Go to an employer in retail or almost any service sector job and read the applications of entry level personnel. You would be surprised how many ask for Sunday morning and Wednesday night free for church service. Most churches offer more than one service a week. I had to go to church three times a week for a few years while attending a catholic grade school. Four times if there was a religious holiday.
John Thornton
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Attendance at Sunday mass is in theory obligatory for Catholics, and people often go to a great deal of trouble to meet this requirement. I can recall, for instance, an admiring WSJ profile of Louis Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, which recounted with a mild sense of wonder the fact that Gerstner, when traveling, always attended Sunday mass wherever he happened to be. (What a man! What a millionaire!) This is standard behavior for Catholics, though--at least it's supposed to be. For the truly devout, _daily_ attendance at mass is always an option; there are (or used to be) numerous ancillary devotions as well ("Benediction" and so forth), which often take place in the evening hours. "Confession" (now renamed the "Sacrament of Reconciliation") is in theory obligatory once a year, but more frequent resort to this sacrament is strongly encouraged. It's small wonder that Catholics took pains to go to mass on Sunday, since this obligation was imposed "under pain of mortal sin." In other words, if you skipped mass on Sunday and got run over by a truck on Monday, it was tough luck, Charlie: say hello to the little red guys with the pitchforks!
When I was growing up, the injunction to attend Sunday mass was regularly, not to say rigidly, observed by ordinary Catholics. My siblings and I were marched off to church every Sunday morning in our little suits and dresses, clutching our missals, black ones for the boys, white ones for the girls. (A missal is a kind of prayerbook). I'm sure we made a pretty picture! Attendance at Sunday mass, however, was but a marker for belonging to a particular sub-culture, with its own attitudes and folkways and well-worn life trajectories--a convenient "metric" for sociological observers. This world almost utterly collapsed in the space of about a decade, from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, both for internal reasons and under the pressure of the broader cultural revolution of that period. This general collapse is mirrored in the plummeting figures for weekly church attendance among nominal Catholics, a decline now stabilized at a much lower level. The emptying out of the priesthood and the religious orders is another telling measure. Catholic "traditionalists" see and feel all of this as one of the greatest disasters of all time. I suppose it's akin to what many Europeans formed under the ancien regime felt in the wake of the French Revolution. People whom I knew while growing up, who in my recollection were genial, tolerant sorts, now seem in old age to be consumed with anxiety and sadness, given to sudden spurts of fury and hatred directed at the "liberals," both within the Church and outside it, who, in their eyes, destroyed the beautiful world.
The novels of Mary Gordon convey the atmosphere of this mid-20th century American Catholicism quite well, and also give a sense of the moral and cultural meaning of its decline--both for those who (like me) rejoiced in its collapse and those for whom its partial destruction (Catholic optimists would say its transformation) also in some sense destroyed their lives. Gordon's perspective is shaped by feminism, and she shows in a way that no academic study can the extent to which the world she chronicles was built on the subjection of women, as wives and mothers and nuns. Once women revolted, it couldn't survive for long in the same form. Another writer, Wilfred Sheed, covers some of the same territory in his novels and essays, though from a different angle. Wilfred is the son of Frank Sheed, a popular theologian well-known in the 40s and 50s and one of the founders of the Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward. Wilfred Sheed describes a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan Anglo-American Catholic milieu whose intellectual guideposts were Chesterton, second-hand Aquinas, and (for really bright lights) French neo-Thomism. This high-end Catholic culture is even more a thing of the past today then the hard-eyed suburban Catholicism Gordon wrote about, done in by the aggiornamento that it was the first to welcome. I highly recommend Sheed's novels _The Hack_ and _Transatlantic Blues_, which taken together provide a portrait of both of these milieux. A more sympathetic literary treatment of American Catholicism can be found in the works of J. F. Powers, the best of these three writers. Perhaps it should be added that this swift implosion was not just an American phenomenon: the collapse of traditional Catholic culture was even more complete in French Canada and the Catholic parts of Europe.
What does it all mean politically? It's a complex and contradictory picture. I think that on questions of war and peace, and to a lesser extent on matters related to social welfare, there are considerable grounds for agreement and coalition between the secular left and religious folk in general--I don't just mean the organized "religious left." There's no reason why even people who are quite traditional in their religious views and not especially political couldn't support, say, universal single-payer health care, or more union-friendly labor law. To the extent that the secular left embraces a vision of liberation based on the juridical, social and material equality of individual persons, however, it is bound to run afoul of entrenched religions. This is especially so in the American context, where interested parties seek to harness, for their own, quite secular ends, the anxiety and resentment felt by those who retain strong emotional attachments to slowly eroding religious subcultures. Nor should one underestimate the attraction that religion holds for those set adrift by the harshness and insecurity of life under American-style shark tank capitalism. Taking a long view, though, I tend to think that both the snarling anger and smug triumphalism of the world-wide religious right, from Pat Robertson to Cardinal Ratzinger to Osama bin Laden, represent one more tempestuous eddy in the long, slow recession of the sea of faith. Nietzsche had it right: God is dead, but his shadow persists. A shadow, though, is still just a shadow.
Jacob Conrad