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.
FWIW, it’s pretty hypocritical to condemn divorce and not annulments, which are also destroying the one flesh arrangement.
Unless you're a Kennedy. They've got "Extra Special Dispensation." It's sort of like "Double Secret Probation."
Don't forget they don't feel bound by Scripture.
editor-surveyor:
No, actually it is an assumption based on in fact. As many former Catholics that I know do in fact once they leave teh Catholic Church go on a “church shopping spree” and very, very seldom do they make a decision to go to a particular brand of protestantism as that is a constantly evolving creed [or lack therof] always trying to find the way to be relevant to the culture of the day.
As G.K. Chesterton beautifully stated [and I am paraphrasing, not and exact quote], those who wed themselves to the current age will be a widow in the next.
Really? We do?
Before the [Second Vatican] Council there were less than 400 marriages annulled by Catholic diocesan tribunals in an average year; now there are 50,000.
-- citing Kenneth C Jones' work Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church since Vatican II,
on the thread Archbishop Timothy Dolan - The Alfred E. Neuman of Catholicism?
wmfights: Don't forget they don't feel bound by Scripture.
I wonder why......
How about your liberal flat brain wave?
So now you fancy yourself an expert in Canon Law too? Wow, all of that from sleeping through the Baltimore Catechism.
Is a marriage valid if either of the parties was already married?
Is a marriage valid if one of the parties was an unwilling participant?
Is a marriage valid if either of the parties was 13 years old, 10 years old, or 8 years old like Mohammed's 4th wife?
Is a marriage valid if either party lacks the mental capacity to comprehend the concept of marriage?
Is a marriage valid if the parties brother and sister, mother and son, father and daughter? Even if neither party knew it at the time of the marriage?
Is a marriage valid if either party never intended to have children and did not disclose that?
It seems that your smug little answers fall short of the real problems of the world. Thank God we have a Church that is prepared to deal with these issues like adults and not like dismissive insolent children.
don’t mind us, go back to your tea and cookies.
editor-surveyor:
Here is an article that supports what I have stated in previous post. America is a “church shopping culture” For Catholics that leave the Catholic Church, it is usually about abortion, homosexuality, women’s ordination that causes them to leave. Because whatever you say about the failings of individual Catholics, and I count myself in that number, it is pretty darn clear what the Catholic Church teaches with respct to Theological and moral issues.
For many people, they don’t want to be confronted with an authority that is not themselves and no matter how you try to spin it, Protestantism is the baby of the English enlightement which ultimately leads to the individual becoming the one who decides truth, and in this case, the individual decides to find a church tradition that accomodates ones beliefs
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1894361,00.html
I would conjecture that many other Catholics leave because of some marriage issue where they decided to divorce another person and jumped into another marriage and found a protestant church that was more accomodating to marriage and divorce.
Don't ask me to comment on what you know, although I have reason to believe it is prescious little.
I agree with you completely-——annulment is absolute hypocrisy.
It has been a sore point with me for many years,and I've had plenty of heated arguments about it.
The Roman Catholic Church annulment is a crock.
Then perhaps one or both of you could take a crack at answering the questions I raised in post #88. Should I put on a pot of coffee and anticipate a long wait?
What’s the priest doing agreeing to marrying anyone under those circumstances?
You mean he didn’t clear that all up when the couple went through the Pre-Cana classes?
Or he didn’t catch it then?
It's also hard to join. You're not just changing your religious beliefs, you're changing your ethno-culture.
This is why the Catholic Church will never be home to certain ethno-cultural groups. It recognizes this itself, because it doesn't waste time trying to convert people from "alien" (ie, rural American Protestant) backgrounds.
editor-surveyor:
I am back from my tea and cookies
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1204/religion-changes-affiliations-survey
Above is the more detailed study. It is interesting that the largest segment [15%] of the American population is Protestants who have changed to other forms of Protestantism. The majorities of this sub-group [58%] said they left one Protestant group for another because they found another one that was more preferable and less of a majority [51%] say they found one more spiritually to their liking, etc.
In other words, American Individualism has now taken root at the theological level so that many Catholics are no different from Protestants and see Church as a menu from which to pick from.
Still curious as to why you didn’t ping me when you responded to my post and quoted it by copying it and pasting it.
Do you have experience ein the annulment field. Where are your sources?
You got that right.
And they'll defend it to the death.
You answer a question, then I will answer a question....unless you just punt. Until then its still your ball.
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