Empty Pews: Not The End Of The World?
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
There is something charming about those who see themselves as the last of a dying breed, as champions of lost causes that the rest of the world finds irrelevant. I have in mind people such as collectors of old vinyl 33-inch records, manual typewriters, and rotary phones. There is nothing wrong with them being determined to not permit these artifacts of our recent past to be forgotten too soon, even while conceding that most of the world couldn’t care in the least.
Christianity should not be seen in the same light. I couldn’t help but think that Dame Sarah Mullally, the recently designated Anglican bishop of Crediton, England, doesn’t agree. She recently told John Bingham, a reporter for the British newspaper The Telegraph, that the “declining numbers at services” in the Church of England “should not be a cause of despair” because “people will still encounter God without ever taking their place in a pew.” Mullally went on to say that “clerics must recognize that young people are as likely to hear the Christian message through social media sites such as Facebook or in cafés as in a church.”
It would not be surprising to hear such sentiments from a Hollywood starlet proudly informing everyone within her orbit that she is “spiritual but not religious.” Hearing it from a bishop of a mainstream church is another matter. It seems to me that a bishop shouldn’t sound like a typewriter repairman, shrugging over what the computer has done to his world.
I hope that there are not many Catholic priests and theologians who see themselves in the same way as Mullally. But I suspect that there are; that in their private moments the administrators of many of our Catholic colleges, for example, admit to each other that they see their mission as easing the transition from their schools’ “seminary school” Catholic past into a new secular identity, in much the way Protestant clerics moved Ivy League colleges from their religious affiliations of old.
We should expect more from Catholic leaders than a commitment to not cause much pain for Catholics with traditional views as they cooperate in the push toward modernity and churches with “empty pews.” Mullally speaks of how there are now people who “encounter the church and encounter God but maybe don’t turn up on Sunday,” adding, “I think that the Church does need to take seriously the change in the Church’s membership and that is important but part of that is also to recognize that there are really good examples where the church engages with individuals that isn’t around the pews.”
I guess one could debate what Mullally means by that. There are many groups within the Catholic Church that call for us to bring our faith into our daily lives, to the workplace, into social settings and civic groups, everything from the Catholic Worker Movement to Opus Dei, to organizations of Catholic lawyers and doctors. These groups call upon us to use Catholic doctrine to transform the world for the better, or as St. Paul phrased it, “to remake all things in Christ.” But none of them would suggest that empty pews are nothing to be concerned about.
It is when we are in “the pews” that we hear the Mass, listen to the Gospels, receive the Body and Blood of Christ. Those are not the minutiae of a religious life experienced more vitally on Facebook or with our friends at local Internet cafés. I don’t know if Mullally would go that far, but what she had to say in The Telegraph interview gives the impression that she thinks it no great loss if Christians no longer experience the liturgy and the sacraments, as long as they are “encountering” God in their own way.
There have been leftwing radicals for decades now encouraging Christians to “grow up” from their traditional religious beliefs in favor of a something more relevant. They are convinced that Christ’s teachings have worth only to the extent that they can be brought into line with enlightened thinking; that, for example, Jesus’ call to love our neighbor as ourselves should be seen as a call for the welfare state favored by secular liberals in this country and in Europe. It is what people mean when they speak of the “social gospel.” We have a right to expect our religious leaders to commit themselves to something more, to a fuller understanding of the faith, to defending, preserving, protecting, and extending our Catholic institutions.
There was an American Episcopalian priest named Malcolm Boyd writing in the middle and late 1960s. His best-known book was Are You Running With Me, Jesus? In it he called upon seminarians, who had lost their faith because of organized Christianity’s failure to join with social activists in their struggle against poverty, racial injustice, and the war in Vietnam, to stay within the ministry to “work for change within the existing structures, bringing them closer to the spirit of the humanist revolution.”
There was also Donald Kirk, a director of a 1970s Protestant-run ecumenical center, who praised Christians who “have no sure formulas, no tested theories…but are guided by the radical implications of the gospel . . . and who find its modern application particularly in the New Left.”
And the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., in 1968, during the time of violent protests against the Vietnam War. He told his flock that the Christian spirit can be seen best in “small communities,” such as “members of the Students for a Democratic Society,” where the faith lives “incognito, dressed in strange, secular, even atheistic costumes, but definitely and clearly present. For wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of love, Christ is present through the Spirit, though no one may call him by name.”
I can’t say that Dame Mullally is not troubled by “empty pews” because her view of Christianity is analogous to the above. I don’t know enough about her to say that. But there are Christians like the Rev. Moore, Donald Kirk, and Malcolm Boyd in the Catholic Church. I have met more than a few. We have the right to see them for what they are.
If working to turn Christian teaching into a carbon copy of the “humanist revolution” is not a betrayal of trust, what is? We care about empty pews.
