Meet the new Church, same (sort of) as the old Church

Enlarge Image

The Future Church

How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church

By John L. Allen Jr.

Random House, 480 pages, $30

If one could take a Roman Catholic from 100 years ago and put him down in the middle of a 21st-century Catholic church, he would almost certainly wonder where on Earth -- perhaps even where in hell -- he was.

Very little would be familiar to him. The Mass would no longer be said or sung in Latin, but rather in the vernacular, and not a particularly elegant version of the vernacular at that.

He would see women assisting at the Mass, hear guitars playing popular, sappy sacred music that would make William Booth ("Why should the Devil have all the good songs?") weep in despair.

And when he went up to receive communion, he would have been shocked, scandalized, to have the priest put the Host in his hands, rather on his tongue. Back in the day, that would have been sacrilege. What strange world had he entered?

If he were to stay around for a while, he would learn that, as a Catholic, he was really still at home. All the changes that he witnessed were cosmetic, designed to make the trappings of Catholicism more appealing -- more "open," as the watchword had it -- for liberal Catholics being appeased by liberal priests and even liberal Popes.

His church in its essence, however, remained the same, unchanged and unchanging in its dogma but now deeply divided between liberals and conservatives in its form.

In The Future Church, Frank Allen, a reporter and columnist for the American National Catholic Reporter, attempts to take contemporary Catholics 100 years into the future to imagine what their church will look like then.

Allen is clearly a liberal Catholic, but there is no evangelizing, no judging here. The Future Church is a thoughtful, well-argued, well-written book that may actually be of more use to conservative Catholics than to liberals in helping them clarify their thoughts.

He posits 10 trends that may change the face of the church.

They are -- in no particular order, he says -- 1) A World Church; 2) Evangelical Catholicism; 3) Islam; 4) The New Demography; 5) Expanding Lay Roles; 6) The Biotech Revolution; 7) Globalization; 8) Ecology; 9) Multipolarization; 10) Pentecostalism.

It is interesting that all of these changes are mostly cosmetic, pastoral or political in nature. Two-thirds of the world's Catholics now live in Africa, Asia or Latin America, and 100 years from now, one can imagine that most of the clergy will be drawn from them -- curiously, they tend to be far more conservative than their North American and European brethren.

One might find women not just assisting at Mass but performing it, since the objection to female priests seems to be one more of tradition than dogma. As society ages, so will the bulk of church membership and the responsibilities of caring for them will change.

And it is clear that at least since John Paul II and now under Benedict XVI, the church intends to be more politically active.

Two of the most intriguing chapters of Allen's book deal with the threats -- or more politely -- the challenges posed to Catholicism by Islam and Pentecostalism; Islam because, like the Catholic church, it claims ownership of the truth, and the Pentecostals because of their extraordinary success in converting people in Catholic Third World countries.

The Pentecostal challenge, which is peaceful and purely theological, is being answered by the Catholic Charismatic movement, but how Catholicism and Islam can be reconciled may well take 100 years to figure out.

The face of the church then may well be, as Allen suggests, much different, but in its essence the Catholic church is unchanged and unchanging because, as Chesterton said, it believes that what was true at 10 in the morning must still be true at 2 in the afternoon.

Free Press editorial board member Tom Oleson is a curmudgeonly Catholic.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 26, 2009 H8