If this is happening to the Catholic Church, you can bet that other churches are feeling the same thing.
On this thread many people seem to have called attention to prominent hypocritical Catholics, like Pelosi and Biden, as driving them away from the Church. Another group point to the sanctimony of other less powerful people whose judgmental attitude is to blame. Both of these, however, really fail to see the bigger picture. The fault is not in any particular group of Catholics, per se, but rather with the Church itself. It is a living contradiction now, and until it comes to terms with what it is, what it really is, it will only get less and less relevant to the people who need spiritual food.
The real problem subsists, to use a good Catholic word, in tradition. Naturally, as a revealed faith it is one founded on tradition, but in Catholicism this goes even further. Other western Christian churches exist specifically by rejecting traditional elements of the Catholic faith, and therefore tradition becomes the point of contrast with other churches. Tradition, therefore, is really the lifeblood of the faith, and it is also the bane of the modern, and modernist, Church.
Catholicism is at war with itself. The Church today seeks to divide up tradition into some kind of arbitrary 'big t' and 'little t' concepts which, frankly, do not exist outside of ideological innovations seeking to remake the Church into some new and novel form, or those apologists who cannot accept the failure of this approach. Some desire to strip out all of what keeps the faith in direct connection with the historic Church, and to do this they invent these ideas. Unfortunately, more traditional people who cannot accept that an error was made, for whatever reason, fall into this pollyanna mode of excusing and excepting everything that was done and this just enables the innovators and plays right into their game. In all of this the faith suffers, and those who are struggling to work out their salvation are deprived of the tried and tested supports of the Church which helped form saints for centuries.
We now have churches which have no notion of the sacred. The music is profane and banal, with nothing of tradition about it. The language used is equally banal and ugly, and are performed and carried out without any regard for traditional notions of the sacred. The art is gone, or is unrecognizable in any sense of Christian meaning. There is no incense, because it is old fashioned. Basically, there is no beauty at all. We worship just as we do anything else, which means it is not worship at all because it requires nothing of us. It also gives us nothing. We come and go without any regard to anything but whether what we are doing is entertaining or at least not terribly inconvenient, and that is because it is no longer of any real substance to us. The Holy Name is flung around with disregard, and the altar is trampled by children during the rituals. Nothing done in our churches today is about God at all, and rather is all about us. And it is because it is no longer tied to any notion of tradition whatsoever. By defining tradition in such a way as to make it entirely optional we reduced our entire faith life to that which is least demanding to those involved. And this made it pointless for anyone who would either have benefited from it, or contributed to it in any meaningful way.
And this is the real dagger in the back of the faith. People who feel drawn to Catholicism, whether born to it or coming from without, do so because they, at some point in their being, understand the fundamental necessity of tradition in a revealed religion. Looking for the living Christ of history they, naturally, feel the necessity of a faith which is itself a participation in that history. And, that is as much as to say, they are looking for a faith which is traditional. But, of course, that isn't what the modern Church is anymore. That is a thing of the past now. And, for that reason they eventually drift away to other more comfortable, and perhaps less sanctimonious, innovations. The Catholic Church cannot continue to tout its historic foundations while simultaneously jettisoning everything historic about itself and continue to expect people to simply play along. Either the Church will wake up and realise it is killing itself with its anti-traditionalism or it will continue on the path to utter irrelevance.
Looks to me like the Catholic population is growing.
Catholic population (The Official Catholic Directory)
1965 - 45.6m
1975 - 48.7m
1985 - 52.3m
1995 - 57.4m
2000 - 59.9m
2005 - 64.8m
2013 - 66.8m
Ignore the current personalities and drama . The Church is the Church founded by Christ, it’s timeless.
I’m included in that statistic. Molested by a priest in the 70s, told it was my word against his, then asked to leave the church. The series of events nearly cost my life. Turned out this priest was a serial predator and was allowed to get away with it. years later I was invited back. never again, I learned my lesson.
The thing about the Catholic religion is that it appeals to all the senses. It looks so religious, so it looks so legitimate. Kind of like the Latvian Orthodox religion on the Seinfeld episode.
Actually this leaving are usually the most faithful church attenders Rome is losing the saved