Why Are Catholics Leaving the Faith?

by Fr. Bill Peckman

I have seen more than a few articles as of late as to why our last three generations have
been leaving the Catholic faith en masse.

There are many cognizant points.

As a pastor of 22 years, a member of one of those generations that departed, and a

person who did leave as young man into agnosticism, I have my own theories based on
my own experiences and what I have seen and read from others.

The first culprit is that we forgot the transcendent.

Check that…we actively excoriated it from our identity. This happened in several ways.
First, we tamed God. We made Him into our image. We turned him into a kindly and
ineffectual therapist whose chief job is to enable our every behavior and pat us on the
back for rebelling against Him.

With such a tamed God, there was no need to focus on Him. The concept of personal
sin went away and became social sin or societal sin. With this move, confession went to
the wayside and was replaced with a morphed view of social justice.

This gave us the liberty to complain about corporate sin and smugly distance ourselves
from it. The tamed God was always on our side to the point where His being around at
all was little more than a security blanket; something to be outgrown.

But God was not the only thing we tamed. We tame the devil and the demonic.

They became fodder for occult parlor games, slasher films, and as a poster boy for
secular humanism. When we tamed him, there was no need to be any more afraid of
him that we are of carnival rides.

Taming God and the devil lead us to largely dismiss them.

Along with God and the devil went their corresponding courts: The Blessed Mother, the
saints, the rosary and rest of the devotional life was dropped as was any sense of the
demonic and sacramentals used to fight them.

Spiritual warfare was dismissed and replaced with ‘be nice.’

Dismissing God’s transcendence made it easy. We simply snapped our intellectual

fingers and poofed them out of existence. In reality, what we actually did is let down our
guard, dropped our armaments, and dismissed our help. We left generations open to
being run over with very little resistance.
We dismissed the transcendent in two ways: liturgy and education.
In liturgy, the focus of Mass went from God to humanity. We came to affirm ourselves
and not worship God. We went for what was comfortable and unchallenging.
In fact, things were so unchallenging that Mass itself became a dreary exercise in self-
affirmation. If you want to lose people, especially men, then this is the correct route to
take.

The more we experimented with the Mass, changed the Mass, gutted the challenge
from preaching into therapeutic moralism, filled it with songs about us, the more and
more people wandered out.

Pair this now with the emptying of the transcendent in education.

Catholic identity was not only seen as old fashioned, but as detrimental to education.
The Land o’ Lakes declaration shooed Catholic identity away as if it were a pesky fly.
This seeped into the catechetical materials used on ages of children.

We shifted away from a transcendent God who has expectations of us as His people to
a doddering old fool of a God who enabled our whims because He had no real
preference to morality.

Morality became subjective.

Want to use birth control? Cool. Want to cohabitate? No problem! Want to reduce you
body to carnal playground to be used as a toy? Sure! The list goes on and on.

Without the transcendent, religion is reduced to “feeling good.”

Sure enough, Catholic priests and nuns started dabbling in eastern religions and
eastern mysticism. They encouraged others to do the same. Why? Because the human
heart needs a sense of transcendence.

If we take it from God, we will have to appropriate it for ourselves. We made God
irrelevant in that pursuit. This was the seedbed from which the popular ‘spiritual but not
religious ‘ mantra used by the ‘nones’ came.

For three generations, we made God irrelevant.

This seeped into our homes. This is where things became fatal. The first generation
raised on this watered-down nonsense became parents who learned well the lessons
taught. If happiness was already guaranteed from God without our effort, then we could
focus on happiness in the world.

After a few generations, the eternal happiness was overwhelmed by the temporal.
The primary way religion was taught was by absence. Children, like their parents,
became comfortable with pursuing the temporal exclusively.

Mass, prayer, and religious formation became theological road kill on the highway to
hell. However, as I said before, the heart need the transcendent.

So, what happens?

The temporal starts to take on a transcendent quality. The pursuit of wealth, pleasure,
power, and honor became the focus. The temporal got treated with the devotion once
given to the transcendent, and the transcendent got treated with the laissez faire
attitude of the temporal.

Why is it parents will consistently choose sports, dance, leisure, and multitude of
things to worship and religious formation?

That was what they were taught to do! We made God irrelevant and these things filled
that gap. It is why parents get hostile when approached with this: it is like we changed
the rules on them.

Catholic schools then became reduced to private schools with statuary. We became
comfortable with that. Catholic identity was no more important in the parish school than
it was in the university.

Land O Lakes weaseled its way down to the elementary level. Religion classes were
seen as the most optional of the curriculum, prayer as entirely to be sacrificed for more
important endeavors, and Mass as bothersome to the more important aspects of the
schedule.

Religion itself was taught as if morality and faith were subject to personal likes and
dislikes. The students see this, and when this is paired with parents already readily
sacrificing Sunday Mass and other Church related things, we almost beg them to drop
away.

In losing our transcendence, we also lost our relevance. No wonder we have a shortage
of priests! Who wants to give their life, not marry, and serve in such a faith?
Again, though, the human heart needs transcendence.
If we truly want to get our lost generations back, it will be by reversing this trend towards
the temporal as being the be all/end all of our lives. This will have to happen in our
liturgy and education first.

We need to remember that without a transcendent God, the Church is irrelevant!

The world very much believes this and for too long we have acted as if they were
correct. We must reclaim our birthright by remembering who our God is and what He
expects.

This will be a long road. It will be a shock to the system. It starts with us admitting we
messed up. We have to own our mistakes, do an appropriate mea culpa, and reverse
course. We must understand that in trying to tame God and the devil, we left ourselves
open for ruin.

Can there be any wonder that we have experienced the depravity in and outside of the
Church in the last century?

The sexual scandals are a symptom of the disease, but not the disease itself. Sexual
scandals can only grow in swampish landscape of a loss of transcendence (how can
you molest children and seminarians and cover it up and still believe in a
transcendent God?).

To drain this swamp takes more than protocols to deal with where the swamp
water is; you have to see where the water is coming from and stem the source.

Our Masses, families, parishes, and schools must truly reflect reality.

There most definitely is a transcendent God. He does have expectations of us. While
He does indeed love us uniquely, we too must love Him as well. The road to relevance,
a road we lost decades ago, can only be regained by restoring the transcendent.

Our foray into a sappy Catholic human-centered fraternal order has given us the identity
of a cheap greeting card. We can and must remember who we really are called to be.