We Catholics are 24 percent of the United States population, forming the largest single denomination. In the world, we have the fourth largest number of Catholics, 74 million, following the Philippines, Mexico and, in first, Brazil, with 184 million members. The 60 percent-plus American Protestants of course outnumber us, but they are divided among Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and more. But awkwardly enough, the second biggest cohort after us is ex-Catholics. Many studies have been done to explain the one in three exodus from Catholicism. Some of the reasons are our marriage rules, our chastity expectations, an argument with a priest, clergy child-abuse scandal, and others. But those dismal exit polls give me a couple of positive ideas.
What of the fact that we Catholics are unwittingly supplying an ever growing number of Protestant pulpits? Does this not mean that inevitably the Catholic inculcation of their youth shows through in these fellow Christians in their preaching and ministry? I have noticed that women clergy I meet quite often had been Catholics to whom priesthood was not a Catholic option. Likewise more than a few of the male clergy I meet in local ministerial fellowships had been not only Catholic but ordained Catholics now in ministerial positions as married family men with children.
In my pastoral experience it has been common each Ash Wednesday to have minister friends visit to pick up some ashes. The Protestant tradition generally avoids such sacramentals. They were problematic back in the 16th-century Reformation when Martin Luther saw them as “good works” that fellow Christians had been using to “buy” salvation. This was when we found no problem with selling indulgences. More than half of his 95 theses concerned indulgences. But now, many Protestants see a value in incarnational, or embodied, practices helping to make God closer to our flesh-and-blood lives.
Likewise I see providential effects in that our Catholic schools, most especially in America’s inner-cities, are educating so many non-Catholics that the enrollment there is predictably greater than half non-Catholic. Even though only a small percentage of these re-affiliate with Catholicism as adults, are we not implanting among minorities and others a Catholic interpretation of life? This means that we are planting the seeds but God is reaping the harvest, as Paul says. And I doubt God looks for statistical success in countable converts each Holy Saturday, when we induct new adult members.
This being the case, I wonder if we Catholics, through the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ought to approach Protestant denominational headquarters and formally ask for financial help. After all, it is many tens of thousands of their children we are educating. Their families choose our schools over the public system. When you consider that the tuition parents often struggle to pay only covers half of the actual expense of educating that child, and when you consider that we are against the financial wall trying to keep our schools running — see the archdiocese of Philadelphia’s recent bout with economic reality — we have to try novel solutions.
Often poor families admirably divide up the cost of Catholic school tuition among grandparents and aunts and uncles to raise the considerable expense we have to charge. This keeps the child answerable to the whole family at report-card time. But it shows their willingness to sacrifice for a good. We have relied on business partnerships to ask for charity since we can truthfully say that our schools have benefitted the whole community. Why should we not use the same logic with fellow Christians who, once they have paid the tuition, have gotten a great bargain in a country whose narrow spin on the First Amendment has barred nearly every attempt to get state aid from the society we have done so much to enrich?
This year we observe the 50th anniversary of the opening of the ecumenical council. The word still throws people. But it comes from the Greek word oikos, which means house. For centuries the word “ecumenical” meant the attempt to get separated family members back under the one roof. For half a century we have tried to lay aside our hostilities and suspicions of the “other,” venturing out into the minefields between the trenches, to see if we could agree on the main things and accept disagreement on the smaller, less essential things. Who would have thought that economics, the household budget, which also comes from oikos, would have promoted unity? It’s time for us to humbly approach our fellow Christians.
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