Posted on 11/22/2010 11:48:02 PM PST by Cronos
Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, elected president of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops last week, said Monday that the bishops faced the urgent task of stopping the huge exodus of Roman Catholics from the church of their birth...
he said there was now a movement among them to confront internal problems like the “sobering study” showing that one-third of Americans born and baptized Catholic have left the church. ...
Archbishop Dolan leaned forward as he cited recent studies finding that only half of young Catholics marry in the church, and that weekly Mass attendance has dropped to about 35 percent of Catholics from a peak of 78 percent in the 1960s.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
ping — anyone know more about Dolan?
What I have seen in Italy is that the only people attending mass are the old people. Sunday mass has about 3 children there. Mine. There are very very few young adults in attendance.
Well, yes and no — in Rome and Milan, yes, in the countryside and the South as well as Perugia the Church attendance is better. However, thanks for bringing that up — this is definitely not a US Catholics only problem, it affects Western Europe even worse.
The Church is not and cannot be about numbers. As few as two will do. The Church cannot become a slave to trendiness and human whims.
I agree about numbers, but there is another aspect to consider. If the Faith is not passed to the young, the number shall pass to zero (0).
I have attended Novus Order parishes, and Traditional Trident Mass parishes.
The percentage of young people in Novus Order parishes appears to me to be much smaller than that of Latin Mass parishes.
As your worship, so will you believe.
Lex orandi, lex credendi
Thanks for upgrading my vocabulary.
Thanks for upgrading my vocabulary.
I agree with your statement, however, we do not educate our young as well as we ought. We are not living up to our duty of spreading The Word — even amongst ourselves.
Absolutely! It's the pathetic attempts at trendiness that caused most of the modern problems, IMO. As long as the Church is faithful, it can't do trendy well; the hallmarks of trendiness are whimsical, fleeting, unpredictable, arbitrary,fundamentally unserious. All things foreign to the nature of the Church.
A "trendy" Church is like those parents who'd rather be a "pal" to their kids than parents -- they make crummy pals and that leaves no one being the parent.
Or like those Republicans who aim at being fake Democrats.
People like the real thing!
Isn't that just another instance of "trendiness"? After all, the style in educational theory for a few decades now has been to make it "fun" and let the kids discover things for themselves. The results are just as obvious in secular education as in religious!
I agree that it’s not about numbers; however, to have a living Christian culture, you have to have enough people who believe the religion.
I go to Spain a lot, and of course Spain was famously Catholic until Vatican II. Big families, many public displays of faith, etc. The watering down and politicizing of the faith after Vatican II seriously affected the faithful. Why bother if the Church was just a fancy Sunday version of the State?
The destruction of traditional religious practices (devotions, processions, etc.) had a major impact on this, and of course it was really finished off by the complete change of the liturgy from something with its roots not only in later Western culture, but in its earliest Eastern beginnings, to a 1970s committee-made production with no roots in anything. Spain went from having the highest birthrate to having one of the very, very lowest, and the entire Spanish family and Church-based social structure collapsed.
The question in any traditionally Christian country is whether it’s possible to build that up again. Whether that culture was destroyed from the inside (as Catholic culture was destroyed by the “reformers” of Vatican II) or from the outside (as traditional Orthodox culture was destroyed by the Communists in many countries), I think it’s not too late.
I have seen good bishops in Spain revive the faith in their dioceses, and I think a revival is going on in Orthodox countries, too. It’s a struggle, but it can be done, often by going back to the old practices that nurtured these cultures, publicly living them, and proclaiming their values unashamedly. People are looking for something, and if the Church (Eastern or Western) can dump the trendiness and dig down to that ever-running stream of tradition starting from the foot of the Cross, Christianity will come back in these countries.
Honestly, I think that most of the problem falls to, in one word, modernism. Strictly speaking, the idea that all must be updated continually, for the sake of being “with the times,” as opposed to “in this world, but not of it,” makes a big difference. No, I’m not railing against V2 or anything like that, but rather that the combination of poor catechesis and a perception, based on changing and inconsistent teachings, leads the faithful to not know what the Church stands for. And I feel that those in leadership who espouse the modernist bent, wholly or partially, share some responsibility, too. I’d pretty much give an arm and a leg to see the Church following Her path better here. I don’t know too much about Archbishop Dolan, but I certainly hope and pray for the best. Better in this case to have a somewhat unknown quantity than an Archbishop who by all appearances is a card-carrying modernist.
It’s true that “wherever two or more are gathered in My Name, there I am in the midst of you.” However, when there are only a few, that means that millions more are going unchurched and unsaved. The Great Commission urges us to find people to join the Kingdom. So empty churches are a very serious problem. It speaks to the millions who do not know God and/or ignore Him.
I am a new convert to Catholicism, after a lifetime as a Protestant of varying degrees of enthusiasm. What I find is that people who were cradle Catholics and had the Catechism stuffed down their throats as children do not appreciate their faith very much; they can’t remember the details of what they learned (and even that, at an unsophisticated level suitable for children) and don’t understand the extraordinary beauty and power of this faith.
As I talk to lifelong casual Catholics in my community I find not only that they’re ignorant about faith; they’re bored to death with the local parish, its politics, and its ceaseless demands for money. They’re embarrassed and chagrined by the sexual scandals in the Catholic Church and irritated by the stupid political stance of bishops on some issues. And they’re lured by the distractions or temptations of modern life, to which the Church seems to offer no competition.
But as life becomes more serious and more painful, the Church does offer some help. Websites like catholicscomehome.com can let longtime Catholics know that this is indeed a home, a refuge, a source of enormous help and consolation. The Church -can- reach out to these people and bring them back in.
Dolan is one of the bishops (the majority) who believe that obedience to Canon Law is optional. Even when disobedience to said Canon Law is a mortal sin.
http://tinyurl.com/canon915
http://tinyurl.com/pont915
http://tinyurl.com/peters915
The disobedience of Dolan, Wuerl, George, and all but about fifteen American bishops is eating the heart out of the Catholic Church in America. Until these men obey the Church’s law, every syllable they utter about reviving the Church rises like a foul stench before the throne of God.
I wonder when Pope Benedict will clean house in the US. He’s been appointing conservative cardinals lately, so there is hope
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