the article discussed "fastest growing" i haven't heard of a catholic church ever being referred to as "fast growing" something about the fact that catholics don't tend to be as out and about as the more evangelical churches, who tend to encourage "bring your friends, bring your family, bring your co-workers, bring some bum off the street!"
They are so sold on rapture theology that she can't make any progress with them at all.
Of course she is the only Catholic on the bus, and there are about 20 of them.
True. Catholics don't really evangelize and instead depend on immigration and reproduction for new members.
Bible-belt Catholics
TIME ^ | 2/7/2005 | Tim Padgett
Posted on 02/09/2005 6:15:55 AM PST by sinkspur
Eight years ago, a handful of Roman Catholic families in Huntersville, a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., started a new parish. The home of their church, St. Mark, was a bowling alley. Our Lady of the Lanes, as they jokingly called it, was an apt symbol of the scarcity--and supple ingenuity--of Catholics in a region known as the buckle of the Protestant Bible Belt. Soon St. Mark was gaining a family a day. Now its almost 2,800 families hear Mass in a cavernous gymnasium as they await completion of a new church. Among the newcomers is Ben Liuzzo, 54, a financial-services manager who a few years ago moved his family from New York to North Carolina. He had thought Catholics in the area might be as outnumbered as Jews or Muslims--and that the meager church life that did exist wouldn't engage his 14-year-old son. Instead, the Liuzzos are attending standing-room-only services like St. Mark's teen Mass, complete with a pop-music ensemble that could be mistaken for one of the area's rollicking Christian rock bands. "This I was not prepared for," says Liuzzo, who flashes a smile at a recent service as an altar girl marches a crucifix past 1,000 parishioners.
Yankee transplants like the Liuzzos aren't the only ones helping fill the pews in the Charlotte diocese. Mexican immigrants are the fastest-growing group, and Hispanics as a whole make up half the diocese's 300,000 Catholics. Thousands of Vietnamese and Filipino Catholics are settling in too. "I've wondered often how bishops in the Northeast handled the waves of immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries," says Bishop Peter Jugis, 47, who took over the diocese in 2003. "It's exciting." It also transcends demographics: the newcomers are practicing a more conservative Catholicism than their brethren in many other parts of the country.
That's probably because Catholic's weren't included in the poll, and that because many non-Catholic Christians don't really believe Catholics are Christians or at least not a Christian on equal footing. BTW, my parish church seats approximately 800 people, and it is generally SRO for each weekend Mass. There are seven total, which means we're pulling about more than 5500 people a weekend.