A People Adrift : The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America

Steinfels, the former senior religion correspondent for "The New York Times," and a former editor of "Commonweal" magazine, relies on his broad experience as a journalist and interpreter of the contemporary experience of various religious communities, their traditions, practices, conflicts, and aspirations, to provide close attention to--and critical reflection on--specific practical and institutional matters crucial to the full survival of the Catholic faith. It is the type of attention and reflection that ought to ground serious "theological" work and keep it rooted in the lives, questions, and feelings of human beings struggling to make sense of their lives in todays world. The author pulls no punches as regards the scandals, embittered arguments, and failures of leadership that are tearing the American Catholic community apart. Nor does he offer cheap solace through soothing compromise or ecclesiastical happy-talk. But all those who care about the future of Catholicism in America, including those in a love/hate relationship with its present institutionalization, should read this sober, intelligent, and painfully honest book.

Steinfels belongs to an impressive group of American Catholic intellectuals, that includes his wife, Margaret OBrien Steinfels, all of whom, in very different ways, have been trying to understand what is happening to U.S. Catholicism. Shouldnt somebody gather these people, urge them to let their common loves and concerns outweigh their various personal differences, and invite them to address all these issues now with an acknowledgment of being in an emergency situation?

What struck me most about "A People Adrift" is how much lay leadership has become a part of the church. With declining numbers of priests Steinfels points to the increasing role of laity....a sure sign that at least in some respects the church is willing to accept change. But the author reserves his harshest criticism for the hunkering down of Rome with regard to women and celibacy. He suggests that without a liberalization on the part of the Vatican that the Catholic church in the U.S. will continue its decline. As an outsider in a progressive Protestant denomination, I very much agree with him.

Although the author is willing to make his own feelings known, he is careful to balance counter arguments. He offers possible solutions to questions about the Catholic perceptions of sex, celibacy, religious education, the roles of priests and bishops, the state of affairs of worship, etc....in short, Steinfels covers just about every tier and angle. And I smiled when he signaled his great respect for the late Cardinal Bernardin and his contempt for Cardinal Law.

While "A People Adrift" is a must-read for Catholics who are concerned about the future of their church, I think this book extends far beyond Catholicism. It is an important book to read for people of any faith, not just as a comparison to their own but as a revelation to those who want to understand the joy and the agony of what it is to be Catholic in America in 2003.

We now know the Church has no power of discnerning who should and should not be a priest. Its slection process is a gamble, a hit-and-miss pick where many who were refused entrance to Orders never should have been refused as perverts and miscreants were given the charism of sacrifice and granted entrance into Orders. The religious superiors who refused worthy men of Orders should, as in days of old, don sackcloth and ashes begging Providences forgivness and the forgiveness of those it abused in rejecting them entry to a calling they felt was genuine and time has shown could very well have been.

The Roman Catholic clergy is in many instances mendacious. Its "Pope" seeks a "go along to get along" rapprochement with other religions as he dilutes the core message of Christ which was quite simple: "No one can come to the Father save through Me." Pontiff Woytyla does not accept that tenet. All religions for his encyclical "Ut unum sint" have "a piece of the pie, a piece of the action." No one need be baptized any more for salvation, for indeed Catholicism, according to Pope Woytyla, is not necesseary for salvation. Indeed, recently he told us that the Old Testament was never abrogated: the Jewish ancestors of Catholicism are to be respected as they await their Messiah, whom every Pope up till Woytyla stated has come in His glory for all, including the Jewish people. For a Pope prior to Woytyla to even hint that Christ had not transcended and made the Old Testament moot as His glory brought about a new coventant, a new testament between man and God would be called heresy. Whether or not one believes in a Christ that was God, the point remains: this Roman Catholic leader has rejected a basic teaching of 1900 years.

The patriarchal structure of Catholicism inveighs against expression by the subordinated clergy. Any cleric expressing his opinion runs the risk of economic ruin by being thrown out of the Priesthood and made "to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow." So, for example, some of the former clerics are now pumping gas at corner stations whereas once they were called "higher than the angels".

Nuns have little respect from 21st Century man, viewed more as a quaint relic of a peculiar past.

When a book such as "A People Adrift" appears, one is only beginning to realize what is going on throughout the cesspool called institutional Catholicism. I served on a tribunal adjudicating a charge of clerical pederasty and what I learned sickened me to the point where I understood why the Mexican government hated clerics. A haughty and deceitful bishopric, lies and deceit at many a turn in an investigation, and arrogance towards underlings is what I found most often in the behavior of these Ordained.

My own view is that Catholicism is on an irreversible decline, man is beginning to understand that no infinite increate existent assumed human flesh in a finite time situated in an area called Judea. Nor did any such existent allow himself to be nailed to wood for a sin committed in some paradisaical setting at the beginning of mans appearance on this planet. For this existent never existed as is described in tales and fables for which we have absolutely no written records at all. If one wishes to hold that a being who rose from the dead and was genuinely God incarnate would not have had mountains of documents kept about him and written about him, let him believe so. A rational mind finds the absence of such documentation evidence enough that there was no such being. The absolutely momentous event of a God on earth not recorded in thousands of places? Absurd and unbeleivable. Why were there no documents then? Because no God ever came to this planet and rose from the dead after the savage crucificixion at which the Romans were priceless masters.

The whole story of Catholicisms origins is more and more emerging as a mythology whose effects have been wars and more wars. This has been the fruit of all religions-- Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam--, a using of people for ends of a few supersititon masters who call themselves Apostles or Presbyteroi, and who spread in a fanaticism not unlike that of Islam suicide bombers today a tale of one figure not unlike the tales of Osiris-Dionysius or Zoroaster that were already rampant throughout a world of 2000 years ago just as lost about final destiny as todays is, and a world not in one measure at all helped by the institution that is called Catholicism.