The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are
Revolutionizing the Catholic Church
By John L. Allen, Jr.
(Doubleday, 480 pages, $28)
John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic
Register and a Vatican analyst for CNN and National Public
Radio, has written an indispensable book for anyone interested in
the Catholic Church or religion itself in its worldwide dimension.
The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing
the Catholic Church is a “thick” book, not to be read in one
sitting, augmented by a fine section at the end recommending
further reading on the 10 trends Allen examines.
What makes this book of particular interest is the extreme
relevance of the Catholic Church to secular world events in our
time. Certainly many factors played into the fall of Communism in
Europe only two decades ago. Nonetheless many experts point to the
election of John Paul II, his first papal visit to his native
Poland, and the formation of Solidarity as primary catalysts.
During his fateful pontificate, John Paul II had not only a
religious impact but often a political one as well, owing to his
denunciation of corrupt, dictatorial, and totalitarian regimes.
The long-simmering eruption of radical jihadist Islam during the
1970s, which led to the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran,
was a major factor in the election of Ronald Reagan, who in turn
helped bring about the final collapse of Communism. In short, the
two dominant forms of creedal religion in the world are Catholicism
and Islam and both are growing vertiginously, as Allen points
out.
In September, Pope Benedict will make an unprecedented state
visit to the United Kingdom, where he will address Parliament and
meet with the Queen at her palace in Scotland. Most importantly, he
will personally carry out the first beatification of his
pontificate — that of John Henry Newman, perhaps the greatest
religious writer, preacher, and theologian of both the
English-speaking Anglican and Catholic Communions in the last two
centuries. All of this takes place in the context of near-anarchy
in the worldwide Anglican Communion over moral teachings on sex and
marriage. This situation has led Rome to take the extraordinary
measure of receiving not only individual conversions but also
conversions of whole congregations and even dioceses.
In addition, Pope Benedict has had warmly friendly dealings with
various patriarchs of the autocephalous orthodox national churches.
If one or several of them unites with Rome under the primacy of the
pope, we could see the beginning of the end of a thousand-year
schism that is the scandal of Christianity.
With the 500th anniversary of the Reformation approaching in
2017, many serious evangelical Christians who belong to thousands
of denominations throughout the world may want to bring their zeal
to the church that gave them the Bible, and receive the
grace-giving gifts of the sacraments that complete their baptism,
including the liturgical life and historical culture that so many
desire.
Christ’s prayer “That all may be one” could possibly be seen
answered by the grandchildren of children being born today.
As Allen’s professional associations listed above suggest, he is
not a paleocon Catholic with Lefrevrist leanings. However, his
personal views seem to have evolved toward an essential assent to
the basic teachings of the Church, and he does a fine job of
maintaining his objectivity in a book that not only offers a
contemporary snapshot of the Catholic Church but also attempts to
prognosticate about the position it will hold at the end of our
still-new 21st century. As he puts it, “I am a journalist, not a
priest theologian, or academic. My role is to describe what is
happening in Catholicism and to provide context for it. This book
therefore is an exercise in description, not a prescription. I
entrust the prescriptive debate to better minds than mine.”
Allen’s choices for the 10 future trends that the Church will
encounter are: A World Church, Evangelical Catholicism, Islam, the
New Demography, Expanding Lay Roles, the Biotech Revolution,
Globalization, Ecology, Multipolarism, and Pentecostalism. Let’s
look at a few of them.
In his chapter on the World Church, Allen calls the shifting of
“the center of gravity from North to South” the most important
change the Church underwent in the 20th century. He predicts this
trend will accelerate in our century as the populations of Africa
and South America continue to grow while the ranks of old, formerly
Catholic Europe dwindle still further. The United States is an
outlier here, largely because of massive (mostly Catholic)
immigration from Latin America.
In Africa, much of the Church’s growth is due to a relatively
high birthrate and more local control from native-born bishops (a
sign their countries are no longer operating as missionary
outposts). These bishops are on average younger and more vigorous
in facing the struggles of enculturation, with polygamy and
witchcraft being the most serious issues to be resolved. Allen does
not draw the analogy, but this is reminiscent of the (700-year
long) evangelization of the barbarian tribes flowing out of the
Asian steppes, which was followed by the triple strains of dealing
with the Black Death, the Avignon papacy, and the Protestant
revolt. It is certainly helpful if the reader knows a good deal of
Church history to understand Allen’s approach to the future.
In his chapter on evangelical Catholicism, Allen waves the white
flag of surrender to 50 years of liturgical, doctrinal, and
sacramental confusion dating from the proliferation of poorly
applied teachings from the misunderstood Second Vatican Council. As
Allen puts it, “The defining features of evangelical Catholicism
are a clear embrace of traditional Catholic thought, speech, and
practice, the usual word for which is ‘orthodoxy’; eagerness to
proclaim one’s Catholic identity to the world, emphasizing its
implication for culture, society, and politics; faith seen as a
matter of personal choice rather than cultural inheritance.”
In short, what we are seeing is a dropping out of the lukewarm
and “dissenters” from the visible Church in the face of resurgent,
vital, orthodox Catholicism. One in 10 Americans is an ex-Catholic,
one of the greatest mass apostasies in the history of the Church.
The Church of the future will be evangelizing and self-confident —
considerably smaller but much more powerful in its effect on
American culture and society as mainline Protestantism continues
its almost 500-year-long death march to oblivion, giving way before
the mainly non-denominational freestanding mega-churches that rely
on enthusiasm and private interpretation of the Bible.
The chapter on expanding lay roles allows Allen a different way
to approach the reality that 98.5 percent of the Church’s faithful
are not bishops, priests, or deacons but rather the laity. Allen
writes: “What makes lay roles a major trend in the
twenty-first-century is that the laity is emerging as protagonists
both inside and outside the Church. Internally lay people are
occupying ministerial and administrative positions once held almost
exclusively by priests. Externally, lay people are taking it upon
themselves to evangelize culture and to act on Catholic social
teaching. It is this one-two punch, lay ministers inside the Church
and lay activists on the outside, that constitutes the trend.”
The central teaching of the Second Vatican Council is the
universal call to holiness. For the large majority of Catholics,
this means holiness is to be pursued (and can be attained)
primarily in the everyday world of family, work, leisure, and
politics, which inevitably influences contemporary culture. It may
take until the end of this century for this first and primary role
for the laity to be grasped and put into effect. Allen examines the
dozens of lay movements that, approved by the Vatican, all with
their proper charisms, personify this approach to the role of the
laity in the Church. In some ways these movements can be likened to
pre-Constantine Christians who put little emphasis on structure but
rather lived their Christianity in their family life, work,
friendship, and works of charity, inspired by a faith that made
them willing to bear witness even until death. However, one need
not be a member of a lay movement to live out fully one’s Christian
faith in the world.
In second place are the lay ministries referred to earlier by
Allen. They are most needed in the Catholic South, where there are
relatively few priests for the exploding Catholic populations of
the southern Continents, leaving dire need for catechists,
teachers, leaders of Scripture study, etc. The danger in the
developed North, however, is that lay ministers can think, in
outmoded clerical terms, that they constitute more of the Church
because they work inside the institutional Church of parishes,
schools, chanceries, etc.
I have only briefly examined three of the trends, leaving the
other seven for you to judge when you read this book. Catholic,
Protestant, Jew, or Muslim, it will give you a much deeper insight
into this third-millennial Church that, whatever your vantage
point, shows no current signs of disproving its Founder’s prophecy
that it will remain with us until the end of time.
