Archbishop Fulton J Sheen used to say, “Evil has it’s hour. But our Lord has His Day.” We must give the Devil his due before we can fight him like Hell. We must face reality, own up to it, if we are ever going to change it for the better. Karl Marx once remarked that the philosophers of the past were always trying to understand the world, “but the point is to change it.” But change without understanding is a false start. Chesterton would agree that we don’t know what we’re doing because we don’t know what we undoing. Our lack of understanding the problem means that all our activity will only lead to more problems. And the business of the Church will become reduced to busyness.
What is the problem? The Catholic Church in America is dying and the way we “do church” has failed us.
We have approximately 22,000 parishioners, 10,000 of which are adults. Do all of these adults attend our parish every week? No way. Only about 6,400 individuals (children and adults) attend each weekend. If our parish coincides with the national averages, that means about 2,540 are adults, and 3,860 are kids. So that means out of our 10,000 adults only 2,540 get to Mass, and of that number a substantial portion are monthly Mass goers.
And our parish is getting bigger. Right now we are at 5,300 families and are expected to climb between 7,000 to 10,000 families in the next 15 years, due to the influx of Exxon employees to their new super complex just south of The Woodlands.
We have three priests. Our pastor is a diocesan priest and is supported by two associates from an Indian religious order. We have 4 very active deacons as well. Our staff is probably 30 people, not counting the school, that are part or full time.
This means that for 22,000 parishioners we have 7 clergymen and 30 staff. That's just a mere 595 congregants per staffer! For now. In five years it will look more like 811 congregants per staffer.
But because they are external, corporate, and memorized, people who don't have a relationship with Jesus Christ are left feeling disconnected to God because of the formalism of the liturgy and the sacraments. The thing is, the liturgy of the Church presupposes a personal prayer life at home. Community worship is supposed to extend and support the personal worship.
But for many Catholics their personal prayer life consists of a few Paters and Aves and the rest is liturgical. And thus, boring. There are no depths to the words spoken from the altar because their is no depth of living faith being actively cultivated in the hearer's heart. They are bored because they are disconnected between the words they say and the realities that unfold.
And when you are bored with something, you do not look hard for resolutions when conflicts come up. "Oh no, Billy has a Sunday soccer game in another city? I guess we will miss Mass." "Oh no, the Houston Texans are playing (and losing) a home game this Sunday? I guess we will miss Mass." When you are bored, you look for excuses to get out of it. When it isn't life-giving, every excuse is a good excuse.
So here is my solution to remedy some of this problem, and yes, it involves talking.