Why are the Latin churches losing members? Maybe some are just tired of the BS or alientated by the nuChurch and nuGospel. Some may have fallen away from sin but did their parish teach about salvation or did it provide some version of therapeutic moral deism instead, leaving them with the impression that it doesn't really matter if they sin or not, since God will love them anyways? It appears the strategy of importing new congregation members hasn't worked out for the Uhmerican bishops. Did they bother to try to harness male energy in the service of God? No; the bishops have been content to let the continued feminization of their churches to take place.
Latin traditionalists may think they are exempt from this, as they are attending the "true Mass" and learning the "true Catholic Faith" but are they living it, or do they remain content that their works set them apart from their Novus Ordo brethren? How many of their children will be alienated because of poor parenting which they associate with traditionalist Latin Catholicism? And then there are the attitudes of Latin triumphalism, Latin integralism, and anti-Americanism which can be linked and reinforce one another. Even if they do not think a reform of the reform is possible, might it be that children and teenagers attending more "traditional" OF Masses are psychologically balanced than their traditionalist peers as they have less toxic influences? This is especially the case with sons! I'll take the influence of a typical Opus Dei priest over the average Latin traditionalist father who is inclined to be a strict disciplinarian.
Dreher writes:
If I’m a pastor of any sort, I’m going to be worried about the people who aren’t going to come back after the Covid lockdown is over. People who were coming simply because they were in the habit, but who now, having had that habit broken by the pandemic response, will stay home on Sundays.
How many with poor prayer lives and only rote attendance of Mass and reception of Holy Communion will just fall away? What have their churches done to teach them how to pray?
A reader responds to Dreher:
By the way, Rod, your point about people who don’t come back after COVID is well-taken, but I wonder, at what point will churches stop the numbers game and focus on quality of disciples over quantity of members? Obviously, we should be concerned for the state of everyone’s soul, but if the church (speaking of the broad Christian church, not the Catholic Church) is full of people who are sort of bland about their faith, then it’s just going to continue to decline. Public Masses are resuming in Texas this weekend (obviously with changes in how they are conducted). But if you are so weakly attached that a 6-week interruption breaks your attachment completely, can you really even be said to have been that attached in the first place?
I think the brute reality is that churches have to slough off the weakly attached before any sort of real reform can take place. When this topic comes up, I see many people on the comment threads always talking about how “nobody can take the bad music and irreverence at the Novus Ordo Mass, so they just leave” but that’s not my experience in parish life at all. It’s actually quite the opposite: most parishioners DON’T want changes to the music, they DON’T want Latin re-introduced, they DON’T want more reverent liturgies, they are quite happy with the sort of vanilla wafer Mass that is par for the course in most parishes.
The reader seems unaware that those who hold power in parishes are Boomers, who most likely have much ego investment in their ecclesial participation, having made their ideas the rule of faith rather than Tradition. Those who fall away probably do not have much skin in the game to begin with. And the reader misses that attrition has already taken place, those who were alienated already left before COVID-19, leaving only those who are committed to the nuGospel (an aging population).
The problem lies instead with priests and bishops who enable the laypeople holding power within parishes to control parish life. The next generation of priests and bishops may be more orthodox in some ways, but they may still be attached to the SJW Gospel and their "human development" may be incomplete, leaving us with a problem of a feminized church that will not have been corrected yet by their mere assumption of authority within the local churches.
via Rod Dreher:
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