Posted on 12/30/2010 10:20:14 AM PST by Alex Murphy
Tim Pereira was an altar boy and his father played guitar in the church's folk music group. The family often gathered in the church basement after Mass to drink coffee and eat doughnuts with friends in their tight-knit parish. They ate spaghetti dinners with the rest of the church, browsed church bazaars, and went on family retreats. Their priest was a caring man who oversaw a close congregation.
Pereira remembers only community and warmth from his childhood in the Roman Catholic Church. He has no horror stories of cold churches or abusive priests. So why is Tim Pereira, 30, now an evangelical?
Pereira joins the 10 percent of Americans who have left the Catholic faith. While some high-profile Protestant intellectuals, such as Richard John Neuhaus in the 1990s, have converted to Roman Catholicism, the overall trend seems to be in the opposite direction. According to David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, the Roman Catholic Church is "hemorrhaging members." The Pew Forum's 2007 "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" found that Catholics have experienced the greatest net loss of any American religious tradition. Although Latinos are now the church's most faithful and orthodox members, church leaders have been worried about their exodus for over a decade. The numbers show a more diverse—and if immigration slows, a smaller—Roman Catholic Church in the coming years.
Faithful immigrant Catholics have enabled the Catholic Church to keep a steady 25 percent of the American population, but as immigrants come in, young people and second-generation Latinos trickle out. In 1997, Andrew Greeley, a priest and sociologist, reported with urgency the news that one in seven Hispanic Catholics was abandoning the church. According to a Pew Hispanic Center study issued 10 years later, Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion, that number is now almost one in five for all Latinos, and it is 23 percent for second-generation Latino Americans.
Pereira, whose grandparents immigrated from Portugal, said his Catholic identity was "almost like a nationality." Chris Castaldo, author of Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic, echoes Pereira: "Catholicism is more than propositions that you believe. It's your culture. It's your identity. . . . It's hard to just walk away from that."
David Campbell told me that the breakdown of Catholic culture—the dissolution of tight-knit ethnic communities and the "hollowing" of Catholic education—is part of the reason the Catholic church is losing members. Latinos, like the Italian-American immigrants of decades ago, tend to congregate in ethnically and religiously homogeneous communities and see their religion as part of their ethnic identity. But as Latinos assimilate into American culture, they may cease to see their Catholic faith and cultural identity as intertwined.
Manuel Vasquez, professor of religion at the University of Florida, said that he expects Hispanics will continue the trend toward Protestant conversion, especially since more and more Latinos are encountering Protestantism in their native countries before they even immigrate. He believes that Latinos will continue to change American Catholicism with their vibrant, more charismatic form of worship. He adds, though, that it's unclear whether charismatic worship keeps young Latinos in the Catholic Church or pushes them toward Protestantism.
According to Campbell, most cradle Catholics who leave the church (roughly 60 percent) end up saying they have no religion, but the second-largest percentage (about 40 percent) turns to a more evangelical form of Christianity. Castaldo said that evangelical converts often mention that they feel a liberation from rituals and a freedom from a guilt that they are never doing enough to ensure their salvation. According to the Religious Landscape Survey, most ex-Catholics report that they simply "drifted away" from Catholicism, but those who become evangelicals say that the church was not meeting their spiritual needs. Ninety percent of Latino evangelical converts say that they were looking for a more direct and personal experience with God.
Pereira's spiritual life turned around in college when he listened to a tape by inspirational business speaker Robert "Butch" James. James said problems and answers preclude each other: If you have an answer, you don't have a problem. "So what happens if you have an omnipresent answer?" James asked, and Pereira began to wonder: "Is it possible to be OK with life no matter what's going on around you?" In what he too describes as "a drifting process," Pereira started searching for that answer in religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. He still went to a Catholic church but only intermittently and when he felt guilty.
Then a girl he liked (his future wife) took him to a Protestant Bible study and he kept coming, forming a friendship with the leader and finally finding an "omnipresent answer" to his quest for peace.
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As a Catholic, I can state unequivocally that the faith is sound. The Church in America is in trouble, though.
All that needs to happen is for the clergy to stand strong in the faith and be true to our Catechism. Instead, they are making political calculations, allowing open scandal to fester and seeking to cover up the embarrassments of their failures.
The call to be a bishop is a call to martyrdom... unfortunately, many today seem to see it as a call to temporal honor and glory.
hyperbole
Quite a few spiritual suicides walking around in this world which they will have to answer for in the next.
I think this one sentence holds the key to the whole issue. I'm sure you can find a direct correlation between the guitar/folk music nonsense and the mass exodus from the Catholic Church.
This line is a bit misleading. Because the Catholic Church has the largest numbers of any religious tradition its net losses will be huge by comparison.
There are very real problems, solved only by prayer, fasting, and evangelization.
One political avenue I'm hoping to pursue is to make it legal for realtors to advertise if a house or apartment is near a church or religious school. (It's presently considered evidence of illegal intent to discriminate, which I find ridiculous).
Even a simple action like moving near a church can be an incentive to renew one's religious practice.
That's interesting. I think it makes good business for realtors should simply keep that information handy in case it's important to any of their prospective buyers -- regardless of religious affiliation. It can't possibly be discriminatory if a prospective buyer brings the issue up and the realtor is simply well-prepared to answer it.
This article has elements of truth, but is poor research. Yes, 10% of Americans are former Catholics, which means based on the current 2010 census, which puts the U.S. Population at over 308 Million, means there are 30.8 millon former Catholics in the U.S. As the study documents, about 60% of the former Catholics claim “No religon” meaning secularist.
Now, census reserach and polling research indicates that 16% to 20% of Americans now claim no religon or some typ of Liberal-Unitarian system [which is no-relgion in my book]. So lets split the difference and say that 18% of Americans claim “no religon”. That means there are 55.5 Million americans claiming no-religon, which means 18.5 million of those are former Catholics, or 33%. What about those other 37 million non-religous.
Now statistically, Catholics represent about 25% of the population so 33% of the non-religous is not that drastic. Again, how many former Protestants are now non-religous and how many are now Catholic? Statisically, is there any significant difference. I doubt it.
The 12.32 Million former Catholics who are now “some form of Protestant” means that if you take the current Catholic population of 77 Million plus the 18.5 Million former Catholics who are secularist and the 12.32 Million who are now “some form of protestant”, that means that 11% of those who were once Catholic have become Protestant and my guess is it is those less educated types who flock to forms of Protestantism that is pentecostal or health-and wealth protestantism.
In other words, those that leave the Catholic faith, at least those that I have encountered tend to go to the “protestant church of what is happening now” and every 2 to 5 years, they are telling you how wonderful there “new protestant church is” and over time those same people will have gone thru more “protestant churches” than I have underwear.
My favorite magazine, A.M. !!
Bump to the top !!
As the late, great Archbishop Fulton Sheen said: “Every 400 years the Church goes into decline and revival and we have been coming through our latest decline and a new era of the Church will begin.”
He said that in 1984 (or around that time).
I believe that the new era is already beginning to manifest itself. Quite a few religious seminaries and orders of sisters are growing very fast, with young and enthusiastic people coming in-—some are having space problems due to the increase.
The families who toughed out the difficult years and stayed in their parishes and brought their own new life there—blooming where they were planted-—are surely part of the reason why many young Catholics are beginning to reap the benefits.
Small Catholic colleges are growing and when they began to send their graduates out, those young people will also be bringing new life to parishes and families.
I’m not just offering rhetoric. I have experienced and am now experiencing this emerging “rebirth”.
The author rather conveniently neglects to mention that hundreds of thousands of Protestants are preparing to join the Catholic Church. They are mostly Anglicans who plan to accept the Holy Father’s invitation to become members of the mother church’s new Anglican ordinates, and in a number of cases, entire parishes and even some dioceses are planning to convert en mass.
- JP
I try to avoid the hippie “music” every week.
Two Sundays ago I was driving to church and heard Joan Sutherland sing a religious carol on the radio - it was beautiful.
Then I walk into church to the most awful caterwauling:
“Ma-reee! Ma-reeeee! Wa-cha gon-na name your ba-A-beeee!”
Maybe you had to be there but all I could think of was - ‘this is just disrespectful’.
One thing that may not be recognized is that the number of “Third Order” communities are growing at a very fast rate.
I belong to a “Third Order” Carmelite community. We are lay people who commit ourselves to lives of prayer while living out our secular vocations in the world. We are lay people attached to the Carmelite Religious Order. We meet together monthly for prayer in community with each other, and for talks and conferences. Our Carmelite communities now number somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 members and are rapidly growing.
And we are the Carmelites. The same thing is happening in Franciscan and Benedictine Third Orders. It is not presently seen or recorded in surveys and research but it is definitely happening.
However, as I’m sure all of us know, it’s never been about numbers in the Church. We Catholics, too, have our faithful remnant and they will be there.
Would love to see some stats about former Catholics who left because they got tired of the Church’s increased emphasis on “social justice” and illegal immigrant rights. We joined a more conservative church. US Bishops should get off the political stage and tend to their own issues-of which there are many.
I plan to research this more, but I suspect there is a great chilling effect on realtors' behavior. There are actually Fair Housing orgs that conduct sting operations to make sure an agent isn't being discriminatory.
Also lots of people, even regular churchgoers, just don't think about moving close to church anymore.
If you look at the housing ads in old Catholic papers, you'll see lots of homes or apartments advertising "within six blocks of Parish X and its school." Imagine the difference in an urban or suburban parish where only 5% more parishioners are within walking distance!
How do I omit the To: field like your post. Thankyou and sorry for pinging you.
**Pereira joins the 10 percent of Americans who have left the Catholic faith.**
No one EVER leaves the Catholic faith. Once they are baptized, they are ALWAYS a Catholic and will remain a Catholic until the moment of their death. They will just have to answer God’s question about why they stopped obeying the Commandments and practicing their faith.
I can think of a very unsavory figure in modern history, who would thus be regarded as Catholic by those who adhere to this belief, Salvation.
Are you really sure you want to claim him? Nobody else does.
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