Divorce is a mortal sin except when it isn't.
Yeah, right.
Finessing God's laws, again.
The Catholic church makes the Pharisees look like a bunch of bush league slackers.
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.
Y'all's own estimates on FR are that only 20% of self-labeled Roman Catholics are authentically practicing RC's.
I don't know if Gamecock or Alex have those posts archived, or not.
In any case, we've seen plenty of posts on FR from RC's themselves--AS WELL AS survey research--DOCUMENTING that it's really the often proferred stats of RC's themselves on FR that don't add up.
Think you’re going to get an answer?
ABSOLUTELY INDEED.
If you bothered to check, the research every one of these articles you link to quotes these numbers from the work of David A. Barrett. This research of his has been debunked numerous times here on FR for the implication Catholics delight to derive from it about ALL THOSE 30,000+ PROTESTANT DENOMINATIONS. If you aren't aware of it, I'd be glad to post it again. Once you read it you will not, or should not, ever try to slip that past anyone here. Let me know if you'd like to see it.
ABSOLUTELY INDEED.
VERY
ACCURATELY,
HONORABLY,
TRUTHFULLY,
FACTUALLY
PUT.
THX.
Why did you do that?
You were in no danger of being talked about behind your back.
That's essentially what you did.
When common courtesy is extended to me I will return it in kind.
What a paragon of maturity. Read the Beatitudes lately?
wmfights asked a very good question. Is there something you'd like to accuse me of to my face?
Not holding my breath.
I think the Kennedys are a protected class of
‘the fast-tracked to pretend White Hanky-hood’
along with other powerful politicos.
Along with priests who train altar boys in various
physical therapy exercises . . . oh, right, their protected status got revoked . . . mostly . . . sort of . . . depending.
It's a way of finessing God's commands.
If the priests were doing their job during Pre-Cana classes, there wouldn't be any need for Roman Catholic church sanctioned divorce (aka annulments)
You mean besides vile, mindless, evil anti-Catholicism and a significant history of misrepresenting Catholic teaching in spite of ample evidence to the contrary? No.
Why, do you have a guilty conscience and feel a need to confess?
Since divorce is a mortal sin, annulment is an out for them to get a divorce and not call it a divorce and still get to heaven.
Probably shortens their time in the torture chamber of purgatory.
The hypocritical thing is, if the marriage wasn’t *valid* to begin with, that means the *married* people were deceived by the church into thinking that the marriage that the Roman Catholic church performed in the first place WAS valid.
In the second place, it then means that they were living in sin (adultery since they weren’t “really” married) all those years and any offspring are then illegitimate children.
I frankly don’t see any reason for any Catholic to participate on this dogpile thread. The Usual Suspects are doing nothing except asking the same old questions, searching for a gotcha, acting as though they are morally superior in whatever one of the 30,000 other splinter sects that they inhabit.
It’s ugly. Let them alone. Leave it for the lurkers to see their unChristian disobedience to the two greatest commandments. They are doing nothing to praise God or His Church, they are instead seeking to establish themselves some sort of soulless theological position of pride. It will be their downfall. Leave them to it.
Or, it could mean one participant in the sham marriage lied, or it could mean that one participant was pressured into marriage because of a pregnancy, or it could mean that one participant was a practising drug addict or alcoholic, or it could mean any one of a number of things.
PS, where is it stated that divorce is a mortal sin?
Oh? It’s just a venial sin?
Something that God hates so much and Catholics even quote Scripture against?
Really?
I agree. Though I think I struck a nerve here. The squealing and outrage is because so many of the anti-Catholics left the Church over their own indiscretions. They hold a visceral hatred for the Church because it won't officially condone their serial polygamy and adulterous behavior or participate in their charade of godliness.
So, where is it stated that divorce is a mortal sin?
I’d say, let it go. Everyone reading the thread can see what is going on. They will make up their own minds.
Divorce is a mortal sin except when it isn't.
Yeah, right.
Finessing God's laws, again.
The Catholic church makes the Pharisees look like a bunch of bush league slackers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.