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.
Good points.
Thx.
INDEED.
INDEED.
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These conversion wars are interesting. From my perspective it comes down to two types of people. Those who seek liberation and freedom as explained above and those who are looking for an infinite expression in the finite, ever changing world. For those looking for the latter, the Romanist Church sells them on their institution as meeting that need as somehow having eluded any flux over time. Of course it's all a constructed facade and so their worship is mired in mysticism and symbolism as a means to cloud the facade.
Abraham Kuyper wrote on this as, "An overflow of mystical sensations darkening the mind. A general bluntness and dullness, rendering both the conscience and consciousness dim and obtuse; and the distance between the lower and higher classes wide and sharp. The laity overruled by the clergy. All vital energy broken. And the spirit of liberty and independence quite crushed down."
However, if the current rates continue the OPC will have zero members a thousand years before the Church.
Where in Scripture is annulment sanctioned?
Since you seem to be so fond of citing Pew findings as authoritative perhaps you would care to mouth-off comment on the following Pew finding too:
- Most Mainline Protestants Say Society Should Accept Homosexuality - March 19, 2009)
What's the big deal about that to a Catholic? The Catholic church is already ordaining homosexual priests.
And once a priest, always a priest. Or just shuffle them around so that they don't come in contact with any more prey.
Until the Catholic church gets serious about dealing with the homosexual infiltration of it's clergy and the abuses perpetrated by them, Catholics and the church are in no position to cast the first stone.
What the mainline Protestants are doing there is just demonstrating what rejection of Scripture as the authoritative Word of God leads to. A lesson the Catholic church should note well, but probably won't.
More to the point, where in the New Testament is DIVORCE mentioned, and what is said about it there?
Now now.
Don’t forget the spoonful of sugar trying to force some truth medicine down RC throats!
Naw. Fergit it. Too many are gunshy of the truth even with the sugar.
It never ceases to amaze me how little those who purport to be experts on Catholicism because they slept through their Baltimore Catechism, are now sleeping with former Catholics, or just let the "voices" speak to them actually know about the Church's teachings, (which by the way, completely repudiates the Calvinist charade about loving the sinner, but hating the sin).
CCC - 2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
CCC - 2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
Ordination is a Sacrament exactly like Baptism. It indelibly marks one soul and cannot be undone. Because the Church is based upon the principles of redemption and forgiveness it believes and works to help each of us on the plan for Salvation that God has created for each of us (this also repudiates Calvin's teachings). Anyone who claims that they don't have homosexuals in their Church or their clergy is a liar. Besides, since priests, like all unmarried Catholics are called to Chastity (how did you do with that one?) what does it matter to you or anyone else who they are not sleeping with?
Annulment is not a Catholic "divorce", it is a procedure according to the Church's Canon Law whereby an ecclesial tribunal judges whether the a marriage was entered into validly. The Church presumes that a marriage is valid until proven otherwise. A "Declaration of Nullity" is not a dissolution of an existing marriage, but rather a determination that a marriage never existed. Typical resons for an annulment are a marriage entered into fraudulently by either party or under coercion. "Because I got tired of him", "she cheated" and "I found someone who makes me happy" are not reasons for annulments.
For the record, many ex-Catholics become ex-Catholics because they have divorced and, according to Canon Law, are habitating in a state of adultery. Does this apply in any way to your decision to leave the Church?
Good post. People join the Catholic Church to find truth. They leave the Catholic Church because the truth hurts.
Thus the exodus from many mainline Protestant denominations into more Scripturally-solid churches who follow God's word (reiterated during the Reformation) and who deny the foul, elevated priesthood of Rome, a charade that draws men who prefer to live without women (historically known as homosexuals.)
lol. All bluster and no evidence.
Typical.
Of course “annulment is a (Roman) Catholic ‘divorce.’”
Rome spends pages trying to finagle its way around its own permission to divorce. If the money is right, the marriage never took place.
Hypocrites.
>> “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” <<
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The Lord is calling his own to him.
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>> “Because the Catholic Church has the largest numbers of any religious tradition its net losses will be huge by comparison.” <<
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False.
Maineline protestants outnumber Catholics by about 20%.
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