Mass exodus

WORLD Magazine ^ | Jan 15, 2011 | Alisa Harris

[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.

[metmom]

If it’s not mortal, it’s venial.

Then it wouldn’t be such a serious issue, would it?

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/index/d.htm

About 3/4 the way down is all the references in the CCC on divorce with links to take you to the statements.

Those in the process of divorce cannot take communion unless certain conditions are met.

So, tell me again how divorce is not a mortal sin?

It sure seems serious enough to have the church take a stand against Catholics divorcing taking communion, that is until they get an official annulment from the church.

A more convoluted system of religiosity does not exist. Catholics can find ways to finesse God’s directives in ways that would make the Pharisees blush with shame that they hadn’t thought of it.

[Judith Anne]

Since you have shown that you have an incomplete knowledge of both the spirit and the letter of canon law, why not drop it?

[gipper81]

A more convoluted system of religiosity does not exist. Catholics can find ways to finesse God’s directives in ways that would make the Pharisees blush with shame that they hadn’t thought of it.

A more convoluted system of metmom does not exist. I could finesse an answer in your direction, but you'd still be convoluted.

[caww]

So Catholics have different levels of sin? Some more acceptable than others or what?

[presently no screen name]

Exactly. Their deceptive practices lead to more deception. Notice how little the RCC thinks about the children involved. What a sham their man made rules are.

[Natural Law]

"Finessing God's laws, again."

It beats the hell out of simply ignoring them or clinging to their perversion by some old French kook to give you a fig leaf of morality.

The Church speaks clearly on this subject:

CCC 2384 Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. It claims to break the contract, to which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other till death. Divorce does injury to the covenant of salvation, of which sacramental marriage is the sign. Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture: the remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery:

[Antoninus]

LOL. How did I know you posted this before I even read the article?

Want to know the sad truth? Even the Pope has admitted that the Catholic Church will shed many cultural Catholics in the coming years of trial--just like the Church did during the persecutions of Diocletian. But it will be a stronger, more vigorous Church that emerges from the rubble.

You all can have all of our Father Cuties. Take them, please.

We'll take these guys:

Anglo-Catholic Bishops Vote for Rome

[metmom]

Do you really believe that you were the first or only person to lie to or deceive the Church or misrepresent yourself or to break your vows?

Oh? When did I lie to or deceive the church? To whom did I misrepresent myself and when? What vows are you accusing me of breaking?

It looks like wmfights was right, that you are accusing me of something.

On what basis, pray tell? What do you think you know about me that causes you to make those statements?

[Natural Law]

"What do you think you know about me that causes you to make those statements?"

It's written in the dirt.

[metmom]

Why, do you have a guilty conscience and feel a need to confess?

Me? No.

I'm a new creature in Christ. I've been forgiven by God through the one and only mediator between God and man, Christ Jesus, and don't have to live with feelings of guilt anymore. That's the beauty of being set free in Christ.

2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

Philippians 3:13b-14 But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

I will sleep like a baby tonight, secure in the knowledge that I belong to Him and that nothing can separate me from His love.

[caww]

Why do they always put words out there or insinuations which are never stated? Sheesh....just means you were making your point clear before they started Metmom.

[metmom]

Annulment is simply Catholic divorce with church sanctioned finessing of God’s directives. It’s a way to provide guilt free and consequence free divorces for Catholics.

Canon law is a joke. The whole thing is simply a system designed to finagle their way out of obeying God’s clear and plain commands as set forth in His word.

The CCC is a self-contradictory set of statements that allows a Catholic to claim they’re right about any topic they’re discussing with a non-Catholic. It plays both sides against the middle.

[Natural Law]

"I will sleep like a baby tonight, secure in the knowledge that I belong to Him and that nothing can separate me from His love."

LOL - News Flash! Calvin's concept of forgiveness does not come with a "Get out of Hell Free Card" and doesn't indemnify you against all future sins. Frankly, your performance on these threads and the absence of beatitude is pretty convincing evidence of a lack of unity with Jesus and a lack of communion with the saints.

[Quix]

YOU have had the 30,000

well documented to you to be a false, inacurate, wrong, fraudlent number.

Yet YOU still persist in using it.

Fascinating.

.

Of course, we realize
That some RC's seem to be quite SNOOTILY happy
to
VERY BRAZENLY
demonstrate their worship at the following

STATIONS OF
The Stations of The White Hanky:

.
1. Icon to bearing false witness
2. Black/white icon of duplicity, double standard dance
7. Icon of the rubber history texts
8. Icon of the rubber daffynitionary
9. Icon of the rubber logic text
10. Icon of hubris to the supreme degree
11. Groping for any explanation but the truth
12. Icon to the holy flip-flops in word meanings and arguments
14. Icon to the fantasized divine right, to be correct, pristinely sanctified & perfectly flawless in all respects in all cases all the time, regardless of the REAL TRUTH.
15. Icon to chronic & obsessive inconsistency.
17. Icon to the undivine right of terminal snootiness to the max.

[metmom]

So Catholics have different levels of sin? Some more acceptable than others or what?

Yeah, there's mortal sin and venial sin.

Mortal sin will land you in hell if you don't make it to confession to confess them before you die. Things like murder and divorce are mortal sins.

Venial sins are more like lying and will result in an extended stay in the torture chamber of purgatory.

Of course, the Catholic church can re-categorize the sin depending.........

And I think you can fill in what the depending is pretty well. (Think Kennedy)

[metmom]

When you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger.

Annulment is a total farce and everyone except brainwashed Catholics recognize that it’s just a matter of semantics and there’s simply no practical difference between it and divorce.

If Catholics only realized how foolish they look defending the indefensible like that......

[Natural Law]

"Of course, the Catholic church can re-categorize the sin depending........."

Since you are a self-professed former Catholic who purports to know all thing Catholic you should know better, but I guess that's what makes a lie a lie.

[caww]

an annulment treats the marriage as though it never happened...hahahahahaah...AND it makes it easier for them to remarry. That’s a one two punch...No Divorce “stigma”...and they can say they were never married...then remarry and slip into bed with someone else as a new bride!.....oh how sneaky is that!

Wonder if they can still annul if there are children? Humm...do they then say the children didn’t happen? Naw...they don’t do that with kids do they?

[Judith Anne]

Seriously, there is no point in any Catholic being on this thread. People who want to hate the Church will manufacture any excuse to do so. I find no visible signs of intelligence here, so, see you around.

[Quix]

INDEED.