A faith in flux

Jack Gannone was about to have a defining moment, one that would unite him with more than a billion people of 200 nations and 600 languages.

Like most of them, he never saw it coming.

The day was April 23, a Sunday, and inside the sparely modern sanctuary of St. Eleanor Roman Catholic Church in Collegeville, 6-month-old Jack squirmed on his mother's lap.

"Parents, do you understand what you are about to do?" the Rev. Andrew Brownholtz asked. John Gannone and Sara Benton nodded.

Suddenly Jack found himself tilted head-back over a marble font. He did not howl, but gave a what-in-the-world roll of his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling as holy water streamed onto his downy brown hair.

"I baptize you," the priest intoned, "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

In that instant, Jack Gannone became a Roman Catholic, a member of the largest Christian church on Earth, one of an estimated 67 million adherents in the United States and nearly 1.5 million in the Philadelphia Archdiocese.

Statistically, he probably will remain in the fold for life. Although American Catholics have a higher dropout rate than Protestants of any major denomination, 80 percent stay at least nominally in the church from cradle to grave.

But what kind of Catholic might Jack - and indeed, any of his 21st-century soul mates - grow up to be?

If today's strong trends are an accurate compass, they point to someone whom the hierarchy has never gladly embraced: a Catholic who lives the faith on his or her own terms.

From baby boomers through Gen-Xers and Millennials, a streak of spiritual autonomy is growing more pronounced among those who count themselves as practicing Catholics. Religious scholars scan the horizon and see little that might reverse the slow drift away from not only the dictates of Rome but also some core teachings of the faith.

"My sense is that this is an enduring condition, not just an anomaly," said Chester Gillis, chairman of the theology department at Georgetown University in Washington and author of Roman Catholicism in America, a 1999 portrait of the U.S. church.

"There's a tension between Catholicism and American culture," he said. "American culture is winning out."

With that comes a deepening dilemma that the church has long faced in Europe, where institutional Catholicism is in near-collapse and Pope Benedict XVI has decried a "dictatorship of secularism."

"What can the church do? If she stands by her moral teaching, then she will be seen as standing in judgment" of a sizable portion of the membership, said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, former master general of the religious order of Dominicans. "If she does not, then she will be seen as surrendering to modernity."

Some of that "modernity" is evident in a Zogby International telephone poll of 1,901 Catholics nationwide, conducted in March for The Inquirer and Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. Of young adults ages 18 to 35, fewer than half said they:

Attend Mass weekly (46 percent).

Go to confession at all (31 percent).

Consider it important that priests be unmarried (48 percent).

Think that the church alone has the final say on sex outside marriage (25 percent).

Believe that same-sex physical relations are always wrong (47 percent).

Support the prohibition against artificial birth control (26 percent).

On some issues, opinions varied little from the youngest to the oldest respondents. They found common ground in a question about abortion: About half of all age groups thought both the church and the individual should have a say. Across generations, two-thirds said the church should be more democratic in its decision-making.

But increasingly, it is the young who are stretching the fabric of one-size-fits-all Catholicism, according to an author of the poll, and who do not want the church standing in judgment.

"They want an institution that understands how they live, that is responsive to their attitudes and opinions," said Matthew T. Loveland, an assistant professor of sociology at Le Moyne, founded by Jesuits.

He recalled asking his students earlier this spring to define a "good" Catholic. "Did it mean going to Mass, or confession, or doing this and not that?" he said. "And their answer wasn't yes or no. It was more like, 'What a stupid question!' "

Yet even among those who eschewed some of the rules, the poll found a durable bond with Catholicism. The majority of 18- to 35-year-olds said:

There is "something special about being Catholic" (81 percent).

Their Catholic identity "connects" them with their families (86 percent).

It's important for younger generations of their families to "grow up to be Catholic" (91 percent).

They like the rituals, art, music (91 percent).

"They think of themselves as Catholic, regardless of whether they agree with church teachings," Loveland said. Still, their accelerating autonomy should concern church leaders, he added, for it "opens up the possibility of their breaking away."

In recent years, discontented voices of all ages have been heard over the media microphone, calling for changes ranging from women's ordination to the opening of the church's ledgers. But the angriest have been in response to the pedophilia scandals in the clergy. A survey for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops found that nearly 4,500 priests had been involved in more than 11,000 alleged cases of child sexual abuse since 1950.

Beneath the public outrage, though, is something bigger, more profound, and unconnected to the scandals, said David Gibson, a former Vatican Radio reporter who is now an author of books on Catholicism and a TV commentator.

"Americans felt the hierarchy had been reprimanding and remonstrating about their faithlessness and their dissenting and perceived shortcoming for decades," Gibson said. "There was this sense that they couldn't do anything right, that they weren't being listened to.

"The sex-abuse crisis became the way to give voice to all that frustration."

The dissatisfaction has been evolving since the 1960s out of a "minimalist" understanding of the faith, said Bishop Joseph Galante of the 488,000-member Camden Diocese.

Rooted in an 18th-century Protestant nation, the American Catholic Church spent its formative decades in an atmosphere of intense anti-"papist" bigotry. From hostile soil sprang an ironweed of an institution, one whose prelates kept the faithful just that - faithful - by maintaining what author Charles Morris termed a "prickly apartness" from mainstream culture well into the 20th century.

In 1934 in the Philadelphia Archdiocese, which had g ained a reputation for straight-and-narrow Catholicism, the famously severe Cardinal Dennis Dougherty banned members from movie theaters "under pain of mortal sin." (The ban has never been formally lifted.)

Everywhere, though, Catholic identity was reinforced with obligatory Sunday Mass, confession, and meatless Fridays.

"I don't know if [members] internalized why we did those things," Galante said.

That would prove a problem when, in 1966, Pope Paul VI relaxed the ban on eating meat on Fridays. Millions who believed such abstinence had been prescribed by God felt "hoodwinked," Galante said.

Unaware of the difference between church discipline - which is changeable - and doctrine, many Catholics began to suspect that other practices, such as Mass and confession, were "made up," he said, and "the whole pyramid fell down."

Like many in the clergy and the laity, Galante has ideas on how that pyramid might be rebuilt. They include better education of young Catholics on the "whys" of the faith, and a closing of the power gap between clergy and laity. They do not include a return to lock-step obedience.

"People aren't afraid of anything anymore. They're not afraid of hell... . Fear does not regulate behavior as it used to," he said.

"Until we get serious about... bringing people to a much better understanding of what it means to be Catholic, we're going to be spinning our wheels."

How Catholic life is thriving

Other recent surveys have painted an even more dramatically changed group portrait of young American Catholics than that in the Inquirer/Le Moyne/Zogby poll.

In a national study of Catholic attitudes commissioned by the independent weekly National Catholic Reporter and published last fall, researchers Dean Hoge, James Davidson and Mary Gautier found that among the 18- to 25-year-olds, only one in three planned to never leave the church. Just 15 percent said they attend Mass weekly.

Few priests are emerging from the younger generations. Many dioceses predict that their ranks of active priests could shrink by as much as three-quarters by 2025. Last month at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, Cardinal Justin Rigali ordained this year's Philadelphia graduates - a total of three new priests.

Rigali is not despairing of the future, however.

"Young people respond remarkably when introduced to traditional practices such as devotions to the Holy Eucharist and to Mary," he said on a CD that he recorded in response to The Inquirer's written questions.

He noted that the Philadelphia Archdiocese had received nearly 1,000 converts in the last year. "There are so many positive signs that the Catholic Church is vibrant and strong in the United States," he said. "So many people are living their faith with conviction and generosity."

Such optimism for American Catholicism is more likely to be heard outside the United States than within. Because, even for an institution built on absolutes, some things are relative.

The U.S. church looks robust to Catholic leaders in most other parts of world, and even to some critical eyes in the Vatican.

In Europe and South America, the church is struggling for relevance in nations it once defined. In parts of Africa and Asia, it is seeking to plant the cross on frontiers made inhospitable by governments and entrenched religions.

Archbishop John Foley, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications and a Philadelphia native, ran down a list of American Catholicism's strengths in an Inquirer interview: "The percentage of Mass attendance is much higher than in Europe; parish life is relatively vital; your fraternal organizations, like the Knights of Columbus, are flourishing."

He added, "You're building parish schools, which is remarkable."

Some sea-change trends that are worrisome to many Americans look like blessings when viewed through that international lens.

One is the towering immigrant wave. Nationwide, Latinos make up 42 percent of the Catholic population, with the highest concentrations in the South and Southwest. Were immigration to stay at its current pace, the number of Hispanic Catholics would go from 30 million to 70 million by mid-century, making them the majority in the U.S. church.

For an Anglo-centric institution with a priesthood that is just 4 percent Hispanic, the challenges are immense. Yet so is the payoff, said the Rev. Joseph Fessio, president of Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla., and a publisher of Benedict's books.

"We have immigration coming from South America - people who share our Western traditions," he said. Whatever happens in the faith's traditional base, they virtually guarantee church growth.

The Latino infusion, Fessio said, separates the fate of Catholicism in America from that of its ancestor across the Atlantic.

Immigration into Europe has been markedly Muslim - hardly a source of new Catholic life on a continent where the birthrates of its traditional ethnic stock are some of the world's lowest.

More so than anywhere else, the church there is in grave decline. Mass attendance, baptisms, confirmations and church marriages are dramatically down among Europe's 280 million Catholics, particularly the young "postmoderns" skeptical of institutions of nearly any kind. In polls, most describe themselves as "spiritual," but not religious.

In South America, home to 450 million Catholics, prelates such as Brazil's Cardinal Claudio Hummes look enviously at the United States. After 500 years of dominion, the Latin Catholic Church now finds itself struggling to hold the lead in a crowded field of faiths.

From a mountaintop in Rio de Janeiro, the statue of Cristo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer, still stretches giant concrete arms over the land. But Protestantism, chiefly Pentecostalism, has developed quite a reach of its own, drawing in millions of converts seeking a new religious fervor.

"In the United States, the church is a minority," Hummes said, predicting that Brazilian Catholicism will shrink to that state. Though it claims only about one-quarter of the U.S. population, "it is an important presence. Its voice is heard."

There are two prizes that not only Catholicism but all of Christianity has longed to claim: Africa and Asia.

For 400 years, missionaries measured conversions "like the body count in war," wrote the Rev. Peter Phan, a Georgetown University theologian who grew up Catholic in French-colonized Vietnam.

In Africa, priests baptized whole villages at once and then imposed Western dress, manners and religious architecture. Such efforts to graft Catholicism onto the native rootstock of ancient animist faiths often withered.

But with the collapse of colonialism and the new worldview of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, Catholic mission theology underwent a "Copernican revolution," Phan said. Instead of "church planting," the clergy came lightly, "bearing witness."

Such was Mother Teresa's savvy approach in India, said George Weigel, an American Catholic author and Pope John Paul II's biographer: "Embody the Gospel in service to the wretched. After a few hundred years, people will start asking questions."

The model of "servant church," bringing education and medicine, appears to be working in Africa. Its 140 million Catholics make up 12 percent of the church's global roll, up from 4 percent in 1950. Nigeria, for instance, has one of the fastest Catholic growth rates in the world.

Adding to the Vatican's delight, said Weigel, is that "they don't have a problem with obedience."

Yet Africa is no easy hunting ground for converts. Like much of the world today, it is a competitive marketplace of religions - but also a notoriously bloody one as Christianity and Islam, rooted there 1,000 years ago, vie for souls.

In Asia, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are so entrenched that Christianity is predicted to make only modest gains in the next half-century.

If there is any tantalizing opportunity for the church in Asia, however, it is China.

After nearly five decades of atheistic communism, most of China's 1.3 billion people profess no religious identity. The government allows five faiths to be publicly practiced, and Catholicism is one, claiming 4.5 million followers. But this church is not "Roman."

It is the "Patriotic" Catholic Church, controlled by Beijing. Its priests say Mass in Latin and are forbidden to condemn birth control or abortion. Some bishops have reportedly been forced to marry to prove loyalty to the state.

The arrangement has incensed the Vatican, which has supported an "underground" church thought to have about eight million members. Anyone caught worshipping at the secret in-home services risks a lengthy prison sentence.

Although it refuses to recognize the state church, "Rome has tried to accommodate the political realities," said Sister Janet Carroll, a former director of the U.S. Catholic China Bureau, at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

The Vatican has validated about 70 percent of the government bishops, who in turn have been allowed to acknowledge deference to the pope.

"We're very suspicious of one another just now," said a Vatican liaison to China who asked not to be identified because of the difficulty of diplomacy. "We've got no timetable. We're just waiting for them to say, 'Come, let's talk.' "

But should that happen, he added, the Roman Catholic Church will have to make serious adjustments to Asian culture, consisting of "more than replacing a bell with a gong."

Thomas C. Fox, author of the 2002 book Pentecost in Asia, described "the Western mind [as seeking] to separate, analyze, clarify," while the Asian mind "seeks wholeness" and prizes "silence and meditation."

"Catholicism in Asia," he wrote, "will become authentic only when it ceases to be Western."

'Able to look past it'

The hands that held Jack Gannone over the baptismal font at St. Eleanor's wore a gold wedding band and a silver Buddhist "Om" ring, symbolizing the unity of being.

His mother, Sara Benton, is an Episcopalian who has been practicing yoga meditation since graduate school. At first, "it was purely a physical exercise," said the 38-year-old social worker. "But when I practiced it very regularly, I found myself feeling more empathic and grounded."

Benton already has started Jack on "baby yoga," stretching his arms and legs into the positions she will teach him as he grows older.

"Some people say it can detract from religion," she noted. "I'd say it can enhance it. Yoga in its purest form is a way to connect to the world around you."

Although she stays Episcopalian "because that's how I was raised," Benton said, she is not a regular churchgoer. So baptizing Jack a Catholic, like his father, was "the easy choice."

John Gannone, 37, a mailing-equipment salesman, admits to being casual about Sunday Mass attendance. But "I do believe Jesus died for our sins," he explained as his little boy napped in their Skippack, Montgomery County, home. "I want that to be a part of Jack's life."

Gannone's own commitment to Catholicism has faced some challenges. His mother was devout, he said, but his father had a "pretty negative attitude toward organized religion."

He also saw his history teacher at Bishop McDevitt High School, the Rev. Edward DePaoli, "taken out in handcuffs, with his coat over his head" in 1985. The priest was later convicted of receiving child pornography by mail.

"I was able to look past it," Gannone said. "In church, you're with the man upstairs. The priest just delivers the message."

Jack is due to start kindergarten at St. Eleanor's parish school in 2010, and his father hopes he will go on to Catholic high school and college.

"It would be nice if he stayed Catholic," Gannone said, but added, "I'm not going to disown him if he doesn't."

Author and commentator David Gibson, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, said he understands why those born into the faith - so-called cultural Catholics - might rebel.

"Discovering you've been baptized Catholic is like discovering you don't get to choose your parents," he said. "So we end up struggling with them forever." Remaining Catholic "means living with the imperfections of the church, it means living with the tension."

Benedict "wants people to be Catholic because they believe in Christ, not because it's the national religion or something your parents decided," Gibson said. "I think cultural Catholicism will continue to hold people, but it's funny: If you've got the church asking them to make a personal choice for the faith, will more fall away?"

Dean Hoge, a leading scholar of American Catholicism, has no answer for that. However, he is reasonably sure of one thing.

"We're going to have a different laity 10, 20, 40 years out," said Hoge, a sociology professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington. "They'll be thinking for themselves, deciding if they believe what the church believes.

"It won't be all good," he said, "or all bad."