… that importing Latin American congregants instead of catechizing and evangelizing at home would blow up in American bishops’ faces?
Peter’s Pence, the annual collection advertised by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as raising money for the charitable works of the pope, is the subject of a class-action lawsuit after the Wall Street Journal reported that only 10% of money raised actually went to help the poor (the rest ending up in the hemorrhaging Vatican general fund).
Needless to say, people are sitting on their wallets when asked to give by the bishops. It’s the only avenue laity have to give them a vote of “no confidence.”
It seems the U.S. bishops are the only people in America who aren’t benefiting from the booming Trump economy. Gallup has released a series of poll findings this week which indicate people are feeling pretty good about the country and their own financial affairs. About 61% of people think they are better off than when President Trump was elected three years ago (a higher number than any third-year president in living memory). About 69% expect their financial situation to improve over the next year (a number only matched in the go-go late 1990s). Consumer confidence is reported at levels not seen in several decades.
People ought to feel good about their financial affairs. The total return on the stock market is up nearly 65% since Trump’s election, which is good news for the majority of families which have 401(k)s, IRAs, and 529s. Wages are finally growing smartly above inflation again, and faster for those at the bottom of the income ladder. Inflation is well within Federal Reserve safety limits. Housing prices are up almost everywhere. You can get a 30-year mortgage with just over a 3% interest rate, the same rate at which you can get a loan for a brand new family car.
Unemployment is at or near record lows by any measurement or for any subgroup of Americans. There are more jobs than there are people seeking work. Labor force participation is up, as millions of discouraged potential workers come off the sidelines and back onto the job force. Anyone who wants a job can easily get one and is in a strong bargaining position to demand a solid salary and benefits package.
Counter-point: About a third of the jobs Trump created went to immigrants, who now make up a little more than 17% of the US work force. Latin Americans account for the lion’s share of immigration to the US. And as I’ve discussed before, The USCCB has had an active hand in facilitating that immigration.
More on that in a moment.
If people have it so good, and Catholics are presumably well represented in these boom times, why are the bishops not only seeing their donations fail to keep pace with the rising tide but actually going down?
The answer is two-fold. First, lay Catholics are fed up with bishops who aren’t listening to our demands to get to the bottom of the culture of sex abuse cover-up and financial corruption that the bishops themselves have spent decades creating. Second, the bishops are so isolated from the rest of us that we have no other way to make our voice heard other than to close our checkbooks.
Latin America is not the place is was in 1920. American adults are not stuck in 1950, and American youth are not frozen in 1970. Yet the USCCB’s policies and outlook are predicated on these misperceptions.
That said, only about a quarter of American Catholics say they’ve reduced donations to the Church because of the clergy sex abuse crisis. That’s clearly a factor, but backlash against the gay priest problem alone doesn’t account for the 54% fundraising drop reported by the Examiner.
The American hierarchy’s current financial woes are the rotten fruit of seeds planted decades ago. Because of these policies, a majority of US Catholics aged 39 and below are Hispanic. Instead of doing the legwork to sustain and increase their native-born flocks, American bishops chased after quick bucks from already Catholic Latin American immigrants.
What the USCCB didn’t count on was the 40% apostasy rate, which affects immigrant populations just as surely as it affects the native stock. A couple freshly arrived from El Salvador might attend Mass every week, but their kids will fall away in college all the same.
The soil may not be magic, but the culture is definitely toxic to faith. When catechesis and outreach amount to nil, the Death Cult default fills the void.
If the bishops want to turn this around, they have to stop acting like nervous, embattled CEOs and start acting like shepherds. Pursue justice swiftly against those who have committed sexual abuse and financial crimes, or those who hid the truth about that behavior — no more excuses, no more delays, and no more bishops covering for other bishops.
I’ll second that sentiment and add, stop taking money from the feds to aid and abet the third-world invasion of America.
To paraphrase St. John XXIII, a good American bishop must first be a good American. Selling your fellow countrymen’s culture and future for thirty pieces of silver does not a good American make.