The U.S. Catholic Church's Internal Self-evaluation

In October 2021, Pope Francis asked the worldwide membership of the Catholic Church to reflect on the church, its mission, and their membership.  As part of a two-year "Synod of Synodality" (you can see the Vatican's web site for the Synod here), leaders of local congregations (parishes) and local collections of congregations (dioceses) were to engage in dialogues with their members to gather information about their members' experiences and perspectives.  In the U.S., the local reports from this process were then to be sent to the national U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who would then create a summary for Catholicism as a whole in the U.S.  This summary -- called the National Synthesis -- was completed and sent to the Vatican in August 2022 and can be found here in pdf format.

This document provides an excellent look at the key issues and concerns of American Catholics who remain the largest religious denomination in the U.S.  So this study is worth a look.  It intends to reflect contributions from about 700,000 persons, so this was a large collective effort.

Several key issues are identified in the report as being of extreme importance to the study participants, and I will mention just a few of them.

The first issue mentioned is the sexual abuse within the Church.  The report states: "The sin and crime of sexual abuse has eroded not only trust in the hierarchy and the moral integrity of the Church, but also created a culture of fear that keeps people from entering into relationship with one another and thus from experiencing the sense of belonging and connections for which they yearn" (p. 5).

Another issue was "to be a more welcoming Church where all members of the People of God can find accompaniment on the journey. ...  People want the Church to be a home for the wounded and broken, not an institution for the perfect" (p. 7).  LGTBQ+, divorced, and those with special needs (e.g., deaf) members were identified as particularly in need of this welcoming, and there was a desire for women to have more leadership roles.

A third issue, called "co-responsibility" in the report (p. 11), is to find a better balance of the religious work between the clergy (the appointed religious leaders) and the laity (the member volunteers).  There was an expression that the laity can do more than they have been doing.

Yet other issues are mentioned so you can see the report for more details.  Of course, this report reflects the concerns of American Catholics who participated, and the concerns of Catholics in other countries can and will differ.  Nonetheless, a lesson for our class is that religious groups -- even ones as old and established as the Catholic Church -- must continue to adapt and innovate when confronting changing circumstances and challenges.  Only by doing this can they keep up in an ever changing religious marketplace.

Burkinis in the Public Swimming Pool

In June of this year, an administrative court in France upheld a ruling that women are not allowed to wear burkini swimwear in public swimming pools in the city of Grenoble.  The burkini is a head-to-ankle swimsuit that covers the woman's entire body except for her face.  Responding to vocal locals, city leaders had previously determined the burkinis would be allowed, but then a higher-ranking government official (the prefect) stopped this decision.  The administrative court upheld the prefect's decision that burkinis not be allowed.

See this article.  The primary direct effect of this ruling is that many Muslim women will no longer be swimming in the pool because they would only swim there if they could wear burkinis.

Some other French cities do allow burkinis in their public pools, so it might seem strange to not allow them in Grenoble's pools.  The court's reasoning behind not allowing them in Grenoble is not that burkinis should be prohibited in general but rather that the Grenoble city leaders whose decision -- later overturned -- to allow women to wear burkinis in public pools made their decision based in part of religious reasons, which violates a principle of separation of church and state.  Those cities that allow burkinis in public pools made their decisions to allow burkinis as part of general loosening of swimwear restrictions and not specifically to satisfy a particular religious demand.

The article does not make any prediction about what will happen next, however the ruling does seem to leave open a path for burkinis to be allowed in Grenoble in the future.  The key is for the burkini proponents to advocate for a more general loosening of swimwear restrictions rather than a specific burkini privilege.  Whatever happens, this case demonstrates the intricate interplay between religious persons and government officials that leads to the religious rules and regulations that we observe in the real world.

The Future of American Religion

The Pew Research Center published a new report titled Modeling the Future of Religion in America (full pdf here).  The main idea is to make projections of religious affiliation rates going forward fifty years.  Making projections is a tricky sort of business because it is all about identifying which of the current trends will continue, which will not, and what not-yet-experienced trends may occur.

This report proceed by considering a few different levels of switching out of Christianity.  With no switching, Christianity remains the majority religious tradition by affiliation in 2070, but with other switching scenarios, Christianity loses its majority status by 2070.

The report also discusses some of the nuts and bolts underlying the projections.  For example, the projections need to make various assumptions about not just rates of religious disaffiliation, but also about fertility, mortality, migration, and intergenerational religious transmission.

With so many moving parts, it is impossible to get everything correct, but making a perfect projection is too high of a standard.  What this report can do -- and does pretty well in my opinion -- is provide a limited number of plausible future scenarios.