(Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture) — It’s the Age of the Laity and all that, but Stephen Millies, writing for the National Catholic Reporter, worries that things are getting out of hand.
“Who owns the brand?” The honest answer probably is that it no longer is owned (at least in the same way it used to be) by the successors of the apostles, our bishops and pastors.
Millies illustrates his point by showing that organizations run by lay Catholics are raising large sums of money, even while the bishops are seeing a decline in diocesan and parish offerings. (The amount of money collected, apparently, is what determines who “owns the brand” of Catholicism.
While bishops and pastors struggle to sustain schools and soup kitchens—indeed, while the U.S. bishops contemplate shuttering the Catholic Campaign for Human Development—Catholics contribute hundreds of millions of dollars each year to these (and many other) activist and social communication organizations that have redefined the Catholic “brand” in the United States.
