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.
Paul is the only NT writer to comment on Divorce.
True; when I’m in a position where something I do may be contrary to Christ’s teaching, the last thing I’ll presume is that He was in error. I’m not perfect, but I won’t excuse my shortcomings with such nonsense.
>> “Ultimately, those who leave the Catholic Church, as the article shows end up in secularism and even those who move to Protestantism never really settle on any Tradition, they keep moving to what is the “Church that is happening now” and church shop the rest of their lives.” <<
.
I seriously doubt that there is a shred of truth in that wild assumption.
I see the opposite as being true. Those that are awakened by the Holy Spirit soon find themselves as square pegs on a round hole in the Nicolaitan churches (Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran) and have to search for a church that is spiritually alive, and that can entail a time of church ‘testing.’
Great understanding of the magick show Rome peddles.
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."
"distance between the lower and higher classes wide and sharp."
Exactly. The elevated priesthood made up of "another Christ" and the peasants who line the pews. Two classes where one thinks for the other. No wonder Calvin is called the "theologian of the middle class." Rome despises the middle class and fears its autonomy.
The RCC appeals to those who seek an earthly master. These people have an authoritarian bent. They want to be told what to do and what to think. They distrust their own minds and consciences, their own reading of Scripture, and therefore they rely on old men who tell them they know what's best for them because only priests have this mojo. No one else is privy to it.
OTOH, Protestants understand what Paul meant by being "renewed in the Spirit of your mind" "to know the things of God." They trust the Holy Spirit to lead them. They believe the word of God is inspired instruction from God directly to the brains and hearts of those whom Christ has numbered among His flock.
"An overflow of mystical sensations darkening the mind. A general bluntness and dullness"
Precisely. And the joke is Rome considers itself to be an "intellectual" faith. lol. NOTHING could be further from the truth.
lol. “hundreds of thousands???”
Don’t hold your breath. That’s just more Vatican PR.
In fact, when Ratzinger recently visited England, the crowds were much SMALLER than Rome had anticipated.
FALSE. As usual your numbers just don't add up:
Catholicism - 1.2 billion
Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy - 310 million
Protestantism - 670 million
Anglicanism - 82 million
Nontrinitarianism - 27.5 million
Latter Day Saint movement (Mormonism) - 14.1 million
Jehovah's Witnesses - 7.3 million
Oneness Pentecostalism - 6 million
Because we all know how much actual research you put into your opinionated hit pieces on the Church I'll take it as a joke. The only response I have is....."That's what she said!"
This reflects the reasons my own dad began listening to Bible preachers and teachers outside of the Roman Catholic Church in the early 70s, and professed faith in Jesus Christ alone and the experience of the New Birth (John ch. 3) in 1974.
Of course, you're correct. Pew said that 60% of ex-RCs in the US became secularists while 40% joined evangelical churches.
Further, Pew also found HERE...
"...Those who have left Catholicism outnumber those who have joined the Catholic Church by nearly a four-to-one margin. Overall, one-in-ten American adults (10.1%) have left the Catholic Church after having been raised Catholic, while only 2.6% of adults have become Catholic after having been raised something other than Catholic..."
RC apologists would love to believe ex-RCs become miserable wastrels, but the truth is nearly half of them become stronger Christians.
Many, many of the Protestants on these threads were once Roman Catholic. And none of them appears shy in preaching the Gospel and declaring with gratitude...
"Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul." -- Psalm 66:16
Progress.
Amen. From darkness to light.
Praise the Lord!
It's a shame that the 60% don't come to an Evangelical church.
How about we review the global numbers.......
Did you limit your statement to the US because there is a lot more to this 6,000 year old flat earth than the US...
annulment = Catholic divorce
Divorce is permitted in Jesus own words in the case of adultery. (Matthew 5, 19 and Mark 10) but it was not the plan from the beginning.
There is NO allusion to anything like annulment at all in the Bible.
Divorce is permitted in Jesus own words in the case of adultery. (Matthew 5, 19 and Mark 10) but it was not the plan from the beginning.
There is NO allusion to anything like annulment at all in the Bible."
We know that annulments do not equal Catholic Divorces. That specious argument is the refuge of of those Catholics and ex-Catholics who have gotten divorced and remarried, but never obtained an annulment.
"So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." - Matthew 19:6
"What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." - Mark 10:9
Beautifully said! Kuyper expounds on this and the results for society when true religion is followed:
At that critical hour God sent a saving angel, what we still all honor as the Reformation....Instead of relying upon feeling and sensation, they appealed to Faith, and faith here meant both the understanding of the Revelation and it's personal application to the soul. They denied absolutely the necessity of connecting the Infinite with the finite by symbols. God has revealed himself, had revealed the mysteries of salvation, had revealed his ordinances for every sphere of our existence, and according to what Jesus declares, eternal life was not to have agreeable sensations, but "to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent." Not symbols but the "wisdom of God" was the preaching of the Cross. "I speak as to wise men, judge ye what I say," interpreted the apostolic method of teaching, expounding not to the clergy alone, but to all the saints, the mysteries of justification and redemption....Of course there is the mystical working of hidden potencies in our mind, there is the perception of God in the conscience, there is the emotion in prayer, and there is the communion with the indwelling Holy Spirit. But these are the mystical gifts, and the aim of God's Revelation is not to abandon us to shady and dim perceptions, but to declare to us the truth, to lift us up to its understanding, and so to enable the children of the kingdom of heaven to kindle the pure and serene light of the Gospel, to become confessors of a sound and clear confession, and if necessary to shed their martyrblood not for mystical sensations, but for the inviolability of God's Revelation....
So standing before the dilemma of feeling or faith, they choose for faith. So standing before the dilemma between sensation and understanding, they declared themselves distinctly for understanding. And as to the fundamental dilemma between Revelation given to us by God, and Symbolism conventionally coined by man, they firmly antagonized the symbolical system, and stood up for the all pervading authority of God's holy Revelation. This was the nerve of their strength, and to this staunch defense of Revelation over against Symbolism, they owe their imperishable glory in history. For it was by thus decidedly turning the wheel of life, that the human mind was roused from its slumbers, that the hidden energies of humanity came forward, that the direct union of the soul with God was restored, and that the liberty of conscience, the liberty of worship, and its immediate consequence, the social and political liberties, were reconquered for every nation, following in their track.
And you didn’t ping me to the response to my post which you even copied and pasted because why?
Taking my name out and putting someone else’s in meant deliberate action to do so.
And you didn’t even courtesy ping me.
I sure hope you don’t wonder why people have low opinions of Catholics.
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