Come on. You have noticed it too. The Catholic Church, which once evoked the phrase “Here comes everybody” (James Joyce) now brings to mind a narrow, fairly homogenous fragment of a slice of a piece of mankind. Sure, if you’re using the phrase sociologically, or even to include all the people who go to Mass more than twice a year, you can still pretend that the Church contains a wide swath of humanity, from illegal immigrant landscapers with Guadalupe tattoos to shark-suited neoconservatives working for military contractors on K Street, and everything in between. In that sense, the beer-sodden Kennedy voters at Boston’s Fenway Park are every bit as a Catholic as the pope.
But let’s use language a good deal more precisely, in a doctrinally rigorous sense. How many people in America actually believe all the central truths of the Catholic Catechism? Public opinion surveys have revealed that high percentages of Sunday Mass-goers do not hold, or perhaps never learned about, transubstantiation (the change of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist). Depending on which faction of the Catholic fragment you belong to, you can chalk up that ignorance to either the collapse of Catholic schooling, the dumbing down of the liturgy, or even to the suppression during the 1970s of the “unconscious catechesis” that used to occur every time the most unlettered peasant knelt for the Host and reverently took it on his tongue from the blessed hands of a priest.
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