It's Sunday morning and Ray Barone of "Everyone Loves Raymond" is still in his pajamas, robe, and slippers, with a day's growth of beard, looking forward to a day of watching sports on television.Meanwhile his wife, children, older brother, and parents are dressed in their Sunday best, ready to go to Mass together.
"Why don't you come with us, Daddy?" his 7-year old daughter pleads. Ray, who plays a sports columnist in the sitcom, replies lamely that he needs to watch TV for his work.
One-fourth of Americans, young and old, are Catholics -- our nation's largest minority. Some of them, like the fictional Raymond, are reluctant churchgoers.
Yet their sense of identity as Catholics is as strong as that of secular Jews and Muslims to their own cultures.
It's rare to find anyone who calls himself an ex-Catholic, which illustrates the old saw, "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic."
Not counting Sunday sleep-ins like Raymond, the Catholic Church is hard-pressed to serve those who show up regularly. There is a dire shortage of priests. Today, for every 100 priests who die, retire, or resign, the seminaries are producing only 30 to 40 replacements.
To compensate for the shortage of clergy, the typical Catholic parish has expanded itself in an attempt to serve more than 3,000 members.
For comparison, half of Protestant congregations in the United States serve no more than 75 members.
The fictional Barones send their young children to a Catholic school, where lay people teach because there is a shortage of sisters. There are simply not enough nuns any longer. In three decades, the number of sisters in America has shrunk by two-thirds.
One reason for the shrinkage is that the church routinely took nuns for granted as cheap labor. Because they were not given salaries, the sisters were ineligible for Social Security, and lacked private savings to maintain themselves in old age.
To remedy this situation, in recent decades many sisters have taken paying positions in service organizations, not all of them affiliated with the Catholic Church.
Sister Sandra M. Schneiders of the Jesuit School of Theology In Berkeley, Calif., complains that church authorities think of us as a "work force" for Catholic agencies," whereas we are...living the life of total dedication to Christ (with) a profound concern for the good of all humanity," not only Catholics.
The Vatican recently ordered two sweeping investigations of all American sisters except cloistered nuns. An American nun who lives in Rome, Mother Mary Clare Millea, superior general of her order, is leading one investigation. With teams of investigators she will "look into the quality of life" of women's religious institutes.
The second investigation aims to determine (among other things) whether American sisters are failing to promote the church's teaching on male-only priesthood, homosexuality, and the primacy of the Catholic Church as the road to salvation.
Whether or not the nuns pass the Vatican's tests, there won't be enough of them to teach Ray Barone's children.
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