THE SOCIETY OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL SCIENTISTS
Friday and Saturday, October 26-27, 2007
The St. John’s University School of Law
Dennis M. Howard, President
The Movement for a Better America, Inc.
PO Box 470
Mt. Freedom, NJ 07970
973-895-7367 (home)
973-796-8338 (cell)
info@movementforabetteramerica.org
http://www.movementforabetteramerica.org
Dennis M. Howard (1930- )
Dennis M. Howard is a veteran Catholic journalist turned creative marketing consultant who founded The Movement for a Better America, a non-profit pro-life communications think tank in 1996 with the encouragement of the late John Cardinal O’Connor. He began researching the economic of abortion in 1992 when the abortion toll had reached 32 million and he calculated that the demographic impact was like destroying our 27 largest cities in a nuclear war. That toll is now approaching 50 million, and is compounded by the impact of more efficient contraception. Both affect the supply-demand equation on which economics depends. In an exchange in Barron’s in 1997, he was one of the first to predict the imminent collapse of the stock market bubble which occurred 3 years later. He currently predicts serious muting of the current recovery as the Baby Boom generation begins to retire.
Dennis began his career in 1950 as a founding staff member of The Sun Herald of Kansas City, the last attempt to publish a Catholic daily newspaper in the U.S.. He moved on to the city desk of the NY Journal-American, and then became a founding staff member of The Advocate, Newark NJ archdiocesan weekly, where he served as national news editor and feature writer. At 23, he became the first lay associate editor of The Sign, then one of the leading Catholic monthly magazines. In 1958, he became a publishing consultant and helped launch such publications as Marriage Magazine, U.S. Catholic, Insight, and National Catholic Reporter. He also worked with America, Commonweal, Worldview, and Our Sunday Visitor, before taking on such commercial clients as Time, Dun’s, and Aviation Week and Space Technology.
In 1963, he moved to Madison Avenue as a creative and marketing director for two New York agencies, where he worked on such accounts as Waring, Matchbox Toys, Toshiba, Casio, and Cessna Aviation. He later formed his own agency where he worked with such clients as Westinghouse, AT&T, and Baker Industries, for whom he launched the first mass market residential smoke detector. He also helped AFA-New York launch its weekly cable television series by serving as technical director for their first 50 shows, and has made numerous talk show appearances. Dennis is married to the former Anne Harvie and has 8 surviving children and 7 grandchildren. He credits his pro-life convictions to his experiences as a parent.
Abortion, Contraception and the Future of the Catholic Church
Dennis traces the history of abortion from the 19th Century struggle that ended with laws against it in every state in the Union., through the 20th Century campaign to reverse these laws that climaxed in Roe v. Wade. He also traces the Catholic revival after World War II that climaxed in the coming of age of Catholics and the election of JFK. He describes how the church missed a great opportunity to capitalize on one of the fastest rates of growth in history. He documents this with case histories of several communications efforts from this period that were not tried, or were simply allowed to fail.
This was followed by the erosion in Roman Catholicism after Vatican II, which he blames not on the Council but on the “spirit of the times” to which Catholics succumbed and the failure of the hierarchy to modernize its education and communications efforts. Instead, they simply walked away from one of the most providential opportunities in history and surrendered their influence to secular humanists in the media. Diocesan newspapers, no matter how good, are still essentially internal house organs and are no replacement for a strong presence in the media and the marketplace. He describes how this inevitably led to changes in behavior and attitudes among the laity – in the form of higher rates of abortion, contraception and divorce and lower marriage and birth rates -- and among the clergy as reflected in the sex abuse scandals and the decline in preaching traditional doctrine in line with contemporary papal documents.
He cites several recent studies documenting the sharp decline in religious literacy among Catholics, rising leakage rates, as well as data confirming the crisis in current Catholic marriage rates. Finally, he documents the economic cost of these trends which threaten to undermine the very infrastructure on which church depends for its continuing existence.. He concludes that Catholicism in America currently faces a life-threatening crisis, and the good news is that it may just be serious enough to force the hierarchy to abandon their besieged castles and take the message of Christ out into the marketplace in a more creative and compelling way. That is its only hope.