I am hiking in the rain forests of thr Northwest (with the emphasis on rain).
I will moderate comments every few days.
I do not know enough about Islam to enter into that conversation, but I find it very interesting
Lee
I am hiking in the rain forests of thr Northwest (with the emphasis on rain).
I will moderate comments every few days.
I do not know enough about Islam to enter into that conversation, but I find it very interesting
Lee
in Catholic Church 21 Comments Tags: Catholic Marriage, Hispanics
Commonweal has a discussion of the decline in the number of Catholic marriages; they have declined 60% since 1972, even as the Catholic population has grown by 17 million. Our Sunday Visitor has the data and some speculation about the causes.
There are parallel declines in mass attendance and reception of the sacraments.
Everyone has his favorite target. Liberals blame the failure to follow through what they see as the logic of Vatican II, which seems to mean the acceptance of contraception, abortion, divorce, women priests, and gay marriages.
Conservatives blame Vatican II for breaking good habits of sacramental and prayer life that had taken centuries to develop and replacing them with incoherence. But these habits were so easily broken one has to wonder how deeply rooted they were.
The Episcopal Church and other mainline churches, which have followed the liberals’ prescriptions, have suffered similar declines, so something apart from failure to update the Church has caused the decline.
Conservative churches seem to be doing better, because they attract new converts to replace the members who leave. That is what the Catholic Church in the US has failed to do. Catholic numbers grow because of Hispanic immigrants, who have replaced the 1/3 of baptized Catholics who leave the Church. But Hispanic populations have never accepted all the church discipines of the post-Tridentine Church, such as getting married in a church ceremony. The Hispanic male aversion to the clergy is probably also starting to affect Catholic practice in the U.S. – in general, Hispanic men do not go to church or to confession – the book on which I am working, Meek or Macho? Masculinity and Religion, examines the hostility that Hispanic men have long felt to the clerical version of Christianity. Hispanic and Spanish men, if they are Catholic, have their own way of being Catholic, a way which often does not include going to Church or receiving the sacraments.
My hypotheses is in short: whatever is causing the decline in the mainline churches is also affecting the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is replacing its lost adherents with a population that has a lower level of sacramental practice. Hence the decline in the number of marriages
A good sociological survey could confirm or disprove this; if the problem is the lack of Hispanic practice, a approach must be adopted to their background and culture, which is different from that of Euro-American Catholics who have undergone secularization.
This table from Our Sunday Visitor suggests this is the explanation:
Marriages in the Church per 1,000 Catholics by diocese in 2010
Highest Rates
Salina, Kan. 7.3
Owensboro, Ky. 7.3
Wichita, Kan. 6.2
Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo. 5.9
Oklahoma City, Okla. 5.8
Belleville, Ill. 5.7
Bismarck, N.D. 5.7
Yakima, Wash. 5.7
Tulsa, Okla. 5.6
Rapid City, S.D. 5.6
Lowest Rates
Las Vegas, Nev. 0.9
Brownsville, Texas 1.0
El Paso, Texas 1.2
Dallas, Texas 1.2
Sacramento, Calif. 1.2
Juneau, Alaska 1.2
Laredo, Texas 1.3
Gallup, N.M./Ariz. 1.4
Brooklyn, N.Y. 1.5
Orange, Calif. 1.6
Most of the cities with the lowest rates have large Hispanic populations.
in Australia 8 Comments Tags: Bishop Morris, Vatican
Bishop Morris wrote to The Record that they had misreported his diocese’s use of general; absolution and that he had never said that he was in favor of ordaining women or “recognizing” Protestant orders. He had simply said that there was a discussion going on about these matters.
As the original statement no longer seems to be available, I do not know whether The Record misreported or not.
If it did, it seems that Morris was the victim of a contest of wills: the Vatican wanted him to come to discuss matters, and he refused. In these contests of wills, usually both parties are wrong to some extent.
Of course, there may have been more to it; transparency in these matters is almost always for the best, a lesson the Vatican has not learned.
In Baltimore a priest was removed from the priesthood because he allowed an Episcopal minister, a woman, who was connected with the family of the deceased, to read the Gospel at the funeral mass and perhaps to offer her communion. (The Pope gave Tony Blair communion when Blair was still an Anglican) At least that was the public explanation.
Either the bishops and Rome are acting in a high-handed and arbitrary fashion (entirely possible) or they are using trivial incidents to provide cover for the real reason for disciplinary actions. Neither possibility is very edifying.
in Catholic Church, demography 17 Comments Tags: American Catholic Council
Maureen Fiedler reports in the NCR about the American Catholic Council that just met in Detroit:
1. The issue of women’s ordination, and gender equality generally, has risen to a new level of prominence on the roster of reform. It is at the top of many reformers’ lists — men as well as women. It’s clear as never before: the denial of women’s equality just makes no sense to most Catholics anymore, especially these Catholics.
2. The issue of gay and lesbian rights has become mainstream in the movement, just as in society at large. It’s not a “fringe” issue for Dignity or New Ways Ministry; it’s everybody’s issue. And of course, over the years, Call to Action has had a lot to do with that.
3. New and independent communities are flowering as never before. If the Church is a garden, new sprouts are proliferating. There have always been tall trees and shrubs (cathedral and parish communities) in the church. But now, there are new flowerings: intentional communities — lots of them, the communities of the Roman Catholic Women Priests’ movement, the “Ecumenical” and “American” Catholic churches and dioceses, even new religious orders like Green Mountain Monastery in Vermont. Most of these are outside the purview of the hierarchy.
4. The “priesthood of the faithful” was visible. When the celebrant at the Pentecost Sunday mass said the words of consecration, hundreds of people in the congregation chimed in without prodding or instructions in the program. Why? I suspect that many do it routinely in their intentional communities, and they believe that they have the power, along with the priest, to call for the presence of Christ.
It is hard to see how these people can remain in the Catholic Church: they are on a collision course with Rome. They want women priests, married homosexual priests, and lay celebration of the Eucharist.
Their theology puts them outside the bounds of historical Catholicism. Rome might ignore that, but their practice threatens the integrity of the sacramental system, at least as Rome sees it.
Sociologically, this movement is aging. I have noticed that as people age their minds sometimes get stuck. My late father-in-law (a Harvard, Harvard Law graduate) could never believe that Communism had really ended in Europe – he continued to fight the battles of his youth.
Similarly, I think these people are fighting the battles of their youth, not realizing that conditions have changed. They also are very parochial geographically and historically – they seem to have no concept that unity with the Orthodox is the highest priority in healing the unity of the Church , and that their proposals would end any possibility of unity. They lack any historical perspective of the post-Enlightenment feminization of Christianity and the chronic lack of lay men in the Church; and they have no sense of the needs and culture of the Hispanic community which will be the Church in the United States.
Also these small, intentional communities (read splinter groups) are susceptible to manipulation by narcissistic con artists, even more than communities that have a structure of accountability and discipline – however much they have been ignored by the hierarchy.
The Jesuits are not aware that the Koran is not the Scripture of the Catholic Church. Perhaps interreligious dialogue between Jesuits and Catholics would help the Jesuits to understand Catholicism better.
A plan to allow for the reading of the Quran from the pulpit during a Mass at St. Peter Church in Charlotte June 26 has been canceled, with an interfaith dialogue planned for October instead. St. Peter Parish had agreed to take part in an event called Faith Shared, in which priests, rabbis and Muslim scholars are scheduled to read sacred texts in each other’s houses of worship. The event is a project of two groups, the Interfaith Alliance and Human Rights First. In announcing the cancellation June 7, Jesuit Father Patrick Earl, pastor of St. Peter, noted that a 2004 Vatican document, “Redemptionis Sacramentum” (“The Sacrament of Redemption”) expressly forbids the reading of texts from other religions during the celebration of Mass.
Some women in Catonsville, Maryland, were supposedly ordained by a women bishop of dubious lineage, who emphasizes that
Roman Catholic Womenpriests traces its origins to the so-called Danube Seven, a group of women who were ordained aboard a ship in the river in 2002 by three male bishops. Two of those bishops were never publicly identified, while the third, an Argentine named Romulo Braschi, was called a “founder of a schismatic community” by the Vatican. The seven women were excommunicated, but RCWP believes their ordinations were legitimate, providing the “apostolic succession” that made all subsequent ordinations legitimate.
I wonder why the one doctrine that such irregular ordinands focus upon is the necessity of apostolic succession of bishops for a valid ordination. If the Catholic Church is wrong about not being able to ordain women (and about a large variety of other matters on which such people usually disagree with the Church) why do they think it is right about the issue of apostolic succession?
From The New York Times
France is Scolded over Care of Great Hamster of Alsace
and
Illinois: Priest Accused of Helping Mobster Keep Violin
The violin in question was probably safer with the mobsters than with the feds. Perhaps the priest was a musician .