The article I post below is from a Protestant source on why there are so many “nonverts” their term of “nones” today. However, the person they quote the most is a European Catholic. He makes wonderful points. The main one is this:
As people’s opinions in the U.S. changed on women’s roles in society, abortion and same-sex marriage, it was absolutely difficult for the churches to deal with, said Bullivant. They thought it meant “alienating large segments of people” who didn’t agree with the church’s stances on issues.
But, if you look at the Episcopal Church, which has changed along with the culture, its numbers are tanking, said Bullivant. Churches shifting with the times doesn’t seem to “fill the pews.”
“When Catholics say, ‘The reason young people are leaving is because they disagree with the church on abortion and contraception,’ they do disagree with the church, and abortion and contraception, and gay marriage and all sorts of stuff,” he said. “But it’s very unlikely that if the church changed those positions, or softened them in a pastoral way, that those people wouldn’t leave or that they’d come back or anything like that.”
My comments: It seems the synodal process of Pope Francis has the end game of making the Catholic Church like the Episcopal Church, bending to the desires of those who no longer practice the faith because they feel excluded by the dogmas of the Church on the hot-button issues of the day, as the article points out in the quote I use.
And that is the scandal of this synodal way in Germany which I believe is what Pope Francis wants for the entire Church although His Holiness is angered that the Germans are going faster than the pope would have wanted. He’s not upset at the content and suggestions.
But, no matter how much the pope and bishops want to appease those in the culture and allow the culture to dictate what Catholics believe, it won’t work. The disaffected in the Church have lost their faith.
What the Church needs to do is to present her teachings in a convincing way and those who believe in what the Church teaches, need to be supported by the hierarchy and not thrown away as though they are backwards and rigid.
We need an adequate apologetic for faithful Catholics and something that will challenge those who have become nones.
We have to accept that the Church will be smaller, but, by the grace of God, a smaller Church need not be a Church in apostasy.
Read the entire article by pressing the title:
2 comments:
Once again you present us with a post that has an eerie parallel with the secular world.
Protestantism is a proven failure, yet apostate Rome continues its path of soft Protestantism cloaked in the language of "renewal" and "reform", utterly deaf to any warnings that we are trodding down an already failed path.
And so it goes with America too. Communism is a proven failure wherever it's been tried, but we are moving like sheep as our leaders take us down the "soft" path to the same ideologies cloaked in civil rights terminology. The most obvious example that comes to mind is the almost mindless knee-bending "mainstream" corporate America gave to the BLM cause, utterly ignoring (or else certain most Americans wouldn't care) about the blatant Marxist affirmations this organization made no attempts to hide.
I just listened to a podcast in which an article in La Croix about Cardinal Pell accused him of being "doctrinally inflexible". As the podcaster went on to say, YES! If you are not inflexible, it isn't doctrine. Doctrine is eternal and unchanging. However, that sort of thinking is anathema to Catholics who insist we are giving birth to a "New Church" or secularists who insist that the Constitution is a "living document" while their leaders chip away at the Bill of Rights.
Jerome Merwick,
Spot on! Unfortunately, most people get their “news” from highly biased, leftwing sources, so they do not know any better.
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