WHY ARE CATHOLICS LEAVING THE CHURCH?

Agnes was a Catholic. Asked why she left the Church, she began by the story of her mother’s long illness. During that time Agnes rarely got out to Mass. No priest visited, no one cared. There was no priest to perform the funeral, it was taken by a layman who had problems remembering her mother’s name. It was some Pentecostal neighbours who, having visited her mother, helped her over those days when she had to pick her life up again. During that time she discovered the Bible. After some prodding she admitted that the Bible was read at Mass but quickly added only selected parts of it — what the priest wanted us to know and from a Bible that had been doctored. With the Pentecostalists she discovered the real Bible — the King James version-realised that she had only been christened and not baptised, discovered Jesus Christ as Lord and personal Saviour, and discovered prophecy. She was now saved. Nkesia was a Catholic, ie, she had been baptised since her father was a Catholic. Her mother died when she was only three years old, her father picked up with another woman, she was brought up by her grandmother, a Vincentian once Methodist. She attended only government schools. Nkesia never took catechism, was never confirmed, never met a priest. She lives in Morvant. At 12 she drifted into a Pentecostal Church and the pastor became her adviser. Ambitious, he got her into Servol and helped her get to England for a holiday. She stayed with former members of his church and never met the English. She learned not only the Bible but the Black Bible — and prophecy.

The Church attacked
Agnes and Nkesia are not the only ones to leave the Catholic Church. The Catholic population has dropped from 36.19 percent in the 1960 census, to 35.4 percent in 1970 to 29.4 percent in 1990. In terms of absolute numbers, the Catholic population declined for the first time in 1990 by 17,082 while the population increased by over 100,000. More striking was decline by geographical area. In Port-of-Spain Catholics, 54.82 percent of the population in 1970, were 48.5 percent of the population by 1990. In San Fernando Catholics went from 39 percent in 1970 to 34.31 percent in 1990. The Catholic ‘heartlands’ showed a more striking decline. Arima went from 60.42 percent in 1970 to 46.87 percent in 1990, Blanchisseuse from 89.89 percent to 73.28 percent, San Rafael from 65.39 percent to 50.70 percent, Valencia from 73.9 percent to 51.41 percent. At least as striking, more women were leaving the Church than men. Decline was snot only among Catholics. Anglicans dropped from 18.10 percent of the population in 1970 to 14.7 percent of the population in 1980 to 10.9 percent in 1990 — a drop in absolute members of 32,370. Methodists declined from 1.66 percent of the population in 1970 to 1.2 percent in 1990 and Presbyterians from 4.23 percent in 1970 to 3.44 percent in 1990. For the purpose of this article I leave aside Hindus and Muslims, only to note that they have not totally escaped the phenomenon of a decline in ‘mainstream’ membership and a rise in the membership of splinter groups or sects — using this word in its sociological sense with no pejorative meaning— as well as recruitment principally to Pentecostalism.

It is highly doubtful that the census now being prepared will see a reversal of this trend. It may show an increase. It should be underlined that census statistics record those who consider themselves Catholics. It does not record practicing Catholics still defined as those who go regularly to Sunday Mass. If this number is taken the drop would be even more significant. Decline in numbers was not the only significant change for Catholics. Over the past decade the Catholic Church was subjected to a steady stream of anti-Catholic articles in the press that would have been unheard of before, except for Albert Gomes’ periodical The Beacon. A Seventh Day Adventist columnist in a popular weekly regularly cited the Bible, relating it to modern events in order to prove that the Catholic Church was the beast of Revelations. Attacks by the Maha Sabha followed the lines of the VHP — credited by Christians as being behind Christian persecution in India. There were systematic attacks on the Church as a ‘White Church’ and systematic attacks by a clutch of agnostics. Beside this, criticism of the Church from abroad was reproduced in the local press whether this concerned priests’ abuse, female ordination, Dominus lesus or the IRA in Northern Ireland. In very few countries would this happen and certainly not in a country where the Church was so closely intertwined with history and culture.

Church silence
Even more surprising was the relative lack of ‘riposte’ from the Church. It has taken until 2003 for the Archbishop of Port-of-Spain to publicly show concern at falling numbers or to announce a policy of the Church’s presence — in the form of priest or deacon — in every parish. That the majority of Catholics would attend government schools where catechism would not be taught worried few. There has been little reply to the anti-Catholicism in the press even when this anti-Catholicism is based on patently false ideas or misinformation. Indeed, in the two areas for which Catholics are noted, ie, intellectual debate on the one hand and the defence of the poor and of Human Rights on the other, there has been a striking vacuum. Well may Agnes and Nkesia turn to ‘prophecy’ to understand history of the Iraq war. They were in good company. The Millennialism — ie, beliefs in the imminent end of the world — typical of the rise of North American sects and having its offshoots in North American culture and science, has been traditionally slapped down in Catholicism since the time of St Augustine. It would run through TT engulfing Catholics as Adventists or Pentecostals and finding a whisper occasionally in Hinduism or Islam. It was not only Agnes and Nkesia. I read the professional agnostics. First among them is Kevin Baldeosingh, agnostic expert on ‘science’ ? la Bertrand Russell and occasionally Voltaire. For Kevin Baldeosingh, the Catholic Church is anti-science humbug at best. I receive from France some copies of La Croix, France’s Catholic daily newspaper. There is a weekly column on science: “What ethics for biology?” Does bio-technology menace humanism?” “Rethinking human nature,” Open letter to the enemies of science,” an article on cloning — these are hardly non-scientific titles. The articles are written, not by a Catholic columnist, but by Dominique Lecourt, France’s top philosopher of science, adopted son of Louis Althuser and — agnostic.

It is not surprising that there are few Catholic intellectuals — this is a country which has become notoriously anti-intellectual. If this anti-intellectualism, part of the new materialist culture, has been attacked abroad, not the least by Catholics in the name of philosophy, the humanities and increasingly social and historical analysis, no such thing has happened here. One is bound to ask why. After all throughout its history the Church has placed an emphasis on reason. In few Catholic countries would the handicapped be ‘roughed up’ by the police or be on wheelchairs outside of Flour Mills without widespread Catholic mobilisation. In none that I know of would the desperation of Laventille have as the major Catholic reply a ‘spiritual caravan’ calling for devils and ancestral spirits ‘to be bound.’ Indeed ancestors are pretty important in the Zimbabwe Church, thank you. I returned from one of the most desperate slums in Caracas, those around Catya. In the streets rats and roaches took night strolls undisturbed. In Catya I stayed in a Jesuit house where I soaped under a cranky shower occasionally splurting driblets of water. Catya is a danger zone and despair zone. It could have been Laventille. In Bolivia a Catholic radio station gave daily agricultural information in Quechua to impoverished farmers. West Kingston and I walked through narrow despair alleys shepherded by a Jesuit priest joking with the people he met and to a cup of coffee offered by a young Ursuline sister.

In Ireland a Bishop had gypsies or ‘travellers’ camp on his lawn in the teeth of local protest, and in Paris we opened the doors of churches to tramps and homeless as a vicious spell of cold hit.  That is the Catholicism I know. Not once did I hear of devils and ancestral spirits, nor once of an exorcism. And certainly in none would there be the incessant call for ‘entertainment’ at Mass. The usual demands is for ‘prayerfulness.’ Where there is both a decline in membership and an a-typical Catholic Church we are not speaking of Agnes and Nkesia. Something more profound has happened that goes beyond religious belief. What has happened? And more to come.