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.
anyone who wants a restoration of sectarianism is (hopefully) going to be disappointed and the church will never have the monopoly dominance that it once enjoyed when it had the threat of force to back it up, but surely the Vatican can outplay the Scientologists and the Pentecostals and the rest given the memetic firepower and installed userbase they have at their disposal.
I mean at the very least it should be able to stay ahead of the Mormons.
the tradcons may wring their hands over sexual abuse scandals but they don’t want to throw out any baby with that bathwater, they’re not willing to undertake any serious institutional reforms that might actually reduce future scandals as that would inevitably also erode the grip of the trad memes that they care about much more.
I confess that I’m kinda confused by both of these points.
Globally speaking, the Church is way ahead of all its competitors in terms of memetic dominance in the religion field, with the possible exception of certain forms of Islam. It’s not as, uh, niche-branded and all-encompassing as something like Orthodox Judaism, so it doesn’t have the kind of success that the Orthodox have had hanging onto a relatively large slice of a very small faith base. But that goes with the territory of being huge and global and catholic-in-the-literal-sense.
Like everyone, I have my own backseat-driver thoughts regarding Exactly How the Church Could Be Doing Better For Itself, but I don’t think there’s any evidence that it’s failing to live up to the standards set by comparable competitors. (Barring its response to the sex abuse scandals, those are some unforced errors.)
Mostly it’s falling apart in the exact same ways that almost every major religion is falling apart, and having its lunch money stolen by the exact same forces that are stealing everyone else’s lunch money.
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OK, seriously: what institutional reforms are you talking about, short of things that amount to “stop being the Church?” I have thoughts, but they’re probably unhelpful until I have a better sense of what’s under discussion.
