Folks I interact with IRL and online increasingly ask me what they can do about the American Catholic hierarchy’s deafness to their concerns. Whether it’s complicity in the canon law-violating restriction of access to the sacraments, covering up abuse of adolescent boys by gay priests, or facilitating the invasion of the United States, the US bishops are giving eighteenth century French nobles stiff competition for Most Aloof Leaders in History.
Seeing their shepherds’ ongoing indifference to their spiritual needs and cavalier betrayal of Magisterial teaching has sown great suffering and confusion among those who love Holy Mother Church. It can be difficult to properly delineate between the Bride of Christ’s sinlessness and her members’ manifest personal sins.
It’s vital to keep in mind that Christ gave no guarantee that His apostles or their successors would be morally impeccable. On the Contrary, He promised that the wicked would live side-by-side with the righteous in the Church until the end of time. Grave sins committed by clergy go back to Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial of Jesus. The latter especially is illustrative, since it demonstrates that the state of a particular member of the Magisterium’s soul is no impediment to his charism for teaching infallibly on matters of faith and morals. That power is not contingent upon the fallen, human bishop. Its source is God Himself.
So, being humans with free will, Catholic bishops remain capable of supporting political positions contrary to Church teaching, and even advancing heretical opinions as private theologians. Human nature being what it is, none of this is anything new. Some people have been misled to think of bad clergy as some unprecedented novelty because academia and the media have fostered historical illiteracy for generations.
Yet the real havoc wreaked by indifferent, corrupt, and even heretical clergy persists. Catholics striving to remain loyal to Holy Church understandably find themselves in a bind. The Church is not a democracy. How to express displeasure to the King’s stewards, even when they are wicked?
As in the Parable of the Unjust Judge, the US bishops’ own worldliness gives the faithful some leverage.
U.S. Catholic parishes in recent years have raised more than $5 billion a year through weekly collections from their members, according to Mark Gray of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
$5 billion buys a lot of episcopal mansion renovations and shiny new, mostly empty, parish centers.
Who is supplying that money?
Church tithing statistics show that about 81% of those who participate in religious services between 27-52 times a year contribute to religious causes. Their average donation is $2,224, while their total annual charitable giving is about $2,935. Americans who never attend religious services give less, with 50% giving to secular causes, and 12% donating to religious causes. Their average donation sizes are $593 for secular causes and $111 for religious causes.
Unsurprisingly, those who attend Church regularly give more, and more often, than those who don’t.
This dynamic is especially significant when you consider the sociopolitical leanings of frequent Mass attendees.
Interestingly, the frequency of Mass attendance correlates closely with which major candidate a Catholic supports. Catholics who attend Mass daily support Trump by 16 percentage points (58% to 42%). Catholics who attend Mass more than once a week supported Trump by 24 percentage points (61% to 37%). By contrast, Catholics who attend Mass less than once a year support Biden by a margin of 59% to 36%, and those who never attend Mass support Biden by a margin of 69% to 25%.
The perennial maxim “Lex orandi, lex credendi” bears out yet again. Time and again, surveys that correct for regular Mass attendance show that the Church does indeed believe as she prays.
For a final and definitive degree of granularity, adjusting for ethnicity yields telling, and predictable, results.
naturalconservatives.jpg
Let’s dispense with the polite fictions, shall we? Christianity is a revealed faith, which means that membership is definitional. If you dissent from any essential doctrines, you are not in full communion with the Church and are not Christian to the degree that you diverge from her teachings.
Similarly, though bad actors have striven for decades to twist the meaning of “American” into unintelligibility, we still have only two workable definitions:
- The direct posterity of the nation’s founding stock residing within its territory
- Any resident who accepts the Founders’ principles and receives official documentation
With those premises in mind, let’s define “American Catholics”. Definition 1’s implications should be obvious. Political attitudes among a majority of the 41% of self-identified Hispanic Catholics, including support for socialist policies, gun-grabbing, and speech restrictions, set them at odds with definition 2.
Conclusion: Most Hispanic Catholics in America aren’t Americans.
A similar litmus test applies in regard to being in full communion with the Church. The 68% of self-described Hispanic Catholics who support a party which rabidly advocates for abortion–which St. John Paul II infallibly defined as contrary to Church teaching–casts grave doubt on the “Catholic” label as well.
What’s the takeaway? EWTN News accurately described the current crisis in the Church when they observed:
And when it comes to foundational Church teaching, the active or devout Catholics are increasingly at odds with their fellow Catholics, to the point that there are virtually two Catholic communities in the country. This is obvious in the 2020 presidential election.
EWTN got it half right. There are not two “Catholic communities” in America. The two groups we have in this country are 1) Catholics and 2) fake Catholics whose delusions of legitimacy are enabled by corrupt or cowardly prelates.
The crisis in the Church is a microcosm of the crisis in America, and both have the same root cause. The US government is flooding America with non-Americans. The USCCB is trying to shore up the runaway American Catholic apostasy rate by importing parishioners who are neither American nor, precisely speaking, Catholic.
It bears repeating: Membership in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church is definitional. If the hierarchy did their job and enforced those definitions through the canonically prescribed remedy of excommunication, surveys of American Catholics would actually show what American Catholics believe. And by definition, it would not be support for nation-wrecking, infanticide, and the illicit barring of the faithful from the sacraments.
What can actual American Catholics do to fraternally correct our wayward shepherds? The good news is, we’re the ones who are funding the institutional Church. It would be tough to ignore our concerns if we were to stop. Even the most aloof ivory tower bishop is gonna feel a $5 billion wallet pinch.
More good news: American Catholics are starting to do the math and close their purse strings.
Among the many Catholic Charities affiliates grappling firsthand with the border crisis is the one in San Diego, which has struggled to obtain the funds needed to sustain its expanded services. It needs more legal staff to help asylum-seekers at their immigration court hearings, and more funds to buy tickets for migrants seeking to unite with family elsewhere in the country. Its new clientele includes not only recent arrivals from Mexico and Central America, but also asylum-seekers from Nigeria, Haiti and elsewhere who crossed over the Mexican border.
“Donors’ support has not been sufficient,” said the San Diego affiliate’s executive director, Vino Pajanor. “Families still reside in churches or overcrowded homes. Children have school-related needs that are not currently being met.”
Pajanor said donations to his organization dipped from $2.3 million in fiscal 2018 to under $2.2 million in the just-ended fiscal year, with a further drop projected for 2019-20.
Donors’ support has not been sufficient because donors are tired of paying to import their replacements. Vino Pajanor might understand that if he stopped thinking of his coreligionists as cash cattle.
If your parish and/or diocese cares more about preaching Woke Cult heresy than the Gospel, browbeats you to fund your own replacement, or wrongfully restricts your access to the sacraments, cut off the money. Stop your weekly collection basket, mail, or online contributions. Tell your pastor exactly why you refuse to donate another cent until he and the bishop start taking your concerns seriously. Be respectful, but be firm and courageous. The eternal teaching of the Church is on your side.
To anticipate an objection, yes, giving to the Church is a precept of the Catholic faith. But the Church is more than just the hierarchy. Don’t stop your charitable giving. Take the money you’d normally put on the collection plate, and give it to fellow Christians in need or Christian charitable organizations that don’t violate Catholic teaching.
We are not given a spirit of fear. Don’t give money to parishes and charities that try to replace you.
If the bishop or the pastor requires financial incentives to stop detroying the Church in the first place, then he has already revealed this allegiance to mammon. Time will tell how many of the bishops are misled boomers vs death-cult infiltrators—especially if they excommunicate their congregations for “the sin of racism.”
Yeah, the USCCB document that mentioned “the sin of racism” was utterly cringe–not just because the sin of hatred makes their definition redundant, but because the Woke Cultists they’re trying to mollify reject that definition anyway.
Brian
An interesting variant: don’t give money to those who don’t fulfill their public duties.
So it’s up to the laity to hold our shepards to account.
Besides withholding contributions, what other charitable actions can we carry out? For example, writing a letter to the bishops deploring their dereliction with respect to doctrine?
xavier
Spot on. My parish is iffy in stormy diocese (bishop does his best, but he knows his flock is unruly and he isn’t a fighter). I don’t give to second collections for “project” funding and at times I’m hard pressed to figure out why I should bother with a parish that is a mere degree above lukewarm. You have it right: identify where your money does most for Christ and put it there. This is a long term project and things will get worse before they get better: it is our Christian duty to make sure that our tithes are spent for Christ’s work, not mammon’s.
Well, to the best of our abilities, of course. And where we do not know, we must pray.