Clouded Future

The Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. is destined to undergo several more years of turmoil, alienation and dissent.

So predicts the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, a sociologist on the staff of the National Opinion Research Center. Father Greeley is one of the shrewdest observers of U.S. Catholic life. A book which he coauthored, The Education of Cat olic Americans (1966), is the most comprehensive study of the nation's parochial-school system. In Overview, a monthly newsletter published by the St. Thomas More Association of Chicago, he now argues that six "almost irreversible" trends will dominate American Catholicism during the next decade:

1) Priests and nuns will abandon their vocations in increasing numbers. "It has now become quite easy to leave the religious life, in the sense that there are relatively few social sanctions imposed on those who depart; on the contrary, of ten they persuade themselves that they are heroes."

2) New recruits to the priesthood and religious orders of nuns "will continue to decline. By 1978 we may have less than half the number of priests and religious we have at present."

3) Many laymen and priests, particularly those who have already registered strong objections to the Pope's birth control encyclical, "will no longer accept the Church as an authoritative teacher on matters sexual. The hard truth is that most people have made up their minds, and their minds say that the Pope and the bishops do not know what they are talking about."

4) Tension between priests and bishops will also grow. Greeley believes that "the present very moderate and sensible leadership of the priest organizations will be replaced by a much more radical leadership and that confrontations between bishops and clergy will be more frequent and more severe. In many parts of the country the bishops will find themselves isolated from their priests and people."

5) Although the Catholic educational system is "at least as popular as it ever was with rank-and-file Catholics, the schools are in deep trouble because of the internal failures of morale. In practice, most of the brave talk about reorganization and reappraisal merely means closing down some schools."

6) Because of declining interest in the traditional church, "many of the auxiliary institutions of American Catholicism will suffer. Diocesan papers, publishing houses, book stores, magazines, etc., will be hard hit, and many will disappear from the scene."

Greeley foresees no mass defection of Catholics in the next decade, but he concludes that the longer-range picture for the organized church is clouded at best. "With the elite siphoned off into the underground, with a declining clergy and vanishing institutions, with no respect for the teaching of the leadership, with the hierarchy and people isolated from one another, American Catholicism by the end of the 1970s might well have begun the journey down the long road previously traveled by the Church in France, Italy and other European countries."

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