The Synod In A Distant Mirror

As a relatively new Catholic convert, I've been reluctant to say anything about the synod recently completed in Rome, except to note what Fr James Martin himself has concludeed about it:

One of these issues was L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, particularly since this community was explicitly mentioned in the Instrumentum Laboris twice. It was also mentioned in half of the reports submitted by episcopal conferences from around the world. Many hoped that the synod would find ways to speak explicitly about reaching out to this community in new ways. Also there were unreasonably high expectations that the synod would, for example, somehow ratify the blessings of same-sex unions.

But that second option was never going to happen on that or any other issue; the synod is consultative, not deliberative. The synod does not have the power to change any church practice; it can only suggest.

Still, the lack of any mention of the term “L.G.B.T.Q.” in the final synthesis, called “A Synodal Church on Mission,” was, for many people, including myself, a disappointment.

I have the sense that at least so far, the Catholic Church has dodged a bullet. The LGBTQ issue, along with earleir ones like women's ordination, has been destroying main line Protestant denominatins for decades. The United Methodist Church is only the most recent:

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.

. . . Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.

Many of the departing congregations are joining the Global Methodist Church, a denomination created last year by conservatives breaking from the UMC, while others are going independent or joining different denominations.

Pope Francis in occasional offhand remarks that I haven't been able to locate specifically seems to have come close to the basic issue: Protestant denominations have liberalized on this, that, or the other throughout much of the past century, but it hasn't brought any Protestants back to church. For instance,

The General Convention Office released The Episcopal Church’s annual batch of parochial report data this week, providing a snapshot of the church in 2022 as dioceses and congregations were beginning to rebound from COVID-19 disruptions. In addition to the numbers, these parochial reports also included responses to narrative questions aimed at deepening the church’s understanding of the changes, challenges and opportunities present in parish life.

The topline numbers continue to show a church experiencing gradual long-term membership decline, much like other mainline Protestant denominations. The Episcopal Church’s tally of baptized members dropped just below 1.6 million in 2022, down 21% from 2013.

The church recorded an even sharper drop in average Sunday attendance in the past decade, down 43% to 373,000 in 2022, though that one-year total was up by 19% from the pandemic-driven low of 313,000 in 2021.

Earlier trends among Episcopalians reflect a decline that began in the 1960s and 70s, when that denomination began to embrace secular political issues and move toward ordaining women:

The Episcopal Church Annual, also known as The Red Book, includes a table that tracks Episcopal statistics from 1880 to the present. . . . If one simply finds the high point of Episcopal membership in Red Book tables (1966) and compares that figure (3,647,297) with the total members in 2002 (2,320,221), it would seem that the Episcopal Church lost well over a million members during the last 35 years.

And as of 2022, according to the first link, that number had dropped to 1.6 million, less than half the number in 1966. The Episcopalians had two periods of schism in which conservative parishes left for newly constituted Anglican denominatios, the first in the 1970s and early 1980s, the second in the 2000s. According to Wikipedia, the most important of these, the Anglican Church in North America, had 127,624 members in 2019, which can account for only a small part of the more than 2 million Episcopalian membership decline since 1966.

It appears that the likely outcome of all such schisms will be an overall loss of credibility for organized Christianity that can never be made up by organizing new, quasi-orthodox denominations. This suggests that the schism in the United Methodist Church will never produce an overall membership total among the UMC, the new Global Methodist Church, and other groups harboring other dissident UMC parishes, that ever corresponds to the pre-schism total in the UMC alone. Mostly, it will encourage more people just to drop church attendance entirely.

The increase in overall denominations leads to an increase in bishops and other key spokespeople both locally and nationally, especially when one Anglican or one Methodist leader is pro-LGBTQ and another is anti, which diminishes the prestige of both and the overall ability of religious spokesmen to affect the public dialogue.

Beyond that, when denominations break up into smaller ones, it's economically inefficient, since relatively more of individual parish tithes to their supervising bodies will go to more administrative expenses in more corporate-style offices at more denominations. This contributes to an overall death spiral.

The takeaway, from what I csn see, is that when Christian denominations cave to secular pressure, it kills them fairly quickly, especially over the LGBTQ issue. Rome must certainly be aware of these trends, which has almost certainly, if very quietly, affected the outcome of the recent synod.