Posted on 04/12/2018 9:00:47 AM PDT by LouieFisk
An updated survey from Gallup, which it has conducted every 10 years since 1955, shows that only 39% of Catholics and 45% of Protestants attend church weekly. Back in 1955, about 75% of Catholics went to Mass every week. For the Protestants, about 42% went to church weekly.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
I’m an usher in my Catholic church, and over the past decade the attendance drop has been palpable.
As the manager of an AM radio station once told me, we lose ten listeners a day via the obituary column.
I think we are entering the end times period of both revival and falling away. People are getting off the fence and choosing sides. That is a good thing.
Most ex Catholics, I think about 7 out of 10 are secular or no religion. There was a study done on this a few years ago.
My local Catholic Church doesn’t practice very much outreach to the community. If you are single and not Young-young, there aren’t a lot of obvious ways to feel like a part of the parish.
A good many other Catholics leave and join other churches if a spouse divorces them and they wish to remarry. The Catholic Church does not recognize divorce under ANY circumstances. They have a process called annulments where they construct a legal fiction that your marriage never really existed due to one of a handful of esoteric reasons. You cannot remarry and continue to receive Communion unless your marriage is annulled.
It can be a humiliating process, and many people just refuse to go along with the lie that their marriage never existed. So they leave. Generally when they remarry and get to their new churches they TITHE, which is driving the Vatican nuts. It has sparked a very intense debate about modifying the Church’s stand on this issue.
I went back and found the study, half are secular and 9% are no longer Christian. Of those that went Protestant, 9% went mainline, 16% went Minority Protestant (congregations that are maybe more diverse protestant congregations racially) only 14% went White Evangelical Protestant which would be the overwhelming church affiliation of protestants here.
From 1955 to current number we have had millions of South Americans immigrated to the US most likely RC...
How can their numbers be down so steeply....
I agree that is one issue that is a significant variable in explaining former Catholics, probably the most significant one. Most of my relatives who are no longer Catholic all had marriages in the Catholic Church that ended and when they remarried they went Protestant.
Because like every other ethnic group, as you get integrated in U.S. society and become economically upwardly mobile, the higher probability of secularism. Human nature is human nature.
We have a hard core of people in our Church who never want to change ANYTHING, even the tiniest little bit. A good number of them want to go back to saying the Mass in Latin, a language understood by 0.002% of the world’s population.
“Most ex Catholics” think they have a choice. Whoever is baptized as Catholic will be judged as Catholic. It’s not like divorce and annulment based on verifiable inabilities.
Not going to mass on Sunday for a Catholic is actually a mortal sin. Always was
https://www.ewtn.com/expert/answers/sunday_mass.htm
“The Catholic Church does not recognize divorce under ANY circumstances.“
That is not true. It is a silly statement
Thanks for the info. The former mainline Protestant denominations are dying, so it’s not surprising they don’t get many people moving in who are going from denom to another.
Christian researcher George Barna, in his book “Revolution,” in the 1990s pointed out a major disconnect in polling and reality. Most of his polls found that people who left church were not doing so because of “too much” religion, but because what they were getting was too watered down and was not serious enough.
Likewise, identification of “Christians” based on whether you “attend church regularly/weekly” gives a much different answer than “did you attend church last week?” The mere wording produced a whole different perspective.
I once did a research paper on tithing, and using the lower-bound # (”did you attend church LAST week”), the higher-bound # (self-identified “Christians”) and the “do you go to church” model, and using a 10% tithe for these numbers . . .
Based on the number of Christians in America, if #1 tithed regularly it would equal almost exactly the HHS budget;
#2 would yield 125% of the HHS budget;
and #3 would yield 250% of the HHS budget.
Conclusion, if even “nominal” Christians tithed, there would be no need for welfare at all. Churches could more than handle it.
Being Catholic entails having been baptized into the faith
There is really no such thing as a former catholic. No one knows that better than a ‘former’ catholic. They are usually not apathetic toward Catholicism. They profess hatred toward it, they’ll cite some wacky made-up rule about it they cannot abide by but they are Catholic
They’ll be judged as Catholic when it counts. They know it
“My local Catholic Church doesn’t practice very much outreach to the community.”
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Parishes used to be tight communities, like a big family. I think in many cases they’ve lost some closeness and a feeling of belonging.
And many have followed the former mainline Protestant denominations’ tendency to tend toward becoming little more than liberal PACs.
If young people are looking for some place to indulge their social justice/liberal leanings there are a lot of outlets with which churches have to compete.
A lot of people think that people can chang e the Church. It simply is not a democracy
Whether the mass is in Latin or not the Eucharist is the Eucharist. No matter
When people say they don’t understand what’s going on in mass because it is in Latin my brain hurts. It’s the mass. That’s what’s going on. It’s not a sit com
I am not denying anything you said. I an only analyzing the data I have read. Pew and the center for religious studies did a comprehensive study on religion and secularism in 2016. Interesting read.
Anyone who attends church weekly knows the difference between the number of regular members and the number of EC Christians. We see the EC Christians twice a year - on Easter and on Christmas - and there are a lot of them.
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