Catholics Called Back to the Fold

By ELAINE GALE

Oct. 24, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The Roman Catholic Church in Orange County is stepping up efforts to bring disaffected parishioners back into the fold--in some cases by borrowing techniques from evangelical megachurches that have lured them away.

With outreach to divorced Catholics, modern music and an extra effort at hospitality, the church hopes to bring back former parishioners, who make up as much as half of the membership of some Orange County megachurches.

Defined as congregations of 2,000 or more, megachurches are popular in suburban Orange County. They place a premium on welcoming people of various backgrounds, providing places where disaffected Catholics can worship without fully shedding their Catholic identity, experts say.

“There’s a large number of Catholics who have dropped out of the Catholic Church and have ended up in these megachurches,” said Father Thomas Rausch, professor and chairman of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “Some people are attracted by what they think is a more personal kind of faith.”

Catholic leaders and researchers say there are few statistics to gauge how many are leaving for megachurches. But in Orange County, the Catholic population has remained steady at about 600,000 for many years despite immigration of Catholics from Mexico and Vietnam.

The large number of Catholic immigrants and the popularity of megachurches in Orange County--such as Saddleback Valley Community Church, Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa and Mariners Church of Irvine--make it a key battleground in the membership struggle.

People fall away from the Catholic Church for many reasons, often after bad experiences with clergy or conflicts with church prohibitions against divorce, birth control or abortion, said Carol Koppenheffer, who runs a program for disaffected Catholics at St. Irenaeus Church in Cypress.

Bill Walls, a retired aerospace engineer from Fullerton, said it was his experience with nuns in a Long Beach Catholic school as a child that drove him away. With a Baptist father and a Catholic mother, Walls resented their insistence that only Catholics could go to heaven.

“That used to tear me apart,” said Walls, who left the church for over 30 years because of his simmering resentment before returning via the program at the Cypress church.

While the conflicts over Catholic doctrine and practices that drive some parishioners away are old, megachurches have provided a new place for displaced worshipers to go, experts say.

Megachurches stress practical messages over religious dogma, emphasize personal connections to God rather than a relationship mediated by priests, and by virtue of their sheer size allow worshipers some anonymity if they desire it.

“Some people moved to California for the same reason: They want to get lost in an anonymous crowd,” said Msgr. Lawrence J. Baird, spokesman for the diocese. “They can do that better in a megachurch.”

Almost half of parishioners at the Saddleback megachurch are former Catholics, according to membership receptionist Tracy Peters. A similar pattern is seen at Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton, where the largest group of members also is former Catholics, said Jenni Key, director of communications for the church.

One Orange County megachurch leader acknowledged that many new members join because they are unhappy with their former denominations--including the Roman Catholic Church. “We give people what they really need,” said Kenton Beshore, senior pastor at Mariners Church in Irvine. “I hold on to dusty doctrines--I just find a different way to translate them into the world.”

Indeed, megachurches like Mariners offer lively sermons with multimedia presentations and contemporary music--modern packaging that the Catholic Church doesn’t even pretend to match.

“It’s a lot more emotional and high-tech, and they’re not getting that in the Catholic Church,” said Koppenheffer of St. Irenaeus.

The relatively formal and institutional character of the Catholic Church is a problem for many middle-aged parishioners, said Eddie Gibbs, professor of church growth at the nondenominational Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

“Yuppie Catholics are reacting against the remote kind of liturgy and formalism of the church,” Gibbs said. “They are looking for something more relational. Boomers are highly suspicious of institutions and hierarchies.”

Gibbs said many are also reacting to what some see as the church’s heavy-handed moralism. “They feel a young married pastor will understand them better than the celibate priest,” he said.

Plus, many say, megachurches are better at selling themselves. “These churches are in the evangelical tradition, so they see going out after others as a basic part of their faith,” said Rausch. “The Catholic Church hasn’t been very evangelical.”

But that’s changing, said the Rev. John Hurley, director of evangelization for the National Conference of Catholic bishops, based in Washington, D.C.

Pope John Paul II called the Catholic Church into a period of heightened evangelization leading up to Jubilee 2000, the Catholic millennial celebration, Hurley said. Since then, there has been more outreach to inactive Catholics across the country as the church rallies for better retention.

Locally, the Orange County diocese has launched myriad programs to retain members--including outreach to divorced people and those who have had abortions. The diocese even has a director of evangelization.

Koppenheffer’s program at St. Irenaeus to get inactive Catholics back into church, called “Coming Home,” is part of that effort. Along with the “Remembering” program at Our Lady Queen of Angels in Newport Beach, it is one of the best known programs for lapsed Catholics.

The six-week Coming Home program features an open discussion with a priest and aims to ease people’s guilt about a prolonged absence from church, misunderstandings with a former priest or lingering hurts from Catholic school that may have kept them from attending Mass.

“People come in angry and very scared, not quite sure if they want to walk through the door,” said Koppenheffer. “They’re ready for a fight. But then there’s a real healing and mellowing and a support system builds among the participants.”

Some of the questions have included: What is the church’s response to priest misconduct? What is the church’s stand on sex outside marriage?

The success rate is good, with about two-thirds of participants rejoining the church, say organizers.

For example, it had been 12 years since Colleen Marubayashi cupped her hands together to take communion. She longed for that familiar feeling of peace when she slipped the thin wafer into her mouth and prayed.

Now she’s very active in her church and goes back to Coming Home nights to help other wavering Catholics back into the pews.

“We all know that the Catholic Church has had problems in the past,” she said. “But going to these meetings, you realize that you’re not totally off the wall” to have conflicts with the church. “It makes your faith stronger.”

The Catholic Church also is learning about evangelization from the megachurches.

Rausch said the church is borrowing megachurch techniques such as an emphasis on hospitality, more modern music and more homilies that are relevant to the day-to-day life of the person in the pew.

Koppenheffer said St. Irenaeus picked up ideas such as providing greeters at the curb for Sunday Mass. “By the time people hit the parking lot here, we have people to welcome them,” she said.

In the end, however, it’s a lot more than public relations and selling the Catholic Church. Priests say rituals like confession and Communion are powerful tools in the struggle to bring parishioners back.

“The Catholic Church gives people the structure that they need,” said Baird. “To come back to celebrate Mass and the reception of the sacraments is marvelous.”

Priests acknowledge that the ceremony and the requirements of the Catholic faith are more strict than those imposed by other churches--but say the payoff is greater as well.

“There are always going to be individuals who are disaffected from the Catholic Church, perhaps because they find the precepts of the church too difficult to follow,” said Baird.

“Hopefully, in the Catholic Church you hear more about following the cross and that there is such a reality as sin. Sometimes those parts of Jesus’ message are missing [at other churches] for the sake of popularizing the Gospel.”

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Catholic Masses

Catholics remain the largest denomination by far in Orange County and nationwide, claiming more than half of adults with a religious affiliation.

Orange County, 1998

Catholic: 606,484

Muslim: 120,000

Jewish: 80,000*

Mormon: 60,000

Southern Baptist: 40,000

Lutheran: 19,347**

Presbyterian: 18,000

Methodist: 16,000