Angelus News | September 23, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 19

Russell Shaw is a Catholic author and the
former information director of the NCCB/
USCC and the Knights of Columbus.
He couldn’t be more right. Many
lay Catholics aren’t ready for the role
abruptly being thrust on them by the
Church’s current movement toward
synodality. Without serious remedial
action, it’s possible that — as seems
already to have happened in Germany
— synodality will fall prey to a minority
eager to manipulate the process on
behalf of their agenda.
Third, sketching elements of a master
plan for allocating institutional and
human resources in the new era of
closures and contraction in which the
Catholic Church, like other churches
and religious groups, now finds itself.
Over the past half-century, the bishops’
conference has issued innumerable
statements about all manner of
political and social issues, but it has yet
to address the crisis now confronting
the Church. Indeed, it was almost a
novelty for the bishops two years ago to
launch a “Eucharistic Revival” project
to address the decline in faith in and
appreciation for the Blessed Sacrament
(a problem that polling had already
identified a full 30 years earlier).
Now American Catholicism is in a
multidimensional crisis that includes
steep declines in priests, students in
Catholic schools and religious education,
couples entering Catholic
marriages, and infant baptisms, the
slow-motion disappearance of most
women’s religious communities, and
much else besides. Cold comfort
indeed that non-Catholic churches in
America face similar issues.
I don’t expect the USCCB to wave a
magic wand and solve these problems.
For canonical reasons, many can only
be addressed at the diocesan level. But
the episcopal conference has a role to
play in information sharing, planning,
and coordination. November would be
a good time to start.
It was 2020, and the world suddenly
lost its bustle. Isolated from the
workplace and other social contact,
we were left with ourselves, and none
of our distractions seemed adequate to
the task of amusing us. We were ready
to learn how to think.
It was 2020, and the world suddenly
lost its bustle. Isolated from the
workplace and other social contact,
we were left with ourselves, and none
of our distractions seemed adequate to
the task of amusing us. We were ready
to learn how to think.
Mike Aquilina is a contributing
editor to Angelus and author of many
books, most recently “Friendship and
the Fathers: How the Early Church
Evangelized” (Emmaus Road Publishing,
$22.95).
September 23, 2022 • ANGELUS • 25