The Pope, the leader of the Catholic Church, shocked the world this past week by announcing his impending resignation. Not even his closest friends and advisors seemed to know this was coming. Claiming he would not be able to physically or mentally do the enormous job he had been tasked with anymore, he did what no other pope had done for 600 years – step aside when his time had come.
People all over the world admired Pope John Paul II, the previous pope, but it was painful to watch as he developed Parkinson’s disease and withered away. Maybe Pope Benedict was awakened by that memory and wanted to give the Church a chance to ease from one leader to another.
What will this new pope need to do during his reign? I would think many in America would say he should try to find a way to increase attendance and recover the faith that seems to be lacking.
I attend St. Aidan’s in Ellendale, a parish that is dying a slow death. Our attendance at a typical mass hovers between 30-40 people, and many of them are older members of the community. People are aware enough to recognize what is happening, but have no solution to halt this decline.
I’ve given a lot of thought to this and wondered and discussed what is happening with many people of varying levels of faith. I think I’ve finally figured out the problem: people aren’t afraid of God anymore.
Growing up, I remember a literal fear of God put into us by my parents. God was this amazing entity that had full power over us and determined whether we’d go to Heaven, where all our dreams would come true, or head to Hell, where we’d burn in eternal damnation.
To a youngster growing up in any era pre-1990s, that was a pretty amazing image. We never missed church growing up. If we were snowed in or too sick to go, we watched a televised service.
Think about the last 20 years. What do kids have to fear? If you think about it, God is a bit like a super hero to a young child. He has power, kids picture Him as living in the clouds, and He’s got these cool angels at his side.
Now you can watch TV or go to the movies or play video games with characters that encompass all that – and it looks so real! Kids have never seen this God fellow, but they’ve watched the Avengers kick Loki’s butt.
I love movies and TV shows that allow me to escape from reality, but I really think kids today have a hard time discerning reality from fantasy, and so God doesn’t seem so special anymore.
There are certainly other reasons for lower church attendance, but this might be one that has gone without much mention.
So what’s to be done? I know hard-line fundamentalists will disagree with me, but the Church needs to enter the 21st century.
Church is not exciting to kids. In our ADHD world, attention spans are waning, yet churches plod along with rote memorization and 15-minute sermons. If I have kids memorize things in my class, they will get nothing out of it. If I lecture for 15 minutes, I’ve lost them before I hit the five-minute mark.
I don’t know if you can bring that fear of God back to our youth, but it might be possible to return the respect they should have for Him. It would take a lot of change to a tradition-rich liturgy, but without change, it’s easy to see the Church continuing to shrink.
It’s hard to change. But the Church has done it before. The Old Testament God is an angry and vengeful God, but by the New Testament, He’s kind and benevolent, bestowing mercy on His followers. Maybe it’s time to change again and recognize what it will take to keep the Church vibrant in a world with ever-increasing pulls at attention. A new, liberal pope would go a long way to achieving that and making the Church more relevant again. I pray that can happen, one way or another.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is mercurial, which means unpredictably changeable, as in, “The new leader was mercurial, and the other members of the group never knew when he might change his mind.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!