In past centuries, human history attests to many instances in which the Catholic Church has wielded great (if not determinant) influence, not just on matters pertaining to the Christian Faith but in matters of politics and even war.
In the distant past, one recalls how, around 455 AD, Pope Leo persuaded Attila the Hun to turn back from invading Rome.
Attila was so impressed by the Pope's personal courage in making his case the he granted the Pope’s request and, in the words of a Medieval chronicler, “ordered his army to give up warfare … and departed.”
Here in America in the 20th century, politicians knew that local Bishops could deliver the votes of the Catholic faithful. Most Catholics were fairly recent immigrants, and the Bishops won voter support by being “their advocates in an often-unwelcoming land.”
Most recently, we note that in the 1980s, U.S. international aid policy “was changed as a result of the Vatican's not agreeing” with it. In 1984, the White House replaced a decades-long policy of awarding aid funds to family-planning initiatives abroad with a ban on aid to any organizations that promoted abortion or contraception.
Today, Bishops around the world still speak out on public issues.
Their voices, however, lack any lingering moral authority they might have had, especially in an era of growing secularization and the wholesale abandonment of religious values in the public square.
For the most part, Catholics appear to have assimilated mainstream political and social agendas thus depriving the Church of any significant influence upon government policy or civic culture.
On most issues, the Church has little persuasion over political leaders in America and elsewhere.
Even in traditionally Catholic countries such as Poland, where 92 % of the population is Catholic, lawmakers and the citizenry increasingly ignore Church teachings. In the southern Poland town of Czestochowa, whose monastery and iconic Black Madonna painting have long attracted pilgrims, the mayor hopes to allow in vitro fertility treatments for couples, over strong Church opposition.
In Ireland, a country among the most fervently Catholic, the Church has become “a strange ghostly presence," as one Irish commentator recently charged. Though Parish Priests have continued to control most primary schools, only 28 % of the public — 88 % of whom are Catholic — said in an opinion poll that they favor such Church control
In the United States, surveys typically find that many Catholics, including weekly Mass-goers, disagree with many official church policy positions.
In a February 2018, a survey (New York Times/CBS News) reported that three-quarters of Catholics said they approve of abortion under some circumstances and three-fifths support the death penalty, although Church teachings reject both abortion and capital punishment.
In the face of such factual evidence that the Church has lost its public moral voice, one would think the Bishops would take notice of what has led to this sad state and what, if anything, could revitalize the influence which the Gospel should exert in the exigencies of modern human history.
But, sadly, it seems the Bishops are more concerned with internal squabbles about rules and rituals affecting the few faithful who still hang on (with great fragility) to their Catholic heritage.
Where this is all leading is known only to the Holy Spirit, Whose intercession we constantly seek in the affairs of life, religious and mundane.
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