When the Enlightenment Hit the Neighborhoods

Why has the traditional, authority-based way of doing faith collapsed? Faith and reason are in a fight, and faith is losing. Only fifteen percent of young Catholics attend church regularly. If ex-Catholics were a religious denomination, they would be the third-largest in the U.S. The young, the quizzical, the semi-faithful, the somewhat churched, the unchurched, the agnostic, and the fallen away no longer look to faith for credible insight into how they should live their lives. Why is...
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Why has the traditional, authority-based way of doing faith collapsed? Faith and reason are in a fight, and faith is losing. Only fifteen percent of young Catholics attend church regularly. If ex-Catholics were a religious denomination, they would be the third-largest in the U.S. The young, the quizzical, the semi-faithful, the somewhat churched, the unchurched, the agnostic, and the fallen away no longer look to faith for credible insight into how they should live their lives. Why is there such massive indifference to faith? And why, for those who continue to participate, is there such fragmentation of identity, with splits across the progressive/conservative divide and splits across time, between the pre-Vatican II Church and the post-Vatican II Church? In her illustrated personal essay, author Jeanne Follman explores the reasons why faith is in such trouble today as she tells the story, and the backstory, of the fifty years since Vatican II, and challenges us to reclaim the experience of the sacred and modernize Church governance. Follman argues three things: First, that the whole Catholic tradition needs to be excavated, rethought, and recreated, thoroughly and entirely, top to bottom, to create a new understanding that both makes sense in the modern world and fully celebrates the mysteries and traditions inherent in being Catholic. Second, Church governance needs to be reformed by the faithful, through the exercise of their knowledge, their voices, and their pocketbooks. Third, Catholics should look to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (primer included) for a way to make faith and reason play better together. His belief that the world is a holy place, that faith and reason are coherent, and that the truth can be found through free and open debate can be the touchstones Catholics use as they state anew the truths of their tradition and create governance structures that make sense in the modern world.