I don’t want to argue if Catholics are Christians, something that some Protestant believe. Before its embrace of ecumenicalism in the 1960s, the Catholic Church viewed Protestants as outside the real Church. Although the difference between the two can be viewed as being substantial, both Protestants and Catholics aspire to worship the same God, Jesus Christ. In a world which increasingly is at war with Christianity, we should be very careful who we call our enemy. Faith in Jesus is what matters, specifically that He died on the cross to pay the price for our sin, and whether you demonstrate your faith in that by praying the sinner’s pray at the altar or by abiding by the Holy Sacraments, Jesus is at the heart of both branches of the Christian tree. Jesus embraces those who seek Him, however they do that.

And Catholic Christians are leaving parishes in America as quickly as Protestants are leaving churches. Whether those parishes were touched by the charismatic revival that impacted many or not, the Church has declined drastically since the 1980s. There have been a number of Popes during that time, but whether the Pope was a political activist like John Paul II or a social activist like Pope Francis, none of them has stopped Catholicism from dying in the United States.

I’ll discuss the reasons for the decline of Christianity in America later. Many of those reasons equally affect Protestants and Catholics, but the Catholic church has been uniquely impacted by a crippling scandal – sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. Celibacy is an ancient Christian practice that the Catholic Church has demanded of its priests. Although an anachronism during the sexual Revolution that started in America in the 1960s, most never questioned the legitimacy of those who took that vow. Priests hold a powerful position in Catholic parishes. They are presented as an embodiment of Jesus Himself. Parents joyfully release their children to priests, fully trusting them. In the late part of the 20th Century, it was discovered that many priests had sexually abused those children, shattering the idea that men representing God were trustworthy. What’s worse, it was discovered that Church officials had in many cases known about the abuse and covered it up, transferring abusers from parish to parish, leaving a trail of damaged youth in their wake.

If this wasn’t catastrophic enough, things got even worse when those who had been abused sued the Catholic Church. At this point, it was revealed that the Church had already paid what could only be described as hush money to some who had more privately demanded compensation. When massive settlements were awarded to those who had been abused, it became apparent that the Catholic Church had vast amounts of money with which to pay many of these settlements. People were aware that churches didn’t pay taxes, but they didn’t know the amount of money the Church actually had, or that it often used that money in ways that had nothing to do with meeting the needs of parishioners . This was a one-two punch for many American Catholics, who abandoned the Church in horror. If Christianity had a meaningful place in society because it provided a moral compass, that function came into doubt. A doubt that would spill into the 21st Century.