Although I am not Catholic I notice that the Catholic churches in my area (and there are many) are packed for both Saturday evening and Sunday morning mass. It’s the main line protestant congregations that are disappearing, not just shrinking. Their answer to reversing the trend is to turn left and leave orthodoxy behind. Surprise, surprise, it isn’t working.
Almost every church that sticks to the gospel of Christ, and refuses to water it down with pro-homosexual and pro-feminist (which many times is teh same thing) thinking tends to grow.
Conservative churches are doing fine. People look to the church to be a moral guideline. If the church is telling them “if it feels good do it”, which is the central tenet of liberal churches, then why bother going at all.
But if the church is telling them “God says do this and don’t do that” and has teh scriptutres to back it up, then they serve a stabilising foundational purpose in our lives. We may not like hearing that we are messing up, but deep down we know we need to be told it. So we go every Sunday (and in most protestant cases, every midweek service too).
I’d wager that the more conservative Catholic churches are doing well but the ones where liberals/homosexuals had taken over suffer as long as the liberal/homo is there.
(If I remember correctly Rembert Weakland, Bishop of Milwaukee was a big liberal. Does anyone have data on the church there during and after his reign? I thought that his replacemnet was a conservative and that weakland was kind of forced out)
Although I am not Catholic I notice that the Catholic churches in my area (and there are many) are packed for both Saturday evening and Sunday morning mass. It’s the main line protestant congregations that are disappearing, not just shrinking
...not to put too fine a point on it, but many churches are packed because they get the spillover from closed parishes...and the less said about closed Catholic schools the better...both Protestant and Catholic churches are being ravaged by the immense nondenominational houses of worship that are sprouting like mushrooms, that attract many laity because theological demands are few and the incentive to socialize is all when coming to worship...America is not so much becoming more secular and agnostic, but has drifted toward an antiliturgical set of ecclesiological desires that require nothing but being there and being somewhat quiet for an hour or so, along with an acknowledgment that Jesus loves us and vice versa...think first grade CCD classes, and you’ve got todays Christian pegged...