Oorah:
For a long time the Church in the USA was under the aegis of the Holy See’s then Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, called now the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. This is why, for example, the seminarians at the North American College in Rome and at the Pontifical Seminary “Josephinum” in the USA wear the same cassock as the seminarians of the Propaganda Fide College in Rome. Mission countries were in many important spheres under the governance of Propaganda. That changed as the Church in the USA, “a Christian country”, was able to sustain itself.
And now?
Dioceses are declaring bankrupcy. Identity is crumbling. The decidedly post-Christian Obama Administration, with its anti-Catholic catholics such as VP Biden and HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius, are viciously attacking our 1st Amendment religious freedoms.
Many years ago I was chewing the fat with an American bishop. I asked him, “What do we do to turn things around in the USA?” He responded, “The first thing we have to do is stop blowing happy gas!”
In sum, things are terrible. Yes, there are signs here and there of an awakening of Catholic identity, but things are simply dreadful, all in all. Maybe that is what we need: the Church grew from the seeds of the martyr’s blood drops.
On that note, I read with interest the comment by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia:
“The Archdiocese of Philadelphia . . . is now really a mission territory.”
Indeed. It's a pity it took their Excellencies and their Eminences so long to notice this, but better late than never. When our Blessed Lord said that the gates of hell will never prevail, he never said anything about the local Church of a particular time and place. Wasn't St. Augustine's old diocese of Hippo conquered by the Mohammedans? The Church in the United States doesn't face invasion, nor is it being violently persecuted... yet. Instead it is dying a slow, lingering death from liberalism, syncretism, relativism, and indifferentism. Our bishops tend to gloss over this reality when reporting their numbers for the census. It's true that there are 70 million baptized Catholics in the United States, making us by far the largest body of Christians in the nation. Less than a third of that number actually goes to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day though. Less than a third believe in the Real Presence. Ontologically, when you're validly baptized, you are a Catholic forevermore. Catholics who have apostatized are still members of the Church in the same way that deserters are still members of the army they have abandoned.
Those of us who are still here are a pretty sorry lot too. The army of God on earth consists entirely of the wounded; it has ever been so. For fifty years though, the army has been rife with dissent, rebellion, chaos, and anarchy. Regardless of the good it contains, or whatever the Council Fathers may have intended, Vatican II effectively removed the Church from the fight. In the eternal war against the world, the flesh, and the devil, many of us Catholics unilaterally disarmed ourselves. As the culture has abandoned its Christian heritage and all churches have lost tens of millions of souls throughout the world, those of us who struggle to maintain a Catholic identity often clash with each other more than the world that needs the Good News.
All Catholics, whether lay or clergy or religious, are called to witness. Some are called to extraordinary witness through heroic virtue or the shedding of blood. God does not ask so much of everyone, but He does expect everyone to keep the Commandments and the Precepts. Those alone, if kept consistently, are a sign of contradiction.
The Church needs leadership that is not afraid to challenge us. For too long, we've been told that it's good enough to be a nice person who brushes their teeth, holds their neighbor's hand at the "Our Father," and cares about the environment. Reverend Fathers, I beg of you in tears,
be what God has called you to be. Don't settle for mediocrity either in yourselves or in your people. Yes, some people will get upset with you. Yes, you might even lose a little collection money on Sunday. But I'm willing to make a wager with any seminarian, priest, or bishop who reads my inane scribblings: teach your people the hard things. Teach them that the Faith is a serious struggle and the stakes are eternity. Whatever you lose in the short term, you will be repaid twice as much in the long term.
The Catholic Faith is both much easier and much harder than most people think. It's harder in the sense that we have to struggle against our own fallen nature, the temptations of the world, and the hatred of the devil and all his angels whose sole purpose in this life is dragging us down into the fiery pit with them. It's easier in the sense that we have Jesus Christ Himself, true God and true man, really present at every Mass and inside every tabernacle in the world as our shepherd, our king, our friend. We have all of the angels and saints of God willing to come to our aid if we only ask them.
This truth, this goodness, this beauty, all of it should be reflected in the liturgy as much as we poor humans can manage. The liturgy is the number one public witness of the Church in the world. The Sunday Mass is the only time when most practicing Catholics have any interaction with their parish, so it's vital to get it right. Unfortunately, the Mass itself has become a source of bitter division in the life of the Church. Combine that with tepid preaching and flacid catechesis, and we see the result: Catholics who know nothing of their faith, their traditions, their heritage, who divorce, contracept, and abort at the same rate as the non-Catholic population. We see Catholics leading the charge against their own Church in Washington!
Like it or not, we're all missionaries now. It's a frightening thought; I'm certainly no great witness to the Faith. How many inquiring souls have I turned away through my own imperfections? But everyone is a frontline combatant in this war. It's just like our Blessed Lord said it would be. Come on you apes, you want to live forever?!