Rod says totally without irony that there really is no place safe [ from modernity ] while noting in passing that Polish young people are very angry about sexual abuse by the clergy and that the church has basically ignored their anger, but the real threat to the church is left wing political parties and “soft totalitarianism”.
I wonder what the church could do to reverse its rapidly declining membership
…is this a serious question? Because the actual answer is “not much.”
Look, say what you want about Dreher and his tradcon buddies – and I have spent way too much of my time fulminating against Dreher and his tradcon buddies, given their general irrelevance to everything – it’s hard to charge them with not caring enough about Church abuse scandals. They are fucking obsessed with Church abuse scandals; they talk endlessly about how getting the Church to clean up its act on that front is literally the most important thing in the entire world, about how the Church’s complacency and defensiveness in the face of sexual misconduct allegations is going to Destroy Civilization. Drawing an equivalence between “passionately Catholic” and “blase about Church abuse scandals” just doesn’t match up to the evidence.
But Dreher and his tradcon buddies are also perfectly aware that all the various cultural moves that can be lumped under “modernizing” are not going to save the Church either. And you know it too, because you’re not stupid.
A Church that is totally inoffensive to modern sensibilities will not be as appealing to a modern audience as cultural competitors that don’t come with all the weird difficult baggage of being, well, the Church. We’ve seen ample evidence of that in America and in Western Europe, as all the struggling-to-be-cool religions get completely steamrolled by an Actually Cool lack-of-religion (or, if you prefer, by Actually Cool modern cults). The Church’s only survival strategy is to operate in a market where it has an advantage, which pretty much means doubling down on its ancient institutional grandeur.
Except that doesn’t work either, because…modern audience. In the end, when you take away its enforced monopoly power, there just aren’t enough people who want to buy the only thing it has to sell. All it can do is die.
No surprises that it’s not going to do so gracefully.
