About twenty years ago I was told by a parishioner of a neighboring parish that his pastor had given a sermon at Mass in which he said he no longer felt responsible for those in the parish who never or rarely attend Mass. That pastor went on to say that he “only cared about those who went to Mass and supported the parish.”
That parishioner asked me if I thought that was the right thing for him to say.
Twenty years ago, long before I became a pastor, I thought the answer was easy.
Now I’m not as sure.
Some years ago it occurred to me that saying that Saint James was “a parish of five thousand families” was simply not true. The “five thousand families” was merely the total number of entries in the latest parish census.
The truth is, the actual number of people who I see at Mass, or even dealt with on an occasional basis, is far less.
The “real” parish as opposed to the “official” parish is maybe 20% of the total number “on the books.”
What about the other 80%?
The Lord faced the same phenomenon. In the cure of the ten lepers, only 10% even acknowledged their own cure or thanked Him for His gift of healing. Jesus’ question “Where are the other nine?” is very real today to any pastor. Every parish in our part of the world is essentially in the same situation and the trend is in fact downwards.
This is despite decades of conscious attempts to make Liturgies, Religious Education, parish programs and pastoral outreach “relevant to the needs of the people.”
A parish might have a particularly popular priest or program for a while; but the lasting effects almost always are the same: little or nothing. So often that popularity was purely personal, and even at the price of authentic Catholicism.
The churches were full after 9/11; but within months things got “back to normal.”
One can go on and on in this vein.
To go back to that pastor twenty years ago and what I think of what he said: I do not think that I should not care about that 80%. They are all “my” and our fellow parishioners. We at times intersect with them at certain moments; e.g. Baptisms, First Sacraments, Confirmation, Weddings, and Funerals. At those times we try to be Christ to them; despite our human weaknesses. We owe it to them to put nothing merely humanly blame-worthy between them and the Lord.
However, I will say this: I am more and more convinced that unless a person is part of the worshipping community he or she simply does not “get” it. Such a person will not “get” what it means to be a Catholic; much less the life of the parish. We try to open the door for such people at those special moments I noted above: but THEY need to walk through that door.
We perhaps have forgotten the fact that Our Lord never promised that His Church would be “successful” in the statistical sense. I was born in 1951, as was this parish. We grew up in the age of what someone called “Mega-Church”. A world in which the rate of practice among Catholics in the US approached 80% in many places.
A world in which seminaries and novitiates actually turned away prospective candidates for the priesthood and religious life because they had too many applicants and standards were high. A world in which parochial schools had enrollments of half a thousand and new parishes were established year by year.
There was something very “American” in all this: we make a cult of “success.”
Yet, Jesus so often spoke of rejection: of Him; and of His disciples.
Perhaps we thought we were exempt?
In one of the most astounding ironies of the Church’s history it was precisely when a monumental effort was made to “open the windows” to the world; that the flow began away from the Church.
That trend took dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of priests, brothers, nuns, and lay men and women out of the Eucharistic family and the Church herself.
We see the aftermath all around us.
We read so often in the Scriptures a challenging, and once understood, perhaps consoling message in so many passages:
“I will leave in your midst a remnant, a people humble and devoted.”
“ When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth, do you think?”
“ Do not fear, little flock, the Father has decided to give you a kingdom.”
“If they will not hear Me, they will not hear you.”
We are in a period where the flock seems small. That oft-heard cliché of the Sixties “read the signs of the times” means something rather different today.
The answer?
I’m not sure.
However I am convinced it will not be by futher secularization or "protestantization" of what remains of the Church's life and practice. We stand, in my opinion, of another Counter-Reformation. As in the 16th and 17th centuries the Catholic Church needed to purify, and courageously re-asserted herself in the face of the Protestant Reformers who denied many Catholic doctrines not by imitating them, but by firmly proclaiming the truth of which she is the guardian.
I will write more on this as the “Spirit” ( or the mood) takes me.