[marshmallow]

Evangelical Protestantism, with its emphasis on ecstatic personal experience, is a great lure in a situation of deteriorating social and economic conditions. Since the 1950s, millions of peasants have left their villages because of guerrilla and military violence or to seek a better life in the cities, changing the balance of Latin America’s population from rural to urban. Uprooted from families and religious traditions, living in slums and at the mercy of criminals and sometimes of governmental predators, the urban poor are a fertile seedbed for evangelical proselytism.

Furthermore, the dwindling number of Catholics is due not only to a rise in Protestant numbers but also to the rising popularity of traditional pagan practices such as candomble and other African based forms of spirituality.

The Catholic Church itself has greatly facilitated this process due to its abandonment of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in many places in favor of a socialist/Marxist mission, which de-emphasises the spiritual in favor of a political ideology which is cold and unsatisfying to the inner spiritual yearnings of man.

Given everything which has taken place in the Catholic Church in the last half century, the only surprise to me is that the exodus from the Catholic Church has not been greater.

[DarthVader]

“The Catholic Church itself has greatly facilitated this process due to its abandonment of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in many places in favor of a socialist/Marxist mission, which de-emphasises the spiritual in favor of a political ideology which is cold and unsatisfying to the inner spiritual yearnings of man.”

It’s starting to happen here in America too with liberation theology rearing its head under the name of “catholic social justice”.

[Quix]

Given everything which has taken place in the Catholic Church in the last half century, the only surprise to me is that the exodus from the Catholic Church has not been greater.
= = =

Thank you.

Does that mean we can now lay to rest the straw dog that the RC edifice has always been . . . one gets the impression . . . from the moment Christ was conceived in the sacred womb . . . until now . . .

100% pure, 100% the same, 100% teaching the same fantasies; 100% unaltered doctrinally; 100% unaltered in terms of what Christian behavior is etc. etc. etc.

???

Never did believe that fantasy anyway.