Pretty Much Sums Up the Situation

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat has an excellent piece in The New Republic regarding liberal Catholics' wish for a reformed Church. His point: A more liberal Church would kill the Church, based on all the empirical evidence. It's a stunning article when you figure it's coming from a leftward-leaning publication, albeit one that has a reputation for being fair. Here's the link (but note: The New Republic has an annoying registration that requires users to disable one's firewall).

Here are a few excerpts:

For most [liberals], though, [the Church's refusal to liberalize] has meant remaining within it, waiting first for Paul VI to die, and then John Paul II, and now Benedict XVI, and all the while insisting--often from major op-ed pages and tenured positions at Catholic universities--that all of the Church's difficulties, from declining vocations to dwindling mass attendance to the sex-abuse scandals, would be solved if only Catholicism were to become more in step with the modern world.

It's an appealing notion, particularly to people whose lives and beliefs already conform more closely to modern mores than to traditional Catholic teaching. But it has almost no empirical support. All the evidence suggests the opposite--that a more liberal Catholic Church would be far weaker, smaller, and less influential even than the wounded and divided Body of Christ that Benedict XVI will govern.

The problem for liberals is that their preferred path to the Catholic future has already been tried, and with less-than-encouraging results. In America, the Church's decades-long slide in mass attendance and ordinations to the priesthood is at its worst not in Catholicism's more conservative precincts but in the liberal-minded dioceses and religious orders--the places where implementing the spirit of Vatican II has meant ignoring the actual Vatican on matters of liturgy, theology, and morality.

It might be argued, of course, that these numbers reflect the negative impact of John Paul's traditionalism--that the liberal dioceses and liberal orders would be bursting with vocations, for instance, if only they were allowed to ordain married men and women, or if the Church took a less hard line tack on contraception or homosexuality or abortion. But in fact, exactly this experiment has already been carried out--by the mainline Protestant denominations, which have spent the last half-century moving to ordain women, accept homosexuality, endorse birth control, remarriage, and even in some cases abortion, and to permit local congregations to manage their own affairs with little or no interference from above. And over the same progressive half-century, mainline Protestantism has endured a slow-motion collapse--in influence, prestige, and membership.

I'd go to church more often if only the Church would do X, or Y, or Z, disaffected Catholics often insist. But 50 years' experience with a liberalized Christianity suggests that they probably wouldn't--that if anything, a progressive Catholic Church would see its pews and altars empty faster than ever before. It's not that many devout gays or pious divorcees or deeply religious feminists wouldn't eagerly rush back to Rome should the Church take a more liberal turn. But there aren't enough of them, if the Protestant experience is any guide, to make up for the fact that liberal Christianity is for most people just a rest stop on the highway to Christmas-and-Easter Christianity, or a vague and self-satisfied spirituality, or finally secularism itself.