byKimberley Heatherington, OSV News
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(OSV News) -- It was an era of required isolation and paralyzing fear -- fear of the unknown, fear of what might happen next and even fear of each other.
According to a Feb. 12 poll from the Pew Research Center, nearly three-quarters of American adults (72%) say COVID-19 did more to drive the country apart than bring it together.
But for a Catholic Church willing to learn, the harsh instruction of the coronavirus pandemic -- which began five years ago this March -- holds many potential lessons about the meaning of mission, community and resilience.
"If you think about the church pre-COVID in the United States, at least, we were stuck in many places; institutionally stuck," said Marcel LeJeune, president and founder of Catholic Missionary Disciples -- a Catholic apostolate coaching and equipping Catholic leaders to "make disciple-makers who make disciple-makers." He also is the author of "The Contagious Catholic: The Art of Practical Evangelization" (Ascension Press).
"Mission-driven institutions were abnormal," LeJeune reflected. "A lot of our leaders were kind of just going along to get along, and we had a culture -- like everything in Catholicism in the United States -- that was, 'Hey, just don't shake things up. The status quo is OK.'"
That status quo, said LeJeune, was anything but OK for the Catholic Church -- because "the numbers told us we were in fast decline. And then COVID hits, and the institution shuts down -- and the decline speeded up. And once the churches opened back up, post-COVID, we saw a big drop off a cliff."
Mass attendance -- a Gallup poll found in May 2023 -- dropped seven points among Catholics, from 37% in 2020 to 30%.
"I think that a lot of people would say, in some sense, it sped up the church another 10 years -- in the course of a year -- to see what the future was like," LeJeune told OSV News.
"So it was an opportunity -- because more than anything, it was a chance for us to reassess, 'What's actually happening in our churches and our institutions at the diocesan level, the Catholic schools and parishes, and what can we do about it?'"
Finding an answer, LeJeune noted, involved asking the right questions of a society pulled apart at the seams by prolonged sickness.
"In the post-COVID church -- and if we look at the wider culture -- what's the great human need? It's to have unity right now. We're so lonely. People don't understand what friendship and community and these things look like," he said.
"So for the Catholic Church to say, 'Hey, you can come here and belong to a community of people who are like-minded and who are running for Jesus Christ, trying to live a virtuous life, and want to meet with Catholics, and go for sainthood' -- that's the opportunity for us as a church. And I think in some ways you're starting to see signs now, five years past, that it's actually happening."
Still, attracting new Catholics -- and keeping them -- remains an issue.
"There's some really good news on the horizon for us, as the Catholic Church -- there's fruit popping all up across the country in terms of new life, and ministries and parishes," shared Julianne Stanz, who is director of outreach for evangelization and discipleship at Loyola Press and has been a consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Catechesis and Evangelization.
"And I see that every day. I truly, honestly do," she told OSV News. "But there is also the harsh reality of the new statistics."
As OSV News reported, a multiyear decline of Christianity in the U.S. has possibly tapered off, according to a new survey released March 4 by the Pew Research Center. However, the survey also found the Catholic Church is experiencing the greatest comparative national net losses of believers.
Just 20% of Americans now identify as Catholics, and only about three in 10 U.S. Catholics (29%) say they attend Mass weekly or more often.
While Mass attendance basically has -- according to a Feb. 5 blog post from Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate -- returned to pre-pandemic levels, the Pew data indicates that for every one person received into the Catholic Church, another 8.4 leave, exiting altogether or entering another denomination.
The number is higher than Pew's 2014 results, when 6.5 Catholics left the faith for every person who entered.
"The reality of people not coming back meant that we had to re-look at our communities and our parishes -- and really look at them as new communities after all of that," emphasized Stanz.
"I think part of the learning for us as a church has been that we can be nimble, creative, and flexible, especially under pressure. Part of the learning, though," she added, "is also that we do like routine and predictability -- so when those restrictions went away, unfortunately, a lot of the creative impulses we had adopted were jettisoned in favor of going back to a more maintenance-driven parish culture."
Father Ryan Connors -- rector of Our Lady of Providence Seminary in the Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island -- agreed.
"The first thing we learned -- or we saw -- was the church's desire to be close to people in creative ways; to bring the sacraments to people," said Father Connors, who during COVID was a professor of moral theology at St. John's Seminary in the Archdiocese of Boston.
"I'm thinking of outdoor Masses, and outdoor confessions, and groups of priests who were quarantined in order to bring the anointing of the sick into hospitals or nursing homes that had closed."
While some of the most stringent COVID restrictions were in effect, Father Connors was among those deputized by Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley, then Boston's archbishop, to visit the dying, a ministry the priest calls a "privilege."
"The church always needs to find creative ways to continue the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments," Father Connors said.
"If something like that where to happen again, we need to think more deeply about how to help people to pray and worship God, even when there may be a period of time -- hopefully as short as possible -- public Mass is not available; how to make it through helping people to pray outside of a liturgical context."
Father Connors also noted the constraints of virtual worship and community.
"I think we've learned the usefulness -- but also the limits -- of online expressions of faith," he said. "It's a good thing to keep people connected, but it obviously has significant limitations. It's not as though we can just move the whole operation online and think everything's going to be fine."
Stanz witnessed fear, frustration, and floundering -- struggling -- in parishes, "characterized by a search for a new path forward. What should we do? Who should the church be? How should we function? How should we move more deeply into the mission that we're called to?"
An answer, she said, lies in clear-eyed ministry assessment and consistent communication.
"Look at what you're doing as a parish. ... I think it's really important to have a clear goal -- a mission and a vision in mind -- but also to ask yourself if all of our ministries in our parishes point to Jesus and to the Gospel, or they don't," Stanz advised.
"And that's a difficult question for parishes sometimes to answer because we want to prioritize everything, which means that unfortunately no pruning happens -- and when no pruning happens, mission creep creeps in, and there's duplicative work, and eventually people get tired and burnt out."
It is, said LeJeune, a missional versus management model -- a focus on evangelization, versus simply maintaining structures and institutions.
"We're starting to see renewal happening at the grassroots level," he said, "where more and more priests and more and more bishops are saying, 'We need a return to mission; to being people who are helping others come to know, and love, and follow Jesus Christ -- and then going out and finding others that can do the same thing.'"
"I think that there are lessons that we've learned," affirmed Stanz. "What are the priorities for us; what can be jettisoned; and what can be most essential?"
One obvious and indispensable component remains.
"The Gospel," Stanz said, "is portable; shareable; adaptable. It's been gossiped from village to village for 2,000 years. And so the conditions around us may change, but the Gospel itself can always be brought to life in any situation -- and in any circumstance."
- - - Kimberley Heatherington writes for OSV News from Virginia.