I have read a number of postings on the Internet in which the Roman Catholic author laments the state of that body and wonders what can be done to keep people from leaving the faith. This is certainly a good question. I don’t have any sort of expert analysis on this problem, but I do have some thoughts on perhaps why people don’t remain in the Christian faith as a whole. These are just passing thoughts. I am not selling them as truth, nor do I have precise answers.

The Christian Faith is Irrelevant. The Webster online dictionary gives the meaning of “irrelevant” as being “not connected or relevant to something.” In this case, I would say that it is irrelevant to life in general in the following manner, most notably seen in affluent Western civilizations:  we don’t need the Church to live the good life.

Western Enlightenment Hedonism has sold mankind on the idea that our lives are all about having what we want, when we want, and no one should be able to tell us that we can’t “have it all.” When you couple this with the ability of the Industrial Revolution to produce a plethora of bright, new, shiny goodies which make our lives fun and easy…well, who is this “God” who tells us that this is not what our lives are all about? We live in the here and now, and if the here and now is good, as it is in Western countries, if we have all the wonderful toys our greedy little hearts desire, then the promise of eternal life is considerably dimmed as something offering substantial value or benefit to us. The Church got blindsided by Enlightenment Humanism and Rationalism and did not come up with responses.

The Church was very relevant in the first century. Life was short, the specter of death hung as a pall over every aspect of life, the majority of people were poor, and only those with power lived something of a good life. Even then, there was the nagging reality of the tenuousness of life. A caesar could find himself with a knife in his back or deported to some godforsaken island by the end of any day. The message of Christ was the glorious news that death had been destroyed. The resurrected Christ offered a new reality – eternal life with the God who, unlike the savage gods of paganism – loved men enough to take on humanity and heal mankind’s broken and sick nature. The message of God’s love to mankind, coupled with the reality of Christ’s resurrection, gave tired humanity a new hope. Paradise was reopened and mankind invited back to the Garden.

People who don’t feel a need don’t seek a remedy. Today in the West, we have it all.

Lack of the Miraculous. Just the most cursory reading of epistles, sermons, and other historic information regarding the lives of Christians in the first several centuries reveals that God intervened in spectacular ways in response to prayer. The miraculous was a vivid testimony to the unseen hand which rules over all Creation. Miracles produced belief, made converts, and turned upside down the smug worldview of the pagan believers and philosophers. What response could you have to seeing a dead man raised to life except to believe?

Today? Meaaaaah…….not so much. Or really not at all. We have seen precious few miracles and miracle workers in the West. What we have seen in their absence is a plethora of charlatans, crooks, and schemers claiming to speak for God and do the miraculous in His name.

Perhaps the most notable work of exposing these Con Men for Jesus was a man who went by the stage name of “The Amazing Randi.” No faith healers were up to performing their “miracles” under Randi’s clinical environments. Zip, zero, diddly squat, nada and none!! If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed then Mohammed will come to the mountain, and that is just what Randi did. He used his investigative skills to expose several high profile charlatan faith healers Including A. A. Allen, Ernest Angley, Willard Fuller, WV Grant, Peter Popoff, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, and Ralph DiOrio. He reported his findings and debunking in his book, The Faith Healers, which had the added bonus of a foreword by the great Carl Sagan.

The problem with these con men is that this sewage flows downward. It covers the Christian faith like a nasty-smelling blanket, filling every corner of the Christian world with some of its stench. It is hard to evangelize people who are knowledgeable about such hijinks. To them, all of the Christian faith is just one big con game. Even worse, if such a disbelieving person was to experience a true miracle in his life, he would still find himself wondering where the curtain was and who was behind it.

The Wretched Testimony of Catholic Lives One reason I was less than interested in the Catholic faith when I was a Protestant was the Catholics with whom I had various social interactions. As the Master Demon Trainer Infernus has stated to his trainees in the Lower World, “There is nothing finer than to have your client meet with a cussin’ and smokin’ Catholic standing outside the Church after Mass.”  If the first Christians stood out because of the love they showed in a darkened world of utter selfishness, today’s Catholics are exactly the opposite – they don’t stand out from the world at all. The great majority of them are selfish and worldly, caught up in the pursuit of pleasure and money. The cuss and swear like sailors, ignore the plight of the poor, and do little to stand against the wave of pornography and filth coming out of Hollywood. They can tell you more about the Kardashian family than they can about praying the Morning Office and the Breviary. And witnessing?  Pffffft…..forget that! I never once had  any Catholic I knew or worked for ask me if I knew I was going to heaven or if Jesus was my personal Lord and Savior. (Okay, okay….that’s Baptist evangelitalk, but you get the idea). My own family on my Mother’s side – all raised Catholic as kids – never once took me to Mass when I visited Grandma Rose or discussed faith things with me.

If the Catholic faith means so little to the majority of Catholics in the Church, you can bet they are fair game for the various cults and heretics running through their neighborhood spouting off about, “Yew need Jaaaaaayzuz to be saved!”  A little twisting of Scripture here, a little ignoring of the Greek there, a few verses taken out of context and VOILA!!! You have yet another X-Catholic who is now a Jehovah Witness or Baptist because he suddenly “found the truth.” The scriptural and religious ignorance of most people in the Roman Catholic Church is absolutely breathtaking. Cultists count on this, which is why the great majority of their flock consists of X-Catholics. In one Evangelical megachurch of 10,000 members in Hershey, Pennsylvania, 75% of them are X-Catholics.

In short, in the lives of the majority of Catholics, there is nothing to keep them in the Church nor attract others to the Church. Which blame lies squarely at the feet of bishops in the Church.

Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church is not THE Church! Oh, boy! This will have some folks get their knickers in a twist! But this is what I hear from members of the Orthodox Church with whom I speak online. They say the Church that Jesus established is not found in Rome because Rome jettisoned the apostolic faith and introduced heresies which have broken its relationship to the Church. The promises of special blessing and protection found in the Bible are extended only to the Church which Jesus founded upon the Apostles. And according to my Orthodox friends, when the Church at Rome began to promote heresy, She separated – or schismated – Herself from the Body of Christ, and is no longer part of the Church.

I will have to some day write an entire blog piece on this, but I think there is more than a chance that this is true, based on my historic overview of the things that the Roman Catholic Church has been involved in which go contrary to both the teachings of the Early Fathers and basic moral behavior. From the formal time of the separation of East and West  – 1054 AD – the behavior of the Roman Church has become more bizarre and more puzzling to observe. Wicked popes, bad doctrines, corruption, scholasticism, killing their enemies – these and a host of other issues have me ready to enter the Orthodox Church as soon as the door opens to me. How some of the things that Rome has done over the centuries can be justified by those who remain faithful to Her is beyond my understanding. However, with the current sex scandals raging full bore in the Roman Church, many people are heading out the doors and a great many more are looking. My only hope is that they don’t go to Protestantism or some esoteric cult. Holy Orthodoxy, the faith of the Apostles, is where I would send anyone asking me for a church home.

A simple test to clarify this: if you can show me in the writings of the Early Fathers teachings such as Indulgences, Purgatory, The Treasury of Merit, Papal Supremacy, and the Immaculate Conception, then the Roman Church is indeed the Church. If not, however, then perhaps this problem is true and Roman Catholicism is dying because it is no longer part of the Church. Our hope should be that someone in the Roman hierarchy comes to realize this, calls a truly ecumenical council, and jettisons all that the Early Fathers did not teach.

Hypertrophic Guilt Tripping  When I was a Protestant, I heard of something snidely referred to as “Catholic Guilt.” Didn’t understand it then, and didn’t really care to as a Protestant whose main idea of Roman Catholicism was that of a bunch of pagan idol-worshipers. Now that I’ve been in communion with the Roman Church for almost 20 years, I understand it better – and find it distasteful at best and sickening at worst.

There is a real and meaningful difference between the salvation messages of the Orthodox East and the Roman West. Augustine created a pessimistic anthropology in which mankind was described in the worst possible terms in relationship to God. Salvation was for a small group, the few “elect of God.” The greater part of mankind he described as a “massa damnata” (a damned mass). Rather than being children of God who are sick and in need of Christ’s healing touch, Western anthropology has come to describe mankind as utterly guilty before the angry Judge who will condemn the vast multitude of mankind to unthinkable tortures forever. The Medieval Church, beginning in earnest with Anselm of Canterbury, took this theme of God’s vengeful wrath and promoted it to the max.

Saint John Vianney, the Curé of Ars, whom the Church named patron saint of parish priests, says, “The number of the saved is as few as the number of grapes left after the vinepickers have passed.” Pope St. Gregory the Great, Doctor and Father of the Church, says, “There are many who arrive at the faith, but few that are led into the heavenly kingdom.” And another Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine, says, “It is certain that few are saved.” Many saints agree.

In order to escape this horrible end, Roman Catholic believer must tightly watch his every step, lest the angry God be offended and call the sinner to stand before Him to be condemned. The Roman Catholic Church developed a long list of nitpicking “sins” which would send one directly to hell, including not being under the authority of the pope. For a while, I couldn’t even dig into a small carton of my favorite ice cream, Hagen Daz, without fearing that I had taken one bite too many and gone from enjoyment to gluttony, which would send me to hell. Roman Catholic Traditionalist websites seem to revel in lurid Medieval descriptions of people suffering in hell. This is what happens when you redefine God from “God is love” (1 John 4:8) to a God who is ever judging and angry with mankind every day. ( Psalms 7:11).  Such a picture of God is troubling and unattractive. Little wonder it drove Luther to insanity and schism from the Church.

Contrast that with the Eastern view of God in which the love of God is for all men, the Cross not for some legal payment of a sin penalty, but for healing of our brokenness. The view is not that of guilty sinners who await a final verdict before condemnation, but that of prodigal children being welcomed back home by a loving heavenly Father who will heal them of their sin sickness. So pervasive was this picture of God as love that in the first five centuries of the Church, it was preached that Christ’s work on the Cross would eventually save all and that the fires of hell were the scourging of God’s love for the healing of the rebellious sinner. The idea of a vengeful, angry God who would torture men forever was not known by the Universalists. It took the Roman thinking of Augustine’s pessimistic anthropology to begin the end of this joyful and hopeful message.

Perhaps I am short-sighted, but I fail to see that optimism in the Roman Catholic Church. Everything about RC doctrine is, “Do so many Rosaries and you will escape hell.”  “Be sure you make five first Fridays and you are guaranteed heaven.” ” Do penance, more penance, and still more penance.” “Get Indulgences so you can escape Purgatory early.” “Don’t die in mortal sin or you will burn forever.” Men like St. Peter Damian even developed a cult of self-flagellation for sin, and while this is neither supported by the Church nor practiced as such any more, the mentality that started it  – i.e., that of legal guilt before an angry God – is still quite in place. It’s all about punishment. I don’t get this sense from the Orthodox East, which is why I am looking East with longing. For years after entering communion with Rome I found myself troubled for years with constant wondering if I had prayed enough and done enough to escape God’s wrath and make Him pleased with me. I want – I need – a Father who loves me and in love will correct me, not one who is gonna beat the crap out of me for some minor infraction every time I turn around.

No one finds such a religion attractive.  Love attracts. This is repellant.

Hot mess doesn’t even begin to describe the condition of the Roman Catholic Church right now. It is infested with gay clergy, has brought in new teachings unknown to the Apostles, and is attended by people who actually don’t accept the ancient and apostolic faith. Priests may speak of God’s love at the Cross, but the underlying them I constantly sense is that of condemnation rather than encouragement. Seventy percent of Roman Catholics surveyed in America do not believe that the Eucharist is the very Body and Blood of Christ after consecration. Their continued attendance to a church with which they do not agree is something of a mystery to me.

I think these five points are worthy of some consideration.  If you, dear reader, can think of something else, please post it in the comments. And as always, if you think I am full of beans, you can tell me that also.