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In Los Angeles last June, a young parish priest called for the removal of his archbishop—criticizing "the church of silence" autocratically ruled by James Francis Cardinal Mclntyre—and got strong support from a few Catholic lay organizations. The Catholic monthly Jubilee has published dozens of letters by priests and laymen asking for a re-examination of the church's stand on birth control. Nuns and priests are no longer strangers to civil rights picket lines. With the approval of Oklahoma's bishop, two Catholic parishes have joined Tulsa's previously all-Protestant Council of Churches. A liturgically reforming priest in Detroit says, with only a touch of hyperbole: "Just walking in off the street, you couldn't tell the difference between our Mass here and a Protestant service."
In large measure, the American Catholic renewal can be credited to spiritual fallout from the Vatican Council and the church-wide modernization unleashed by Pope John. Signs of change, in the case of the American Catholic church, are also signs of maturation.
Until 1908, the U.S. was in Vatican eyes still technically a mission land, and even after that, to many Protestants, Catholicism remained a second-class faith for third-class citizens—the Irish, Polish, German, Hungarian and Italian immigrants who brought their religion with them in the steerage. Now Roman Catholicism has become by far the nation's largest and richest Christian denomination. The latest edition of the Official Catholic Directory says that there are 44.8 million Roman Catholics in the U.S. Actually, there may be 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 more than that, for, as one bishop points out, the directory's figures come from parish priests who underestimate the size of their flocks to keep diocesan assessments low.
The nation's 244 prelates can summon the services of 57,000 priests and 180,000 sisters. Although the church suffers more dropouts than it likes to admit (largely among Italians and Latin Americans, and among Catholics who marry outside the faith), and the number of converts is declining, the losses are more than made up by the more than 1,000,000 babies baptized as Catholics every year. According to Chicago's Priest-Sociologist Andrew Greeley, "the religious practice of American Catholics is far and away the best of any industrial nation in the world." One survey has indicated that 72% of U.S. Catholics go to Mass every Sunday, as canon law requires them to; 45% receive Communion at least once a month, and 66% go to confession at least twice a year.
Renewal Elite. The truest sign of American Catholic maturity is the development and vociferous presence of something that has been rather grandly called "the renewal elite." It includes bishops, priests, seminarians and sisters, but its driving force is a young, college-trained laity that accepts the church's essential mysteries and matters of faith while questioning the authoritarian way moral theologians reduce these dogmas to terms of practical behavior. As one California Jesuit puts it, "The catechism answers don't satisfy any more —thank God."