Do Women Have a Future in the Catholic Church? Social jusrice Orgs Petition Bishops This Week

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BY PATRICIA MILLER JUNE 14, 2016

No denomination has suffered as acutely as the Roman Catholic Church from the changes remaking American Christianity, from a rise in unaffiliated individuals (particularly millennials) to an alarming decline in women’s church attendance.

Now the decline in millennial women’s attendance and participation in the church has become so acute that progressive Catholic leaders are raising alarm about a “lost generation” of Catholic women—and potentially their children as well–if the church doesn’t radically change the way it relates to women.

As sociologist Patricia Wittberg wrote in America Magazine about 2008 data that indicated a first-ever decline in religiosity among young Catholic women as compared to men:

Both genders of millennial and Gen X Catholics are much less devout and much less orthodox than their elders, and many practice their religion infrequently if at all. But the decline is steeper among women. Millennial Catholic women are slightly more likely than Catholic men their age to say that they never attend Mass (the first generation of American Catholic women for whom this is so), and the women are significantly more likely to hold heterodox positions on whether the pope is infallible and whether homosexual activity is always wrong. None of the millennial Catholic women in the survey expressed complete confidence in churches and religious organizations.

And as I noted recently in RD, the trend of women leaving the church only accelerated through 2012.

http://religiondispatches.org/do-women-have-a-future-in-the-catholic-church-social-justice-orgs-petition-bishops-this-week/

https://action.groundswell-mvmt.org/petitions/a-declaration-for-our-daughters

http://achurchforourdaughters.org/

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1. Unfortunately the church seems to jam their heads in the sand as SOP.

Unfortunately the church seems to jam their heads in the sand as SOP when confronted with new and changing things in the world or when faced with any problems. And that's with just about everything that's happened over the past several hundred years. All the way back to the reformation at the very least and continuing on from there. It seems to me that so many of the problems, especially in recent times with the abuse, the number of vocations dwindling, parishes closing, and now women not attending church as much can be traced back to a church leadership that is unwilling to confront problems with real solutions as they occur and only want to close the barn door after the cows have gotten out, taken the family car on a joyride, and smashed into a couple police cars before crashing into the local newspaper offices. Instead of fixing problems when they occur or trying to prevent them before hand, the church's track record has been one of allowing problems to fester until they get out of hand.

Even with Francis in charge now I don't know that I'd expect much to change. He's making some minor adjustments to the church, but really I don't think it's far enough. I think he wants to do more but is being limited by forces in the church that think anyone to the left of Benedict is a socialist out to destroy the church. I know Francis has demoted some of the bigger loudmouths - such as Burke - but there are still a lot of people in the church leadership who hold positions of authority because Benedict liked their conservative viewpoints and not because of actual leadership ability. The talk of allowing women to serve as deacons would be a good first step that I hope he follows through on, but I wouldn't hold my breath.