Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Pope and the Pew

The cat's out of the bag and Pope Benedict XVI has done something about it. Unfortunately I'm not referring to the sexual abuse crises of the Catholic Church to which the Church took roughly nine years to react. It was the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that really got the attention of the Vatican.

In 2008 the Pew Forum published results of its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey identifying the Catholic Church as the denomination experiencing the greatest loss in membership as a result of affiliation changes. The study further indicates "These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration." (See http://www.pewforum.org/.)

The study's summary of major religious traditions in the U.S. had the Catholic Church in the number two spot with 23.9 per cent of the U.S. population behind Evangelical Churches with 26.3 per cent of the population.

So the Pope dug in his heels and resurrected Pope John Paul II's appeal for a new evangelization. In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI announced his creation of a pontifical council charged with pumping up the membership specifically targeting inactive Catholics, or as he described them, people "...living through a progressive secularization of society and a kind of eclipse of the sense of God." (Vatican City, Catholic News Service, June 28,2010)

Taking the lead from the top Church, the Catholics are looking for men and women whose lives have been personally changed by Jesus and who can find the words to share their personal stories with others.

The Church has also implemented the nifty corporate practice of merging with smaller entities, i.e. welcoming the conservative Anglican Church of America into its fold.

But beware, this "new evangelization" has a far greater reach. Pope John Paul II's initiative declared that "The new evangelization calles for a clearly conceived, serious and well organized effort to evangelize culture." (Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia in America, 1970)

U.S. Catholic bishops and organizations have rallied to that call with unprecedented grassroots political organization, taking the crusade off the battlefield into the voting booth. Their mission to "evangelize culture" has them in the pulpits, on line and in the media spotlight lobbying for Catholic agenda dignities to the extent that eyebrows have been raised as to their crossing the line of federal laws regulating non-profit organizations.

Bishops are using corporate bullying tactics to pressure Catholic politicians into towing the Catholic Party line by refusing sacraments to those who don't vote according to doctrine. Unwittingly, or not, the Church has a clamp on the U.S. Supreme Court with five Catholic Supreme Court Justices out of its nine members.

All this high profiling to garner new members while flying in the face of international accusations of the Church's crimes against children worldwide seems to be working.

The National Council of Churches 2011 Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches listed the Roman Catholic Church in the number one position with 68.5 million members and reported growth of .57 percent; however, according to the NCC, ten of the 25 largest churches did not report updated figures (News from the National Council of Churches, February 14, 2011). It's interesting to note that the Catholic Church found the time in 2010 to compile this report; but has ignored the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for fourteen years....onward Christian soldiers.

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