"Catholicism these days asks very little"

At CatholicVote.org, Bradley Birzer interviews Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative:

BB: What do you see as the future of Catholicism? 

DMcC: There are challenges ahead for Catholicism that will make the last century look placid. For all the talk about the global south becoming the population center of Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, the West and Far East will continue to be the engines of global culture for a long while yet. As Africa and South Asia develop, they will develop towards the kinds of commercial, statist, spiritually attenuated conditions you find in America, Europe, Japan, and China. “State liberalism,” in the form of democratic capitalism or Chinese-style authoritarian capitalism, will continue to look like “the end of history” and to pose a much greater spiritual threat than Islamist extremism ever could. Religious competition and sectarian violence are challenges the Church is adept at overcoming, but the world of Aldous Huxley is something else.

The Church faces the twin dangers of accommodation with liberalism or overreaction against it, the latter of which has already turned much of evangelical Protestantism into a caricature. I don’t think the “fewer but better” strategy is a sound one; it threatens to turn Catholicism into a subculture, when Catholicism can only be catholic. What I hope to see is a revival of religious orders, or the development of new ones, to meet the challenge. There are lessons to be learned from the Mormons, of all people, who are growing and becoming more influential. Think of how they send young people on missions. They ask a lot of their young people; Catholicism these days asks very little. And gets it.