New England's Catholicism Cramdown

By Fester:

Andrew Sullivan is highlighting the collapse of the Catholic Church in New England and I have some perspective on this collapse.

In Massachusetts, the decline is particularly striking - in 1990, Catholics made up a majority of the state, with 54 percent of the residents, but in 2008, the Catholic population was 39 percent. At the same time, the percentage of the state's residents who say they have no religious affiliation rose sharply, from 8 percent to 22 percent....

"The huge loss, in absolute terms and as a percentage, of Catholics in New England is the most striking element, as well as the fact that most of them didn't join another religion," said Ryan T. Cragun, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tampa. "They didn't become Protestant, but they actually dropped out of religion and became nonaffiliated."

Von at Obsidian Wings is writing in reaction to the excommunication of the raped Brazilian nine-year old for having an abortion, and he is rightly angry:

I read something like this in the context of a Pope who lifts the excommunication of a Holocaust-denier and wonder: Is the Catholic hierarchy f_cking nuts? I mean, y'all did a good job in destroying your moral credibility by allowing pedophilia to rot your core and then, instead of taking responsibility for your own failings, blamed the gays. But now we're moving from tragedy to farce. And not the ha ha ha funny farce, I'm sad to report.

I was raised Catholic, in a long line of Irish Catholic and French-Canadian Catholic families. My grandmother routinely threatened us (in Quebecois French) with Hell and guilt trips on what we were doing to poor baby Jesus. I spent thirteen years in Catholic education, and I still have the strange combination of Catholic guilt as well as the conviction that works are the mark of morality and not belief. My good friends growing up were Catholic and the five us still lean on each other. Only two of them have gone to church for anything other than social ceremonial reasons in the past decade. A good chunk of my politics are informed by my cultural Catholicism.

I decided not to be confirmed because I could not believe in good conscience that I could fully buy into the Church's teachings and being a cafeteria Catholic made no sense to me. I was either endorsing the Catholic Church or not endorsing it. I could not in good conscience find a reasonably common ground, so I walked.And since then, I have attended church for graduations, weddings and funerals.

I dropped out of organized faith because the dominant faith of the region failed. It failed to recognize reality that it was beating up on my friends and my sisters because they were female. It failed to recognize that gays and lesbians were people who had struggles too; instead it both bashed them and became flaming hypocrites as half the parish priests were barely in the closet. It failed to provide the good works that were needed; instead it mouthed platitudes. It failed to recognize reality that not all teenagers would be abstinent by choice (and not all by circumstance either) and opposing basic contraception and barrier education was endangering thousands of lives with STDs. The Catholic Church when I was growing up in Greater Boston just did not seem relevant.

And then the abuse scandals started to hit the light of day. And at that point, previously tolerable venal failures became mortal failures as the Archdiocese did not just fail in protecting the most vulnerable members of the parishes and the diocese but actively attempted to destroy them and their lives even more.

Should there be any surprise that the Catholic Church's failures in New England led to a massive disenchantment with any form of organized religion in the region? Really.....