By David Warren

But first, a note from Robert Royal: David Warren's observations today remind us that not only do we have struggles over particular issues inside and outside the Church. We even have a huge educational task ahead: teaching people who claim to be Catholic - and perhaps even aspire to be faithfully so - what the Church stands for. And why. At The Catholic Thing, we try to address that whole range of challenges. Please help. The time to act is now.

Now for Mr. Warren's column...

Even before the Batflu lockdowns, which began in 2020, a desolation in the Catholic Church had become apparent.

Although statistics must necessarily be inadequate to convey it, we can get a vague glimpse through the surveys. What, we wonder, do Catholics "really" believe?

I say vague because we can't ask simply who believes and who does not believe what they have been taught. For one thing emerges from the research rather clearly: that "modern" Roman Catholics aren't taught very well.

This works both ways. Those who don't go to church don't learn what is taught, and those who haven't been taught don't go to church. But we can't realistically compare the worlds of past ages. We have only romantic or cynical impressions.

Yet there is evidence of a decline towards debilitation in the last fifty or sixty years. Demonstrably, church attendance has fallen dramatically.

According to a fairly thorough study by the Pew Forum, done just before the Batflu hit, it was established that less than a third of living Catholics were practicing actual Catholicism, by holding the most basic Catholic belief.

I do not think that the lockdowns improved this circumstance, though I haven't seen "scientific" counts. But that minority of outwardly declared Catholics who had been attending, found themselves in many cases locked out of church. In the time since, many would seem to have wandered away.

Let me refresh the reader's memory of that last Pew report on us, from 2019.

Some 69 percent of self-identifying Catholics did not accept transubstantiation. That is to say, they did not consider the Real Presence to be Real, even to the standard of opinion polling.

Instead, a majority of them believe that the bread and wine in the sacrifice of the Mass are merely "symbols" of something.

The Real Presence of Our Lord is thus disbelieved. Yet of those disbelievers, a large minority of those who sometimes made it to Mass were aware that the Church does in fact teach the Real Presence. Most still rejected Church teaching on this, and incidentally on other issues.

A considerable number (chiefly of those no longer attending the Mass) are confused even about the symbol. Their Reason must have left them along with their Faith.

Bishop Barron and some others have specifically addressed this "crisis"; a selection of senior clergy have given some indication of panic; and the small section of what we call "traditionalists" (i.e. Catholics who sport Catholic views) are resisting, daily and weekly.

But disbelief is "a problem" not only for Roman Catholics but also among the Greek, Russian, and Oriental Orthodox, and in those Protestant realms where some version of the Eucharist is still sometimes celebrated.

Beyond the churches, the modern mind finds the doctrine of the Real Presence implausible. The churches are emptying wherever modern life gathers on the streets outside; wherever men and women feel genuinely free not to think about it.

For the curious thing is that the Real Presence is more commonly believed among those who think, and enjoy better education in the most tangible forms, everywhere. This must be understood to confront the challenge of "re-evangelizing" the congregations that have "got away."

The distinction between wisdom and raw crass IQ is not entirely unknown. Wisdom intrudes upon intelligence by its sincerity, and by demanding full attention. The glibness of modernity is, by this definition, unwise.

In general, in Africa and China, the believer is compelled to b...