Monsignor Pope Ping!
The myth is that they can fill the pews again by importing Hispanics. I’ve got some bad news for those puppies. Ain’t gonna happen. That myth about the Hispos being family and church oriented is from the 40s an 50s. Those days are long gone. They only have kids these days for use as political props and golden tickets into the Land of the Big Pinata.
Gotta make room for all the new mosques.
Loss of faith in God, or abandonment of a corrupt ecclesiastical hierarchy?
The two are not the same Msgr Pope.
When the Mall and the Nanny State supply everything one could possibly want in life, there is no need for churches. Brutal, but true.
Creeping materialism leads to atheism.
It’s not something that makes up for all the closing churches but it should be noted that many churches are broadcasting on the web now. The attendance picture that we see is not all there is because some are still “attending” that way.
Yes, the mental default of a lot of people is secular. Technological marvels and miraculous cures are produced by science... and, in fact, man’s abundant generosity to peoples of the world is due, in great part, to science. The message in the Gospel of Luke — help the poor — is taken up by a predominantly secular mindset, as if, one can speculate, that God poured himself into the flesh of his people and removed himself from the scene so that they can accomplish his will. God has been allowing man more power to determine its destiny ever since he grant them the right to have kings in the Old Testament. God started off from afar on Mt Sinai in the OT and slowly came close to man. The closest he came was with Jesus. But then he slowly has moved away till we now have the secularism of our century. But he hasn’t left us and we experience grace, our source to the transcendence, and we either accept or reject him — and judging by our fruits, by our generosity to our fellow man, we have accepted him.
Thank you for posting this.
I’m afraid that the Catholic Church in the US will be experiencing closures on a grand scale in the near future. Current attempts on the part of bishops to move and protect assets is thinly veiled and will be pierced.
The Church will survive the loss of many of her buildings. What is sorrowful is to see many of these buildings, which were monuments to faith and hard work, lost to time. Perhaps it will spur those young faithful to find their architectural voice. One can pray.
My thought is that the Grim Reaper no longer harvests the very young as he used to, thanks to modern medicine, so the young people scoff, and deaths are relegated to “accidents”.
Families no longer have 10-15 children, knowing 2/3s would never reach adulthood. Today’s families are much smaller.
Still, death lurks at the door, too close for some of us.
I firmly believe this part of the essay identifies the major cause for so many churches and synagogues failing ———- “As for the mainline (largely white) Protestant churches, I would argue that a collapse of faith has depleted them, at least collectively. Many of them ceased preaching the “old time religion” a long time ago, having largely assimilated to a post-Christian world and acclimated to the sexual revolution. Gone are the moral demands of the gospel, which have been replaced by a social “gospel.” Gone is the drama of salvation.” Imho, perhaps 5 percent of people want or like or will tolerate a socialist “church” program. Most everyone else, EVEN IF COMMIE PINKO politically, want a meaningful / Biblical faith message in church/ synagogue. I further think that almost everybody at least “sees through” the socialist political “liberal church” propaganda as false - ( also as unnecessary and not helpful for them).
Well, when you have decades of the Left teaching kids that anything pertaining to religion is bad, except Islam. Islam is good. The one religion that tells its followers to kill, is the only good religion.
Then you have all scandals of the Roman Catholic church.
You have the Left blaming all that is evil in the world being caused by all things associated with Christianity, in all its forms.
What does anyone expect?
Years ago, Stars & Stripes had an article about the mosques in Baghdad. As things started to settle down toward the end of 2008, the imams were complaining that fewer and fewer people were attending. The young kids were just going about their business.
I will show My Glory through the Eastern House
April 8, 2014
Back 35 years ago, myself and some friends bought a fairly modern church building to expand our church group.
We found the shocking reality is they are VERY expensive to run.
The ones build 100+ years ago are frighteningly expensive to run.
Eventually, more and more effort goes into funding the building and less and less goes into religious activity.
Eventually we sold the building.
This applies as well to the Catholic Church.
Catholics, when was the last time you heard a homily that honestly faced the danger posed to our immortal souls by our personal behavior, that called us to repent and turn our lives over to Jesus?
What is the focus of our shepherds but the promotion of leftist politics, in between their frenzied bouts of faggotry?
The Church has not been in the salvation business for a long time, and the falling out of the formerly faithful is not nearly finished.
But Jesus will not abandon us. The Church will be purged of the filth and the faithless, emerging smaller yet stronger, once again gathering the sheep to the Good Shepherd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qht73MF6C84
add to that, living in pain and years of unanswered prayers. What if prayer will only make things worse?
Most American Protestant denominations are no longer recognizably Christian. I won’t go to any church affiliated with a mainline denomination.
Where you will find the real churches is meeting in people’s homes, renting movie theaters, meeting at public school gyms and cafeterias to the extent that hasn’t been shut down by the atheists.
Hey! Bad news. It isn’t a loss of faith, it is a rejection and disgust with an increasingly degenerate and out of touch clergy.
The Good Monsignor is trying to shove this off on outside social forces.
For the most part it’s the BAD DECISIONS of Church leadership that has caused this.
Closing established parishes in inner-city neighborhoods to go and chase new money out in the suburbs.
Sweep a sex abuse scandal under the rug for decades and then find yourselves on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements, judgments and legal fees.
etc.
Since the feast of the Immaculate Conception (Dec 8) falls this year on a Saturday. Today my rural local parish My pastor comes from SriLanka (Ceylon)is holding a 5:30 pm vigil mass for the feast of the Immaculate Conception and an 8am mass on Saturday because of the regular Sunday vigil mass said at 5:30 pm on Saturday will not apply to Our Lady’s feast.
Frankly I expect both both masses to be lightly attended. I’m lucky to have a priest let alone have masses said on what were Holy Days of Obligation. Immaculate Conception was the name of the church and grammar school (12 Franciscan sisters) I attended while a kid in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. The school has since been closed the parish disbanded and the church rededicated and given to the Holy Family religious order.
All of this is predicted in Scripture. Isiah 4:1 is my favorite. It basically says in the Last Days there will be 7 women ( women are denominations or churches)that will love one man (Jesus), and they will eat their own food (make their own doctrines) and wear their own garments (a garment is your righteousness-call evil good and good evil) but they want to be called Christian instread of the church of Satan. But there are multiple verses saying the love of the church will grow cold, there will be this lukewarm church in the Last Days, and so many other examples anyone can see what we will be up against as we approach the Last days. If you visit a newer growing church, most likely you would find one that preaches grace more than burning in hell. Most likely speaks in tongues as a sign of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Will preach more sermons on everything repeating itself such as the Antichrist is a type of Nimrod in Babylon, a type of Pharaoh that forgot Joseph, a type of Antiochus Epiphanies that killed a pig on the altar and declared himself god in the Temple according to Maccabees, and others. We see and preach that it will be as the days of Noah and Lot in the Last Days. Of course the days of lot is the emergence of sodomy being accepted and the Days of Noah refers to evil is good and good is evil and the corruption of the image of God with demonic seed.
Pretty much everything that uses robes, collars, and church furniture make men(and now women)the authority and not Jesus and His Word, is failing. There are multiple verses about large "trees" ( gatherings of people. Trees are people, Jesus said I am the vine you are the branches.) They have "beasts of the field" and "birds" in their branches. Beasts of the field are demons and birds are demons living in the people and demons are in the shade of the tree.) A demonic church will fail. Scripture says God will cut it down but leave the stump.
If we hang on to our denomination more than we hang on to Jesus and the Word of God, God will cut it down. It's not the people, it's the teaching. The message of God has beckoned people for thousands of years successfully. The farther we get from the teachings of the Bible, God will give us up to a reprobate mind.(Romans 1:28) A reprobate mind cannot think straight so the FIRST indication we are losing our minds is sodomy (Rom 1:24) They thought they were wise, but became fools. Doesn't "science" say it's OK to be Gay? Would teaching that God is creator and rejecting evolution stop this slide to Gomorrah? (Rom 1:20)
It's really easy to fix this, but we probably won't. We have reverted back to the original sin. We took Satan's advice and made ourselves as gods and worship ourselves. We are more proud of being a Catholic, Methodist, or Baptist, than following Scripture. We are so concerned that we are right and everyone else is wrong that we would rather go down swinging rather than stand with Jesus.
Another thing we do is worry about sin. Jesus either took our sin on the cross or He didn't. We point at each other and tell everyone I'm better that they are. No, you are just like the biggest sinner there is, but you have been forgiven. Our continuous sin is our nature. We should try to sanctify ourselves and be holy people put aside for God and stop worrying about our neighbors sin. It's his/her problem. If you keep pointing at your neighbors splinter, someone may notice the log you carry. You will never get believers by pointing out people's sins, but tell them God loves them and gave His Son to rescue them. Hellfire and Brimstone is fine to preach for informational purposes, but the love of God will overpower the desire for sin if the people are told about it. Our pride will always tell us we are better than the next guy or God doesn't really care about the sin I do. I can't count the number of lost people that tell me they don't go to church because of something another Christians has done to them. They immediately say "I'm better than they are".