Pope's visit excites lay people but doesn't erase problems
When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Washington, D.C., today on his first U.S. papal visit, he'll see a Catholic Church of great vitality — facing great uncertainty. "People are excited that he's coming. He's saying, 'You matter in the universal church,' " says Sheila Garcia of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' office for the laity. "But for most laity, the church is what happens in their parish.
"Participation is what this country is all about. We believe people … have a right to bring their gifts and talents to their church. If they don't, many ministries won't get done at all."
If Benedict could visit just three places beyond his six jam-packed days in Washington and New York, he would see — in a struggling urban outpost in Boston, a Phoenix megachurch booming with Hispanics and two stalwart small-town Iowa parishes that share a priest — much of the promise and the problems in U.S. Catholic life today.
It's not like the Catholic church in Europe, with its empty pews, or the Third World, where one in four parishes has no priest, or in Islamic countries, where Catholics can't build churches.
The USA's 67 million Catholics live in a vibrant world of faith and service, rooted in nearly 19,900 parishes. Lay people, particularly women, have risen to new heights of participation and leadership. Where priests are scarce and overburdened, they keep the lights on.
Yet this is a church under duress.
It's challenged by intense competition from secular culture and other religions. About 10% of people born Catholic say they're no longer Catholic, according to a February study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Of Catholics, 55% say they practice their religion, and 61% say sacraments are "essential to my faith," finds another study, released Sunday by Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University.
The number of priests has declined for decades.
And faith in the leadership of the bishops was shaken by the clergy sexual abuse crisis, which exploded into the headlines in 2002 in Boston and reverberated nationwide.
"The church is on its heels in this society — divided and demoralized and damaged. It really needs this pope to come and talk about the good things — to America's witness for life, its rich parishes and ministries, its remarkable efforts for social justice," says R. Scott Appleby, a professor of Catholic history at the University of Notre Dame.
He hopes the pope will "offer a powerful, charismatic, healing word about the abuse crisis to the laity, who need to hear this, and hear that the work of the Holy Spirit continues to be good and give life."
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