Posted on 09/23/2007 5:00:38 PM PDT by shrinkermd
In 1961, only one half of 1% of Canadians told census takers they were not attached to any religious body. The figure rose to 4.3 % in 1971 and 16.2% in 2001.
After the Second World War, 67% of Canadians told Gallup they had been in a church or synagogue over the previous seven days. By 1990 this figure had fallen by nearly two thirds to 23%. Gallup says it's now less than 20%.
In 1961, 90% of Quebecers said they had been to church in the last seven days, and the Catholic church had one priest for every 500-700 parishioners. There were 43,000 women in religious orders, one for every 115 Quebec Catholics.
Today, church attendance in Quebec is the lowest of any province, state or nation in North America.
Now what puzzled Noll was this. Although the histories of Canada and the U.S. have many parallels, religious practice isn't one of them. Nothing like this has happened in the U.S.
Where Canada was, if anything, more loyal to its churches in the first half of the 20th century, it now lags far behind, and church attendance in the U.S. is considerably more than double the Canadian average.
He shows this phenomenon in another way: In 1959, when Georges Vanier was sworn in as Canadian governor general, he began his acceptance speech, "My first words are a prayer. May Almighty God in his infinite wisdom and mercy bless the sacred mission that has been entrusted to me ... In exchange for His strength, I offer Him my weakness."
Forty-six years later, when Michaelle Jean was sworn in, she declared Canadian history "speaks powerfully of the freedom to invent a new world."
(Excerpt) Read more at calsun.canoe.ca ...
ping for D
We have a church in Toronto that I have heard is doing well. Not sure what the problem is in Canada.
my best guess is that the problem lies in the school system.
I wouldn't be so certain to conclude that. Drive around Massghanistan on a Sunday. You will see mainly empty churches...but then I suppose the people who aren't there will claim to be members.
Firstly, Canadian Christians of an era abandoned the Bible and the concept of personal property and put in it’s place a “social justice” movement.
That would be fine except there was no limit to where they went and any Morality that could be subjegated under “social justice” was quickly attacked and discarded as Anachronistic and “Not Christ’s message of Love for all”.
Secondly, Candians simply think that Govt can solve all problems, from healthcare to (sic) Gun Control, if there is a problem it’s not “That’s life” it’s “Do something..pass a law”.
That springs from point #1, Morality has been abandoned wholesale and replaced with Morality by proxy.
Some provincial governments in Canada actually fund separate religious (Catholic) schools. Some provide a percentage of funding to any religious school.
The Constitution of Canada requires support for Catholic schools in some provinces. Catholic schools are quite popular (they have a reputation for more discipline, and therefore more learning)compared to the “public” schools.
This is not suprising at all. Canadians are to comfortable in their thinking that they are superior to the less enlightened. They view government as their god. Get me out of this hell hole....
that is very good news to me, thanks.
Father Richard Neuhaus (himself a Canadian) points out that in Quebec, the people are not indifferent to Catholicism; they positively loathe it and show their contempt at every opportunity. He speculates that their attitude stems from the political and social power the Church once exercised.
I attended the Montreal public schools in 1971-2 when I was nine. There were three kinds of public school - French Roman Catholic, English Roman Catholic, and English Protestant. I went to the latter, and we started off the day with a hymn like All Things Bright And Beautiful or When He Cometh. Then God Save the Queen.
Montreal was starting its multi-cultural journey then, with immigrants from all over the Commonwealth - Hong Kong Chinese, Pakistanis, various Caribbean nations. Disgruntled Americans like my own family. My best friend was Hungarian; our upstairs landlords were in succession Pakistani and Barbadian.
At the time I thought we were getting on quite successfully until our landlord’s young son, also nine, spent hours talking with me about how he wished he wasn’t black, and he wished he was back home. Then he began spending time with a boy who started telling him “white girls let you touch them,” and I kept far away. His parents did not invest in Canada for a racial divide or ghetto influence for their children but they found it.
In the next decade the schools bent over backwards to accomodate the immigrants’ sensibilities, and Christianity and Canadian identity were out.
Even so, one hymn a day isn’t enough to keep a people truly Christian, is it? It wasn’t just the schools.
Mrs VS
For American example see Episcopal Church, toss and wait 20 years.
Similar to Ireland. The Church was powerful—nearly 100% of the people were Catholic in many places. Sick, neurotic, conformist, authoritarian people were attracted to the priesthood and religious life. Abuse of children and adults by priests and religious was rife. The pendulum has swung the other way. Besides the corruption in the Church, destruction of the Church was one of the primary goals of the demon Trudeau.
As in the U.S., Canadians were subjected to ever-more-mediocre, stupid, weak, and corrupt bishops. The old boy system self-selected the worst priests rather than the best, sending their names on to Rome as candidates for bishop. This parade of ciphers, just as in the U.S., were utterly inadequate to the task of reforming themselves, the priesthood, or the laity.
We vacationed in Nova Scotia last month and visited two beautiful Catholic churches in the Acadia region. We had interesting conversations with their “volunteer” tour guides. The churches are now government sponsored museums, based on the churches’ architecture or historic value. The “volunteers” were paid by the government.
One young man in Acadia said he and his brother were about the only youth left, and he doesn’t know what will become of the congregation. A sign at one of the churches showed an annual pledge goal of just $30,000, and only a fraction had been raised as of that time.
Our guide told us one problem was that sports practices and games are held on Sunday. We told them that in our town a lot of people were concerned about that. They got active, and Sunday sports are very limited, with the few games being held after usual church service hours. Our guide’s response was that he couldn’t imagine his priest or nuns “negotiating” with the government over sports. He couldn’t understand that “we the people” just take care of business here.
We said that in America you don’t have the government keeping churches open, no matter their cultural or historical value. We said if we feel it desirable to have a congregation, we raise our own funds, build and maintain our own buildings, fund and manage our own services, programs and missions, and pay the salaries of church pastors and staff. If we don’t step up and do that, the church will fail, the building sold, and that is that. Their mouths dropped in astonishment. They couldn’t imagine what we were telling them.
All we could see was yet another casualty of socialism.
We failed at bridging the cultural divide, but had an interesting conversation, anyway, and a wonderful time in a beautiful province.
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ahh, and here is where the Catholic Churches’s lack of intensity comes into view, a pity really.
“Negotiate”
Pity that, a wonderful story though and perhaps a cautionary tale as well.
The T-virus of Liberalism struck Canada and now it is even more spiritually dead than the USA.
Careful Old Army, keep in mind that as long as there is a core of Christians who will not compromise, numbers really do not matter, what matters is that the small number remains true to Christ and the Bible’s plain teachings.
One person with God is a majority...
Next day BUMP! :-)
Mark A. Noll, the historian of American religion most distinguished for his celebrated book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, (the scandal being too many Evangelicals don't use the gray matter God gave them, and many think it wrong to even try) confesses himself mystified of late by a country called Canada.
"What Happened to Christian Canada?" he asks, and that's the title of his little booklet published this year by Regent College Publishing in Vancouver.
It has been widely ignored by the Canadian news media.
It's more essay than book, and in about 50 pages sets forth some statistics and other information I have never seen assembled under a single cover by any Canadian author, even the authoritative Reg Bibby at Lethbridge University who has over the years assembled it piece by piece under a great many covers.
Some sample facts:
In 1961, only one half of 1% of Canadians told census takers they were not attached to any religious body. The figure rose to 4.3 % in 1971 and 16.2% in 2001.
After the Second World War, 67% of Canadians told Gallup they had been in a church or synagogue over the previous seven days. By 1990 this figure had fallen by nearly two thirds to 23%. Gallup says it's now less than 20%.
In 1961, 90% of Quebecers said they had been to church in the last seven days, and the Catholic church had one priest for every 500-700 parishioners. There were 43,000 women in religious orders, one for every 115 Quebec Catholics.
Today, church attendance in Quebec is the lowest of any province, state or nation in North America.
Now what puzzled Noll was this. Although the histories of Canada and the U.S. have many parallels, religious practice isn't one of them. Nothing like this has happened in the U.S.
Where Canada was, if anything, more loyal to its churches in the first half of the 20th century, it now lags far behind, and church attendance in the U.S. is considerably more than double the Canadian average.
He shows this phenomenon in another way: In 1959, when Georges Vanier was sworn in as Canadian governor general, he began his acceptance speech, "My first words are a prayer. May Almighty God in his infinite wisdom and mercy bless the sacred mission that has been entrusted to me ... In exchange for His strength, I offer Him my weakness."
Forty-six years later, when Michaelle Jean was sworn in, she declared Canadian history "speaks powerfully of the freedom to invent a new world."
She made no mention whatever of the diety. What a contrast her speech made to the election speeches of both Democrat John Kerry and Republican George W. Bush in the 2004 campaign. Both made repeated references to God.
So what happened to Canadian Christianity, asks Dr. Noll, and for the next 39 pages of his book, he searches for the explanation -- searches among the explanations offered by Canadian historians and reaches a few conclusions of his own.
He examines two churches in particular -- the Catholic Church in Quebec and the United Church of Canada, both of which have suffered a catastrophic decline in membership. Though the churches are, of course, quite different, he discovered curiously similar explanations.
In Quebec, he finds an explanation in the rise of Catholic Action, a movement that gained great momentum after the Second World War and recruited platoons of talented young people -- like Pierre Trudeau, Marc Lalonde and Gerard Pelletier.
Its object was to supplant what had become the moribund Catholicism of historic Quebec with a new amalgam of democratic socialism and a reformed Catholic spirituality and practice.
Quebecers bought the first half of the proposition, but not the second, and people abandoned Christian practice en masse.
The United Church, created in the 1920s by the union of the Methodists, Congregationalists and most Presbyterians, sought to combine the socialistic reforms of the social gospel with the spiritual message of evangelicalism. This had much the same result. When the government itself legislated the social gospel, the church was left with no message at all.
But all this is an inadequate summation of a brief but very observant analysis of Canada's religious collapse.
Better to read the little book itself -- if you can find it.
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