and that many are not up to the task. Whenever this happens, it is the inaction and indifference of the higher ranking members of the clergy towards useless corrupt priests that makes more parishioners disenfranchised, leading to dwindling church attendance.
In spite of the difficulty of becoming a priest and the rigour of the seminary, many priests have become out of touch, arrogant and unwelcoming, indicating something rotten in the hierarchy of the Church. The inflated egos and unwillingness of priests to connect with people is the cause of the opaque version of the church we often see and, in turn, the cause of low attendance numbers. Nearly everyone has a story of a priest that has led them to leave or change their parish.
And this captures the Zeitgeist. After two years of being locked down and isolated, separated from family, friends and co-workers, we’re losing touch with each other because we’re losing communities like our churches. We’ve suffered from isolation, disconnect, and in some of the worst cases, a mental health catastrophe from being deprived of meaning and community. And we haven’t even realised it was happening to us.
How Can the Catholic Church Improve?
One thing that another local parish, St Anthony’s, does well is to be friendly and welcoming — something simple and essential, but still lacking in many other parishes. St Anthony’s is fortunate to have a priest who is enthusiastic, articulate, and engaged with parishioners.
With this in mind, it would be wise for priests to focus on this: putting their community at the centre of the parish, and extending their welcome to people outside it so it can grow. Churches can be rebuilt around their communities with simple things, creating a place not only to attend mass, but to socialise, to sing, to teach, to read, to discuss, and to question what they’re told by the Bible.
People need a place to ask hard questions and talk with people who understand them. What do the commandments teach us? Should I get married? Why should I pray? Why did God sacrifice his only son? What’s the point of faith, and why should I believe what I’m being told by the Bible? Nobody wants a dumbed-down, irrelevant church. They want a faith that can help them. They want genuine answers and interesting discussion on their faith.
Bishop Barron of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, for example, has been on a mission to do exactly this through his own lectures, interviews, and podcasts. In his own words, his ministry “harnesses goodness, truth, and beauty to draw people into or back to the Catholic Faith”, and does so with great success. His videos on YouTube have been watched nearly 100,000,000 times.
People want to be challenged by their faith and want to be able to grapple with it — an important part of being a practicing Catholic. This has become self evident, with another clear example being the fact that Jordan Peterson, a prolific Canadian writer and academic, can fill theatres with thousands of people to listen to a series of lectures on the book of Genesis. Just a couple of years ago, someone proposing to hire out a theatre every week for several months to talk about archaic biblical stories would be laughed out the room. And yet, thousands not only payed to attend the lectures, but listened intently for up to three hours at a time.
We live in challenging times. But understanding the important and profound wisdom that the Bible teaches can help us to navigate them.
What Does the Church Mean to Us?
In a recent interview, Randall Wallace, the writer of Braveheart, tells a story of a time when he was visiting St Petersburg while on a scout for another movie he was filming. When they finished the scout ahead of schedule, his guide, a Russian woman in her early thirties, offers to show him more of the city and asked if there was anything else he wanted to see. Wallace responded by telling her he wanted to see some of the churches there. His guide was confused by the unusual request, but offered to take him to her church. Also curious and surprised, Wallace questions why she was a Christian given that religion was banned in communist Russia. Even more surprising to Wallace was the fact that she had been a Christian for nearly her whole life even though her parents were atheist. Pressed to explain how she became a Christian in this oppressive, unlikely situation, she said that in communist Russia there was no beauty. That as a young girl walking around the city, there was nothing beautiful. Nothing, until she passed a church and saw candlelight and heard singing. She went in to see, then went again the next week, and then again the week after that. She was drawn to the faith by its beauty — by the candlelight, music, art, sculptures, and stories. She found beauty in a place where there was none.
Even though things are nowhere near as bad as they were in communist Russia, there are still so many tragic situations and dire outlooks for many people right now — gas crises, unemployment, inflation, illness, isolation, and now war, to name just a few. So that even in our developed, prosperous country it is easy to see a world without any beauty. Why not let our churches be a source of beauty and of hope?
