The church will become small ...She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built [like CAF]

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The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members…
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–Pope Benedict XVI
Jon_Sorensen said:
On Thursday December 31 at 5pm PT, Catholic Answers will close the Catholic Answers Forums (CAF). …
Because Catholic Answers has limited resources, we are always evaluating our programs to determine if they provide a good return on investment. …
When we add to the inconclusive value of the forums, the significant cost in financial resources and personnel time to host, operate, and to what degree we can, govern them, Catholic Answers can no longer justify the effort.
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MarysLurker said:
COVID made it impossible for in person events or services to be provided. However, the virus caused a global shift to digital platforms. This should have resulted in a commensurate increase in the usage of these forums… but it did not.

If you look at Mr. Check’s letter, he says that the problem with the forums is not that CA doesn’t have the money to run them. The problem is that not enough people actually use and benefit from them to justify the expenses.

Edit: here is an analysis that I did of the user statistics . Before the closure was announced, there were at most around 70 registered users per day. This is during COVID, in fact during an unfortunate surge which should have increased demand for the forums. Mr. Check’s conclusions are confirmed by the data, as hard as it is for us to accept
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What other forums on the Internet are similar to CAF? said:
I’ve said before that CAF is a microcosm of the future of the Church. It looks like that is coming to pass. Now we have the parish closures which will leave behind a smaller, faithful remnant (on other fora) a la Benedict XVI’s prophecy.
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MarysLurker said:
If you are familiar with the concept of the Benedict Option, and the arguments for and around it, the concept of many small and focused web “missions” replacing the one big declining “parish” is intuitive.
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I respectfully submit to you that the closure of CAF is a confirmation and a prediction of the prophecy of Pope Emeritus Benedict. It is also evidence that the Catholic Church cannot engage the mainstream culture because it has definitively rejected the Church, as evidenced by proven demographic trends.

Building big high profile institutions like CAF to engage the culture will not work. Similarly, large scale attempts to dialogue with the culture will fail. This is evidenced by the failure of Pope Francis’s novel attempts at evangelization through such dialogue. There is no “Francis effect” and no rush of Francis-inspired RCIA enrollment.

The answer is to focus not on engaging the world but on engaging ourselves and our local communities so as to build small, strong Catholic communities: arks to the coming flood.
In his recent book, “The Benedict Option,” Dreher calls the new societal trends and values “The Flood,” and argues that Christians can no longer fight the flood - they must figure out a way to ride it out and preserve their faith for generations to come.

“…American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears,” he writes.

“The idea is that serious Christian conservatives could no longer live business-as-usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them.”
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– CNA review.

The Benedict Option means:
  • Given the profound crisis of culture (which has affected the Church as well), we cannot look to mainstream institutions for our future.
  • Rather, we need to form intentional communities that more fully embody our Christian faith and in which we are willing to face the consequences of going against the stream.
  • It is from such institutions that real cultural change will occur.
This does not mean total withdrawal from the world. It means building small communities of intentional disciples from which missionaries can be sent to the world. By focusing inward, the new communities can become stronger and sustainable. Such small, sustainable Catholic communities must replace the large institutions, as asserted by the Pope Emeritus. For example, small Catholic forums must replace big public forums like CAF. Small, focused parishes must replace the traditional mega parish. New, small Catholic schools must replace toxic public schools and failing legacy Catholic schools.

All of this is tough to hear. But it must be said.
 
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With respect, CAF is not closing because there aren’t enough Catholics willing to pay for the maintenance of this forum. It’s closing because the atmosphere is so toxic that no one wants to pay for it to be maintained.
 
MarysLurker said:
This does not mean total withdrawal from the world. It means building small communities of intentional disciples from which missionaries can be sent to the world.
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Unless as Catholics we’ve been living with our head in the sand, we’d know the enormity of the Catholic presence in this area for the entire history of the Church.

"…the Church runs 5,500 hospitals, 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly and those with special needs, with 65 percent of them located in underdeveloped and developing countries.

Catholic Church: Largest provider of health care services

The review of the history of medical care begins not with the Monastic Rule of Saint Benedict (AD 480–550) that articulates the tenet: “The care of the sick is to be placed above and before every other duty, as if Christ were being directly served.”

From the Gospel to the early Christian communities to the Benedictine Rule, Christ was the inspiration. The Catholic Church’s institutional apostolate for the sick gave rise to the gradual development of a more systematic nursing and medical care of today.

To fast forward a bit, during the Middle Ages (500 AD to 1500 AD), monasteries, bishops’ houses, and convents became the key medical centers of Europe. The Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres, founded in 1696, are dedicated to nursing, visiting the poor, and taking care of the old and infirm, orphans, and the mentally ill. Today, with operations worldwide, they have about 121 Sisters in the Philippines working in 13 hospitals.

Nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale, who cared for the British troops during the Crimean War (1853-1856), once said: “ What training is there to compare with that of a Catholic nun.”

Around 4,500 Missionary Sisters of Charity (founded in 1950 by Mother Teresa) care for hundreds of thousands of poor refugees, mentally ill, the aged and convalescent, sick and abandoned children, lepers, and people with AIDS – in addition to running schools to educate street children and managing soup kitchens around the world.

“The Church, adhering to the mandate of Jesus… during the course of her history, which by now has lasted two millennia, has always attended to the sick and the suffering,” reported the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers in 2013.

Immersed and yet transcendent, rooted on earth and yet yearning for heaven, the Church does not have all the technical solutions to the problems afflicting the world, Benedict XVI admitted in 2009, days after the G8 Summit in Italy, but she remains “an expert in humanity” who proclaims the Gospel of love and justice.

The Catholic Church aids humanity to be fully alive to give greater glory to God. As Saint Ireneaus nicely put it: “ Gloria Dei vivens homo .”

Lets take this opportunity as an “oh wow” moment to realize that our pontificating on the internet is nothing really that important compared to the millions of Catholics already out in the world serving as Jesus showed us.

 
Motherwit said:
"…the Church runs 5,500 hospitals, 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly and those with special needs, with 65 percent of them located in underdeveloped and developing countries
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And the Methodists have a lot of hospitals too but when was the last time you saw one?

You changed the topic.

Anyway, here are the numbers. Unless you’re in Africa, things look bad.

 
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MarysLurker said:
This proves the point that toxicity is all that dialogue with the zeitgeist gives you.
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The zeitgeist did not create the draconic moderation years ago that purged away many good members who simply had a bad day. Nor the influx of trolls who would run rampant for hours making account after account before getting banned.
 
MarysLurker said:
Again, I rest.
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The Church has had agitators since its very foundation. It doesn’t help your case. The problem wasn’t that they existed, the problem was they kept coming back and wrecking havoc for way too long, and non-mods could hardly do anything about it.

You’re oversimplifying why this forum is going away.
 
No Internet forums are succeeding, period. It’s a dead medium. That’s not exclusive to those that are Catholic.
 
I’m not so sure CAF was ever as high profile as some people seem to think.

I’ve never been to a Church or parish that publishes “online resources” that even mentions it.

I myself stumbled across it by accident and decided to join.

But it barely blips the radar of the Web
 
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Yes. CAF has always been a barely significant extension of the Catholic Church. It was a worthy experiment in the internet age, to try an online Catholic community. It’s still a good concept. At least we learned how not to do it.
 
FrankFletcher said:
No Internet forums are succeeding, period. It’s a dead medium. That’s not exclusive to those that are Catholic
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0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
But it barely blips the radar of the Web
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Facebook and YouTube are definitely on the radar. And we all know what happens when you try to evangelize there.

It is not that we are using the wrong medium. It is that they don’t want the message, so they shoot the messenger.
 
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Beryllos said:
Yes. CAF has always been a barely significant extension of the Catholic Church. It was a worthy experiment in the internet age, to try an online Catholic community. It’s still a good concept. At least we learned how not to do it.
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Somewhere I heard that CA and CAF were a foil to the Jack Chick tracts that had been put on peoples windscreens outside a Sunday Mass. It’s now become a battleground between Catholics which would be a great joy to people like Jack Chick.
 
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I evangelize on Facebook by posting inspirational Christian and Catholic messages, pretty memes, that sort of thing
 
In terms of experiments, I think in future something more like Reddit (plus active moderation, plus formal apologist involvement and publicly identified priest roles, and maybe even clearly distinguishing users by religious affiliation so new users understand when Catholics genuinely disagree about something, versus a hoarde of Protestants/agnostics/atheists disagreeing with Catholics on their thread) could be positive.

The big benefit of Reddit’s structure is that top-rated comments move to the top, so the most helpful answers – as voted by the community, or pinned by an admin – stay right near the question, and a person doesn’t have to dig through hundreds of (contentious, confusing) posts for it.

I think internet technology can still be helpful for the Church in future – but yeah, this wasn’t it.
 
The moderation is pretty bad, unpopular comments are removed if enough people flag them meaning there is little room for different viewpoints.
 
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AlNg said:
Muslim membership up by more than 200%.
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Precisely because Muslims have built faithful Benedict Option-type enclaves out of necessity. That 200% growth isn’t from converts, it is from babies and immigrants who are then formed in the BO enclave. We need to learn from that.

It starts by realizing the culture is against you and that dialogue is counterproductive. Muslims get that, so Muslim kids and immigrants dwell in enclaves. We don’t, so we send our kids into the culture and lose 3 in 4. We have more immigrants than Muslims, and we spend millions supporting immigrants, but then we send them and their kids into the culture… same.

Enough.
 
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