Posted on 03/08/2018 12:01:11 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The Roman Catholic Church in Belgium has been hit by one of its most dramatic drops in baptisms in decades, a survey has said, with less than 50 percent of children undergoing the ritual last year.
Evangelical Focus reported on Wednesday that the survey, which is to be released later this year, was commissioned by the Bishops Conference of Belgium, and confirms that parents have a diminishing interest in traditional relationships with the Church.
The decline in baptisms was reportedly highest in Brussels, the nation's capital, which has seen a 32 percent drop since 2010, and it was also significant in Antwerp, which saw a 31 percent decline. What is more, overall church attendance has dropped to less than 10 percent.
Geert De Kerpel, spokesman of the Bishops Conference, said that the results were negative, but insisted there is no need for panic.
"Like any other organization, we would prefer a growth rather than a decline, but we will not start a promotional campaign," he said.
"In the society we see an evolution from a church to which people belonged automatically to a group of people that choose consciously to be part of the church. When people are really convicted they specifically decide to have their children baptized and they will stimulate them to belong to the church."
De Kerpel suggested that "new ways of believing" are needed in a country which was once a Catholic stronghold, but like many other Western European nations, has seen a notable rise of the non-religious.
"We aim to do what the first disciples of Jesus did: to be authentic Christians — a church offering the alternative that people are looking for, a church that is authentic and exciting," the spokesman said.
The steady increase of immigrants in Belgium was credited for the growth of both the evangelical and Muslim communities.
While numbers for each group were not immediately made available, Christians arriving from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ghana, who are establishing churches, were said to be one of the main factors behind the rise of evangelicals.
The decline of Catholic faith in countries like Belgium is said to be having a notable effect on churches in Africa, according to Bishop Matthew Kukah of Sokoto in Nigeria.
Kukah said in October 2017 that the growing secularization of the West comes at the expense of the Catholic Church.
"From my own experience, I find that the British high commissioner, the ambassadors from European countries, the American ambassador — they are pandering more to Islam than to Christianity, because most of them have turned their backs on Christianity," he said at the time.
"The Arab world is pouring money into Nigeria and the Pentecostal pastors in America are doing the same, and the Catholic Church is now becoming the weakest in terms of access to resources," he added.
Modernism has been around for 100+ years ... and was officially unleashed upon the world and infected Catholic Church during and after Vatican II.
His Church will survive. Many of Her members will not.
#misererenobis
Kick out Christ and satan rushes in. Any questions?
People (many of them, anyway) are not stupid.
They can discern between between churches/synagogues that preach teach and attempt to live genuine faith (however dogmatized)....and those that have abandoned most of their core Biblical moral principles
put simply, attending or belonging to a ‘church’ that has jumped the shark, gone off the rails, and/or preaches values that are either meaningless or, as we see so often nowadays, directly against Biblical law/moral instruction/teachings...........there’s no point in wasting time attending such ‘churches’
......people do not have to be super-orthodox or “tradition huggers” to recognize this. even somewhat “liberal” folks (those that would accept or welcome some changes in doctrine or ritual, etc....folks that would even advocate for some changes that many of us oppose) ...even many of these people recognize when a church isn’t worth their while anymore, or when a church has gone over to the Dark Side.
Noting that it is primarily the churches/synagogues with sincere, mostly-traditional priests or pastors or ministers or rabbis.... that retain and attract parishioners/members
...... while so many of the now-leftist “anything goes” outfits that are dying on the vine, losing membership.
Europe is in the post Christian era and Muslims are filling the vacuum, as is Satan.
I am sure the Pope will get right on it.
I'd say there's a lesson to be learned here. But it won't be.
And probably most of the people in those Churches are the Polish emigres.
Why do you continue spread falsehoods about what the Catholic Church teaches?
RE: Hmm . . . a religion that insists its own holy book is mythology
I don’t think the Catholic church teaches that its own holy book ( which is the same holy book as the Evangelicals ) is mythology.
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