[.ca] A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church ... (ISBN 0743261445)

From Amazon.com:
American Catholicism "is on the verge of either an irreversible decline or a thoroughgoing transformation," according to author Peter Steinfels, veteran religion reporter and writer of the "Beliefs" column for the New York Times. In the face of the Church's daunting sex scandal, few could argue with Steinfels' dramatic assessment. But what makes this book especially unique and controversial is that Steinfels believes that the American Catholic Church would still be grappling with impending decline or a serious overhaul even if the heinous acts of sexual misconduct had never occurred. Steinfels—a practicing Catholic—nostalgically speaks to the positive ways the church once influenced and guided American Catholics. "Sacrament, edifice, art, doctrine, parental example, youthful devotion, adolescent romance, a teacher here, a mentor there—all part of passing on the faith from person to person—generation to generation," he writes. Indeed, a generation ago, the Church weighed in heavily when American Catholics made decisions about work, sex, marriage, and raising children. Nowadays, the younger generation of Catholics may go to church, but are far less likely to integrate the Church into their daily lives. Steinfels cites polls showing how Catholics are deeply divided on seemingly non-negotiable issues, including the use of birth control and the legality of abortion. He also examines crumbling institutions, such as Catholic hospitals and religious orders, showing how the innate divisiveness in the Church has created the current decline. Other topics of intense scrutiny include the shape-shifting Catholic schools and the resistance to ordaining female priests. Rather than pontificating on solutions, Steinfels offers an intelligent expose that is bound to create waves among the "people adrift." --Gail Hudson

Thoughtful and thought-provoking:
Long standing New York Times journalist Peter Steinfels has produced in "A People Adrift" a very nuanced view of modern American Catholicism. As the title implies, Steinfels may be fairly placed in the liberal wing of the church, but his thoughtful analyses of various problems in the church and proposals for reform are as likely to disappoint radicals as they are to anger conservatives. Take his discussion of the sex scandal. While of course condemning the behavior involved, Steinfels casts a critical eye on his own profession, wondering whether the frenzy over the revelations was in part manufactured by the media's blurring of the time periods involved, lumping all of the crimes under the general category of pedophilia, and ignoring that this wasn't really new news but had been reported on 10 years earlier. But the church doesn't escape Steinfels' microscope either, as he details the public relations, legal and moral catastrophe the matter quickly became. As a woman, I found Steinfels' views on women in the church particularly interesting. Although he neatly dismantles all the theological arguments for limiting the priesthood to women, he wonders if the problem isn't as much that decision-making and managerial power goes along with ordination. One wonders why the senior staff in many bishops' offices are all priests in what are often administrative jobs--especially given the priest shortage. He also proposes a dual solution, admitting women as deacons and into positions of authority. Perhaps then the power to say mass would be limited to just that, and seen as limited to men as a matter of tradition. Although this stance is unlikely to appeal to radicals in the church it represents a middle ground less fraught with theological problems. Steinfels' first chapter contains an excellent statistical summary of where the church stands today, and it is immediately obvious the real success stories in terms of growth over the last four decades is in education and health care--not coincidentally areas which have transitioned to lay leadership. But he also examines the challenges of this change--exactly what does it mean to be a Catholic college where a substantial percentage of your students aren't Catholic, clerical professors are few and far between and your president is a lay person? Are Catholic hospitals unique in any way other than that they do not offer contraceptive and abortion services? Carefully researched and informed by a decade of reporting, this book is well worth your time whatever political camp you find yourself in.

The shaky state of the Catholic Church:
" A People Adrift", Peter Steinfels's new book about the crisis in the Catholic Church in America is as comprehensive a study as you will find about the church today. For those of us non-Catholics who wonder why Catholics go through all the fuss and bother that they do, Steinfels helps us out. Most importantly, he gets us away from the screaming headlines of the newspapers and the segments on television and gives us a close-up look at the many layers of Catholicism, how they interact, what's wrong (and what's right) in the church today. What struck me most about "A People Adrift" is how much lay leadership has become a part of the church. With declining numbers of priests Steinfels points to the increasing role of laity....a sure sign that at least in some respects the church is willing to accept change. But the author reserves his harshest criticism for the hunkering down of Rome with regard to women and celibacy. He suggests that without a liberalization on the part of the Vatican that the Catholic church in the U.S. will continue its decline. As an outsider in a progressive Protestant denomination, I very much agree with him. Although the author is willing to make his own feelings known, he is careful to balance counter arguments. He offers possible solutions to questions about the Catholic perceptions of sex, celibacy, religious education, the roles of priests and bishops, the state of affairs of worship, etc....in short, Steinfels covers just about every tier and angle. And I smiled when he signaled his great respect for the late Cardinal Bernardin and his contempt for Cardinal Law. While "A People Adrift" is a must-read for Catholics who are concerned about the future of their church, I think this book extends far beyond Catholicism. It is an important book to read for people of any faith, not just as a comparison to their own but as a revelation to those who want to understand the joy and the agony of what it is to be Catholic in America in 2003.

Searching for Common Ground:
This is a surprisingly broad survey of the state of the Catholic Church in the United States which avoids focus on hot button moral or divisive doctrinal issues to instead examine nearly every major facet of Catholic corporate life. At first, I found this a little disappointing because I expected a dominant focus on matters of leadership and institutional structure. But upon getting deeper into the author's project, I was gratified by the breadth of perspective because it showed how widespread is the Catholic presence in American society, and in turn, how thoroughly Catholicism is affected and challenged by that society. Steinfels begins with an account of the last years of Cardinal Bernardin in Chicago and his efforts to establish a dialogue between different wings of church opinion on fundamental issues defining the future of the church. The effort was called the "Common Ground Initiative." It was publicly criticized by several of Bernardin's cardinal colleagues on the basis that there could be no real dialogue, implying compromise, on church teaching in key areas identified by Bernardin. The topics are worth noting: - changing roles of women - organization and effectiveness of religious education - Eucharistic liturgy as most Catholics experience it - meaning of human sexuality and the gap between church teachings and the convictions of many faithful - the image and morale of priests, and their declining numbers and ratio to laity - the succession of laypeople to positions of leadership in Catholic institutions formerly occupied by vowed religious, and the provision of adequate Catholic formation for them - the ways in which the church is present in political life and debate - the capacity of the church to embrace minorities - the survival of Catholic school systems, colleges, health care and social service institutions, and the articulation of a distinct and appropriate religious identity and mission for these institutions - financial support - manner of decision making and consultation in church governance - responsibility of theology to authoritative church teachings - place of collegiality and subsidiarity in the relations between Rome and the American episcopacy Most of these topics are taken up by Steinfels in his subsequent chapters. Steinfels argues that Bernardin correctly saw that American Catholicism was increasingly subject to polarization by vocal minorities on the left and right and that it was important to bridge the real differences through dialogue while dispelling the notion that the extremes were in fact in the mainstream. Yet the very reaction to his effort demonstrated how increasingly suspicious various segments of the church were of one another, reading any area of deviance from one's own view as evidence of being in the wrong camp in general. Steinfels offers four common interpretations of the aftermath of Vatican II ranging from far right to conservative to liberal to radical left. Steinfels claims to personally find himself somewhat on the liberal side of the analysis, though receptive to many concerns of the conservatives. In any event, he argues, that the Catholic hierarchy, especially in Rome, failed in its leadership to implement Vatican II leaving divisions (and suspicions) to fester. Much of the downside of the shake-up in the American church had settled by the mid-Seventies when Rome, under John Paul II, began to ratchet up its oversight and exacerbate tension on problems of authority within the church. Increasingly under John Paul II, the hierarchy has a conservative bent while Catholic leadership outside the church as such is dominated by liberal elements. Yet each side feels beleaguered by the other which feeds an undue emphasis on contentious aspects of church life or teaching at the expense of more fundamental and ultimately more fateful issues.

The book says much about Catholicism's irreversible ruin:
It speaks not well when a book of this sort is written about an institution which is apparently getting the comeuppance it has long deserved. The filth of the Medici's, the horrific Inquisition, the Croatian clergy's treatmetn of World War II Jews, the severance from a liturgy that none of the faithful asked be severed, the iron fisted treatment of dissidents, and now the ultimate: gross, scalding, retromingent pederasty by those "discerned" to be proper candidates for Melchisidech's role-- the "alter Christus". We now know the Church has no power of discnerning who should and should not be a priest. Its slection process is a gamble, a hit-and-miss pick where many who were refused entrance to Orders never should have been refused as perverts and miscreants were given the charism of sacrifice and granted entrance into Orders. The religious superiors who refused worthy men of Orders should, as in days of old, don sackcloth and ashes begging Providence's forgivness and the forgiveness of those it abused in rejecting them entry to a calling they felt was genuine and time has shown could very well have been. The Roman Catholic clergy is in many instances mendacious. Its "Pope" seeks a "go along to get along" rapprochement with other religions as he dilutes the core message of Christ which was quite simple: "No one can come to the Father save through Me." Pontiff Woytyla does not accept that tenet. All religions for his encyclical "Ut unum sint" have "a piece of the pie, a piece of the action." No one need be baptized any more for salvation, for indeed Catholicism, according to Pope Woytyla, is not necesseary for salvation. Indeed, recently he told us that the Old Testament was never abrogated: the Jewish ancestors of Catholicism are to be respected as they await their Messiah, whom every Pope up till Woytyla stated has come in His glory for all, including the Jewish people. For a Pope prior to Woytyla to even hint that Christ had not transcended and made the Old Testament moot as His glory brought about a new coventant, a new testament between man and God would be called heresy. Whether or not one believes in a Christ that was God, the point remains: this Roman Catholic leader has rejected a basic teaching of 1900 years. The patriarchal structure of Catholicism inveighs against expression by the subordinated clergy. Any cleric expressing his opinion runs the risk of economic ruin by being thrown out of the Priesthood and made "to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow." So, for example, some of the former clerics are now pumping gas at corner stations whereas once they were called "higher than the angels". Nuns have little respect from 21st Century man, viewed more as a quaint relic of a peculiar past. When a book such as "A People Adrift" appears, one is only beginning to realize what is going on throughout the cesspool called institutional Catholicism. I served on a tribunal adjudicating a charge of clerical pederasty and what I learned sickened me to the point where I understood why the Mexican government hated clerics. A haughty and deceitful bishopric, lies and deceit at many a turn in an investigation, and arrogance towards underlings is what I found most often in the behavior of these Ordained. My own view is that Catholicism is on an irreversible decline, man is beginning to understand that no infinite increate existent assumed human flesh in a finite time situated in an area called Judea. Nor did any such existent allow himself to be nailed to wood for a sin committed in some paradisaical setting at the beginning of man's appearance on this planet. For this existent never existed as is described in tales and fables for which we have absolutely no written records at all. If one wishes to hold that a being who rose from the dead and was genuinely God incarnate would not have had mountains of documents kept about him and written about him, let him believe so. A rational mind finds the absence of such documentation evidence enough that there was no such being. The absolutely momentous event of a God on earth not recorded in thousands of places? Absurd and unbeleivable. Why were there no documents then? Because no God ever came to this planet and rose from the dead after the savage crucificixion at which the Romans were priceless masters. The whole story of Catholicism's origins is more and more emerging as a mythology whose effects have been wars and more wars. This has been the fruit of all religions-- Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam--, a using of people for ends of a few supersititon masters who call themselves Apostles or Presbyteroi, and who spread in a fanaticism not unlike that of Islam suicide bombers today a tale of one figure not unlike the tales of Osiris-Dionysius or Zoroaster that were already rampant throughout a world of 2000 years ago just as lost about final destiny as today's is, and a world not in one measure at all helped by the institution that is called Catholicism.

Notes from a Catholic drifter:
Mr. Steinfels, formerly editor of Commonweal, draws on his years of reporting for the New York Times in offering his overview of the Catholic situation in America. A self-described liberal, he speaks chiefly to other liberals about what he views as the failures and successes of changes since the Second Vatican Council. Alternative accounts are, regrettably, ignored or derided but nowhere engaged. Steinfels' emphasis is on the institutional and sociological, "rather than," as he puts it, "the profoundly spiritual or theological." A chapter is given to the recent scandals, but he believes the deeper "crisis" of his subtitle is occasioned by the Church's failure to respond adequately to the demands of women, the reality of contraception, the acceptance of homosexuals, and related changes in the culture. He urges what he calls the "American Catholic Church" to be more independent from Rome, and asserts that the Magisterium is teaching falsely about, inter alia, the ordination of women to the priesthood, which he believes will happen "ultimately" but should be implemented cautiously. On the renewal of episcopal leadership, Mr. Steinfels' favored models are the outspokenly liberal Kenneth Untener of Michigan, the now disgraced Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, and, above all, the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago. Like embattled socialists who contend that true socialism has yet to be tried, Mr. Steinfels surveys the damages wrought by liberal interpretations of the Council over nearly four decades and recommends as a solution his somewhat tempered version of the same. The book begins and ends with a touchingly nostalgic backward look at what the author views as the unfulfilled promise of the late Cardinal Bernardin and the now languishing Common Ground Initiative, which sought a dialogue between those who affirm and those who ignore or deny Catholic teachings that stand in the way of the further Americanization of Catholicism. A People Adrift is a competent and eminently readable, albeit by now very familiar, account of religious, cultural, and institutional changes, written in tones of wan hope for a new and improved liberalism that is capable of resisting what the author sees as the threat posed by the "conservative" alternative. The book may be profitably read as an informed, if highly selective and tendentious, review of the recent history of Catholicism in America. Having set spiritual and theological profundity aside, Mr. Steinfels makes as good a case as probably can be made for defending the weakened hegemony of the liberal status quo supporting an American Catholic Church. This was from a First THings review