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.
Years ago I read Shelia Rausch Kennedy's book and that was a real eye-opener for me. I wasn't aware of the very complicated process until that book came out.
I'm divorced and was married in the Catholic Church but I would never get an annulment I would consider it hurtful to my 5 kids.
Correct! Though it does speak of seperation for a time, with the encouragement to come back together. Annulment almost seems like the Vatican is blessing the couple in a rather undignified way.
NL, I don't always follow these threads is there something you are accusing MM of, or that came up in an earlier thread?
What you’re apparently not understanding, is that the differences between the different ‘forms’ of ‘protestantism’ differ in mostly insignificant ways that amount to less than wallpaper patterns compared to the schisms among Roman catholic parishes.
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While there are obviously many tares among all the denominations, I am confident that the percentage in protestant churches is significantly lower than in caatholic churches.
I base much of this opinion on the scriptural ignorance demonstrated by the more active catholic postors here at FR.
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It would be a lot simpler than going through the complicated,and often hurtful, process that takes place in Rome,especially if only one person wants the annulment.
God can make the final decision on the state of their souls.
Enjoy your coffee,by the way,I'm through with this topic.
Politics and religion,you know. Tough subjects,
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
Those quotes demonstrate why there some posters I simply won’t reply to, to do so might lend a legitimacy to their comments that is wholly undeserved.
Just curious . . .
Which of those applied to the Kennedys?
editor-surveyor:
The scriptural ignorance you are referring to among Catholics on here, which I am one, is in my view, more likely how those Scriptures were understood down thru the centuries and how they are understood by the Catholic Church differ from your personal view. At least that is how I see it.
I am not sure that the differences among Protestantism is insignificant. I think you are trying to minimize the difference. There are at least 30 different Presyberian groups. The Lutherans in this country are 3 different groups. Bapist are divided into Southern, Northern, Free Will, Calvinist-Baptist, ones that have “Arminian” (sic} theology and that is not counting the various stripes of pentalcostalism, emergent church, mega church, health and welfare theology, and on, and on, and on, and one.
Here is an article from Christianity today that, according to the study they cite, there are 38,000 Christian confessions and since there is the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, the rest belong to the Protestants, i.e your folks.
http://christianity.about.com/od/denominations/p/christiantoday.htm
Here is another study that does more analysis of the same study cited by the Protestant Christianity today article.
http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/a106.htm
Finally, here is a link to the Calvinist-Reformed Seminary’s Center For the Study of Global Christianity. In one of the links, you will find that the center collects data on “9,000 Christian denominations”
http://www.gordonconwell.edu/lifelong_learners/globalchristianity
Unfortunately, much of their work is password protected but if you go to this site [remember, it is a Reformed-Protestant Seminary], there data clearly says Protanstism is growing exponentially.
You’re picking your nose on this. The differences you imagine are not real. Even the Arminians still share the same belief as to the basis of salvation; they just take the fearful read on a couple of verses, which weakens their faith a little, but the effects thereof are small and mostly personal.
Fine. We'll start with the one I asked you about why you responded to my post, quoted me, and didn't ping me to it.
Everyone knows that removing a name in the *To:* field requires deliberate effort.
You answer a question, then I will answer a question....unless you just punt. Until then its still your ball.
I wasn't responding to you, I was commenting on your statement. You were/are active on this thread and had posts concurrent with mine. You were in no danger of being talked about behind your back. Besides, I find nothing in any of the posts you addressed to me other than formal protocol. Courtesy is reciprocal. When common courtesy is extended to me I will return it in kind.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Let me know if you get an answer. I haven't yet.
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