The Catholic Church has recently gained some noteworthy converts, but this is offset by the alarming number of defections from the faith.
The reasons given for apostasy follow a common pattern: the Church is irrelevant to this computer-automated age; the Church's hierarchical structure militates against personal freedom; the Church makes unreasonable demands on the faithful and thwarts personal fulfillment, especially in the areas of sex and marriage.
But these are rationalizations, not reasons. Nobody loses faith without fault. The conscious rejection of all or any religious truth is a sin against God's light and God's grace. Apostasy takes time – a slow process of half denials, ignorance, pride, and neglect of prayer and religious practice.
Ignorance comes in different degrees and kinds. Religiously, a person is ignorant not because he's uneducated or uncultured, but because he does not know what his religion means; he cannot, to paraphrase St. Paul, "give reason for the faith that is in him." Today, religious illiteracy runs high, even among Catholic college graduates.
But just as learning alone cannot generate faith, neither can learning alone preserve it. Pride has been the downfall of some learned pillars of the Church. In these days, when the "imperial self" is adulated and where the complete autonomy of the individual is touted as the norm of morality, one hears, quite frequently, the words: "No church is going to tell me what to believe or how I should behave."
Perhaps the chief cause of loss of faith is disordered, sinful and immoral living. If a person doesn't live the way he believes, he will soon search for reasons to justify the way he lives. When a renegade Catholic maintains that he left the Church because it enslaved his intelligence and cramped his liberty, one must first examine his religious practice or lack of it.
But three movements in post-conciliar times have also contributed to the weakening and loss of faith: ecumenism, dissent in the Church, and secularism.
The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in other religions, as Vatican Council II points out. Ecumenism emphasizes what Catholics hold in common with their separated brethren. Regretfully, this has, at times, been carried to the extreme for the sake of Christian unity. In the desire to minimize differences, dogma is considered to be inconsequential, articles of the creed are questioned, and the various Christian churches are looked upon as so many separate ways to God, each on a more or less equal footing, all leading to the same place. Each way, it is said, is adapted to the peculiar temperament and background of those members who belong to different denominations.
This false ecumenism reduces religion to subjective emotion and exemplifies the common American heresy. "It makes no difference what you believe. All roads leading to God are equally good."
Dissent in the Church has also endangered faith by creating an intellectual climate which diminishes the traditional love and understanding of the "one true Church." The Magisterium (the teaching authority) of the Church has come under attack, while the Church herself is accused of being a vast bureaucracy inhibiting or blocking progress. In such a state of ecclesiastical civil war, a Catholic's reasons for remaining loyal to the Church may become muddled and confused.
Secularism, a complete concentration on this world and its problems, with a rejection of any religious faith, has also played a role in crippling belief.
Revelation and sacred doctrine are deemed useless. The secularist asks, "What difference does it make, in the light of environmental, energy, racial, and poverty problems, whether Mary was conceived immaculate or whether there are three or four persons in the Trinity? What really matters is the social unity and well-being of mankind."
But the Catholic Church was not founded by the Lord Jesus Christ to solve social problems, to cure physical and psychological ailments or to provide personal fulfillment (whatever that may mean). Rather, Christ established the Church to save souls. Indeed, the Church is the prolongation in time of the life and work of Jesus Christ. And for Catholics who remain faithful, and for those who convert to the Church, the deciding factor ought to be the objective truth of what the Church teaches.
The once-familiar phrase, "one true Church," as the encyclical Dominus Jesus points out, is still valid. Only one Church was founded by Jesus Christ, and thus it is the duty and privilege of all who acknowledge the claim of the Church, to belong to this communion, imperfect though it may be as an institution. To separate oneself from the Catholic Church is therefore to separate oneself from the teaching and person of the Lord Jesus Christ. "To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68).
Rev. Joseph L. Lennon, O.P. lives at the St. Thomas Aquinas Priory at Providence College.
