As I begin my presentation to you, I first want to make it clear to you that if you are not exactly certain about what the Catholic Conference is, you are not alone. The Catholic Conference of Kentucky (which I will refer to as CCK) is a well-kept secret, perhaps with the exception of those times during which the General Assembly is in session and we are engaged in dialogue around some of the policy questions. We are a result of the Kentucky bishops’ decision many years ago to combine their resources and work in collaboration among the four dioceses to advance the mutual public policy and pastoral interests of the Archdiocese of Louisville and the Dioceses of Owensboro, Covington and Lexington. The Conference Board of Directors is composed of the four Catholic Bishops of Kentucky. Conference policy related to public affairs is developed by committees representative of the four Dioceses, with each committee focusing on key areas of Church political concerns. Positions of public policy developed by the committees and endorsed by the Conference’s Board of Directors are advocated in Kentucky and in Washington, D.C. In Kentucky, Conference representatives work in Frankfort with the General Assembly, Governor and state agencies. In Washington, D.C., the primary public policy effort of the Conference is directed toward Kentucky’s delegation to the U.S. Congress.

There are two other programs housed with CCK in Frankfort with which you may be familiar, Kentucky League for Educational Alternatives (KLEA) and Opportunities for Life (OFL). KLEA was created in 1993 to assist in representing those issues of specific concern to the future of Catholic Education. KLEA lobbies on behalf of Catholic school students and their families for a range of benefits: transportation, vouchers, tax credits are all part of the KLEA blueprint. Since 1986, Opportunities for Life has offered personal, confidential help to those experiencing an untimely pregnancy. Established as a statewide pastoral outreach ministry of Kentucky’s bishops, OFL’s caring, trained volunteers provide a network of hope and life-affirming solutions to people in a desperate time of need. OFL offers a 24-hour, toll-free hotline with volunteers who respect their confidentiality, demonstrate their compassion and understanding, and assist callers to access resources and appropriate opportunities.

I want to thank you for allowing me to be a part of this important gathering. I hope that you are finding your time together as a source of strength and support for the wonderful work that you do as you live out your vocation of service to our Lord and his people in this Diocese. I feel certain that you often think and feel the way that I do, that being that the difficult tasks of our ministry are made much easier by our gift of working with Bishop McRaith, a source of real inspiration as he shepherds us through the challenges of faithful living.

When I was asked to participate in this convocation, Fr. Meredith invited me and others to speak freely and so I shall during our hour together. I’d like to speak with you, from my perspective, about several areas of concern: the call of the Gospel message, a contemporary analysis of the American Catholic, and my thoughts on how to address these challenges. I think that it is important to emphasize that although I will use some data which describes Catholics and their sacramental engagement in their faith, this will be basically for descriptive purposes. It is not my intention to offer a fix on some of these issues, but rather to use this as a description of who we are - and then to move on to an analysis of where the contemporary Catholic is with regard to their political preferences around key issues as they either face or do not face the living out of Catholic teaching.

Let us begin with a review of what it is that the Gospel calls us to do: As the U.S. bishops wrote in their papal letter entitled "Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics" released in November, 1998, "While our personal vocation may determine the form and style of our witness, Jesus calls each of us to be a leaven in society, and we will be judged by our actions." The bishops go on to write that "We believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a ‘Gospel of life.’ It invites all persons and societies to a new life lived abundantly in respect for human dignity. We believe that this Gospel is not only a complement to American political principles, but also the cure for the spiritual sickness now infecting our society. As Scripture says, no house can stand divided against itself (Lk 11:17). We cannot simultaneously commit ourselves to human rights and progress while eliminating or marginalizing the weakest among us. Nor can we practice the Gospel of life only as a private piety. American Catholics must live it vigorously and publicly, as a matter of national leadership and witness, or we will not live it at all."

Vigorously and publicly – are we meeting this call? I say that we have so much work to do and I come to you today, quite candidly, to have a conversation, within the family so to speak, about the state of the contemporary Catholic. There remains today some perception about where the average Catholic is on a number of critical issues, but I suggest that the reality offers us a tremendous challenge as it is my belief and my experience that this average Catholic is more of a product of his/her secular culture than of the teachings of the Church. And so I would like to share with you data that has been gathered by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) housed at Georgetown University. I have found this most recent work (gathered during the Fall of 2000) to be helpful in my attempt to understand who this Catholic is, how does this Catholic relate to the Church, and where is this Catholic on key moral issues that are at the forefront of public policy dialogue today.

CARA’s National Parish Inventory now covers 16,860 parishes, or 87% of all parishes in the U.S. An average parish church is filled to approximately 58% of capacity over the course of all the Saturday Vigil and Sunday Masses celebrated during a typical weekend. Attendance figures for a typical weekend represent about 43% of the total number of registered members of an average parish. Using the figure of 966 average attenders per parish, the estimated number of Mass-attending Catholics for all parishes on a given weekend is 18,680,508. This is 31% of the Official Catholic Directory reported number of all Catholics in the U.S. The Catholic Church is the single largest religious body in the United States, with more members than the next 12 largest religious bodies combined.

As CARA did its research, it broke Catholics out into four categories, but placed its research emphasis on the "Young Adult Generation". The categories break out as follows:

In this portion of my presentation, I will focus on the "Young Adult Generation" as it, obviously, has much to do with the future look of this Church we love. In its research during the year 2000, CARA had a number of major findings.

Although nearly half of Young Adult Catholics are still single, those who have married are less likely than the older generations to be married to another Catholic.

Young Adult Catholics are more likely to have finished college, less likely to have attended Catholic grade school, and more likely to have attended CCD. They are less likely to say that their Catholic faith is "very important" to them, to attend Mass weekly, or to be registered parishioners. However, they are only slightly less likely to describe themselves as "spiritual" persons. Only one out of four young Catholics self-describes as "very weakly" committed to Church.

Along with members of the Vatican II Generation, Young Adults are much less likely than members of the two older generations to say that each of the following six factors is "very important" to their sense of what it means to be Catholic: (1) the Eucharist, (2) attending Mass, (3) passing on the faith to the next generation, (4) following Church teachings, (5) learning more about the Catholic faith, and (6) participating in devotions such as Eucharistic Adoration or praying the rosary. In contrast to this, there are no significant generational differences in the proportion who say that helping people in need is "very important" to their sense of what it means to be Catholic.

Young Adult Catholics are more likely than members of the older three generations to say that feeling welcome and opportunities to help the poor and needy would increase their participation in parish life. With the Young Adult Generation, Catholics in their 20s are more likely than Young Adults in their 30s to desire more opportunities to help the poor and needy.

If you look at where the four generations are relative to income, one in five Young Adult Catholics is a member of a household that earns $80,000 per year or more and only one in ten members each of the Young Adult and Vatican II Generations belong to a household that earns less than $20,000 per year. The odds of falling into this low income category increase with age, thus a clear picture of youthful affluence among Catholics beginning to emerge.

In returning to the matter of self-describing as spiritual, 79% of Young Adult Catholics say that they consider themselves "spiritual" persons. Slightly higher percentages of the older three generations consider themselves "spiritual" (86-87%). In general, those who describe themselves as "spiritual" persons tend to display relatively high levels of commitment to the Catholic Church. This is especially true for members of the Young Adult Generation. The data tells us that Young Adult and World War II males are especially unlikely to describe themselves as "spiritual".

There is a consistency among Catholics of all generations who say that it is "very important" to their sense of what it means to be Catholic to extend help to persons in need.

Let us return to the point that there continues to be a perception held by some that Catholics believe in a certain way, act in a certain way, and vote in a certain way. And for many, the belief is that Catholics are well-educated in the teachings of the Church, hold true to the teachings of their Church, and that there is, in fact, a block voting by Catholics. CARA did extensive research in the Fall of 2000 to determine the political preferences of Catholics during the election season. Again, I would like to summarize some of the major findings. The data indicated that Catholics are almost evenly divided in describing themselves as "pro-life" or "pro-choice." Although a majority of Catholics favor the death penalty, a significant percentage of Catholics have recently changed their view and now oppose it. Catholics express a wide range of opinion on abortion depending on the specific circumstance involved. In a repeated theme, it was found that frequent Mass attendance, high levels of involvement in religious activities, and an important role for religious faith in daily life increases the likelihood that Catholics agree that society is responsible for helping the poor out of poverty.

More than three-fourths of Catholics say they draw on their Catholic faith and values at least "a little" in making political choices. Slightly over half of Catholics say they would want a priest to urge parishioners to support or oppose specific laws or to contact their elected officials. Only one in ten Catholics would want a priest to urge parishioners to support or oppose a specific political party or candidate. We will deal with this in more detail later in this presentation.

One-third of Catholics perceive an anti-Catholic bias in America. About one in three thinks politically active evangelical Protestant groups, the entertainment media, and liberals are hostile toward Catholics.

The CARA research took a look at how Catholics who view themselves in particular ways with regard to Mass attendance, religious involvement, and the extent to which they draw upon their faith and values expressed their support for the two major political candidates.

Furthermore, we have some insight into the type of issues which will influence the Catholic voter’s choice the most:

I would like to turn your attention at this time to several specific areas of Catholic moral teaching and spend some time in analysis of where Catholics are on these matters. In this first table, we will examine Catholics’ abortion attitudes and we will come from three perspectives: Catholics who self-describe as "pro-life", Catholics who describe themselves as "pro-choice", and Catholics who "support the legality of abortion.

In addition to abortion, the CARA research has given us a snapshot of where American Catholics are with regard to capital punishment and physician-assisted suicide.

In a straightforward "up" or "down" support or opposition for abortion, capital punishment and physician-assisted suicide, 34% of American Catholics oppose abortion, 40% oppose capital punishment, and 49% of Catholics oppose physician-assisted suicide. To look at this from the reverse, 66% of American Catholics support legalized abortion, 61% support capital punishment, and 51% support physician assisted-suicide. Only 15% of American Catholics oppose all three, and, of cause for even more concern, 32% of American Catholics oppose none of the three.

On a hopeful note, it appears that of Catholics who oppose the death penalty, one third have experienced some change of heart more recently, thus acknowledging fertile ground for a renewed abolition effort.

In spite of the picture that some of these statistics are painting, the CARA research tells us that Catholics are aware of their Church leaders speaking out on the death penalty, physician-assisted suicide, and to a lesser extend, third world debt.

On the other hand, among Catholics who say they have not heard their Church leaders speaking out on these issues, a large percentage are able to intuitively determine the position of the Church.

The CARA research tells us that there is a desire among American Catholics to have their priest offer some guidance on the difficult issues of the day. However, support for this varies according to each type of guidance.

It is my belief as the director of the Catholic Conference, as someone who spends a fair amount of time in a variety of settings with Catholics, that there is cause for optimism for the future of our Church. We attach a positive value to being spiritual, we recognize the connection between our faith and our care for the poor, we are often able, because of our foundational background, to intuitively determine the position of the Church on key issues, and, on a national level, our numbers are large. I do have grave concern however for the large numbers of Catholics who are not with us on some of the critical issues our Church and policy makers are facing. I grow anxious when our numbers begin to look more like the broader population and lose a specific Catholic-teachings focused look. And I express regret that the rich body of Catholic social teaching is not being studied, discussed, owned, and lived to the extent that it deserves.

As a layperson, I am in awe of the commitment that you have made to your God and to this Church. But I challenge you to lift up this body of teaching, to give us more challenge on the demands of the Gospel and Catholic tradition. We need a more full communication that reaches out to all of the members of our Catholic family. I ask you to return to the document released by the U.S. bishops in June of 1998, "Sharing Catholic Social Teaching - Challenges and Directions" with its blueprint for this and make it a part of the plan for your parish and your diocese. I recognize that the influences of the secular world can only be described as overwhelming, but I ask that the Church not shy away from offering its alternative, that being the message of the lived Gospel.