Greensboro Catholic Young Adults

BBC Radio has an interesting programme called In Our Time.  It discusses the history of ideas related to science, religion, philosophy, history and culture.  It usually has very interesting topics and knowledgeable guests.

This week’s topic is the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII.  You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or follow the link and listen to the lastest episode.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

Enjoy

Christianity is a religion of new beginnings.  Jesus died for our sins, so that we may have new life.  A life that is not tainted by our past.  It’s not that our past doesn’t matter.  Our past must be confronted and dealt with but Catholics are given that all important sacrament of reconciliation.  As long as we deal forthrightly with our past we are not doomed by it.  Our life can have a new beginning.  Our future is not determined by our past.  He did not ask the fisherman if they were righteous, he asked them to drop their nets and follow him.  That is all Jesus ever asks of us, to follow him.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/03/19/easter.whipping/index.html

Health officials in the Philippines are asking — no, “strongly advising” — Catholics taking part in Easter self-flagellation rituals this week to first check the condition of their whips before lashing their backs.

Authorities worry that dirty whips could lead to tetanus and other infections, according to a report in the Manila Times newspaper Wednesday.

“We are not trying to go against the Lenten tradition here,” Health Secretary Francisco Duque III told the newspaper. “But this advice is important to make sure that no one will land in the hospital due to tetanus or other infections that penitents might get in the process.”

So be sure to check the condition of your whips. You don’t want to give yourselves tetanus or some other infection during holy week.

Come join the St. Pius young adults as we follow the donkey this Sunday during the Palm Sunday Procession.  It begins at Northside Baptist Church (1100 E. Cornwallis) at 5 p.m. and ends at St. Pius with an ecumenical worship service and a reception.

Don’t forget to bring your palms, and if you have any questions, contact Jeremy (202-9720).

When people reminisce about love. They think of the exciting start to a new relationship, to the surge of feeling walking down the aisle at your wedding, they may even think of the comfortableness of knowing your spouse stills love you twenty years into a marriage, but I doubt many would think of the unconditional love of a husband watching his wife in love with another man. But that is exactly what this movie shows.

In the movie, a husband watches as his wife slowly loses her mind to Alzheimers. Forgetting that she is married to him she falls in love with another man. At first the man is jealous but at a certain point he accepts what life has dealt him. There is a touching scene in which a teenage girl mistakes him for a patient. Once she realizes her error, she asks why he isn’t with the person he is visiting. He says that she’s enjoying herself too much for him to interfere (with the other man). The girl assumes that the man the and woman at the distant table are husband and wife. The husband corrects her and tells her he is married to the woman. When she realizes the situation at first she shocked and then she is touched. That in a nut shell was my reaction to this movie. It is a bit shocking but in the end it is a movingly loving tale telling a very unique story.

This is the second post on the Pew Forum’s Survey of the American Religious Landscape.  I said I was going to comment on the lack of converts and I eventually will, but this post is going to be about a sampling bias Pew found in their data.

On page 41 of the study Pew noticed that their Latino percentages did not match those found in a study they conducted a year earlier.  They had used different questions which may have introduced some bias but they believed and found by conducting an additional survey that the source of the bias was the lack of immediately bilingual questioners.  The Landscape Survey attempted to conduct interviews in English, if they could not complete the survey the household was contacted again by a Spanish interviewer.  In the fully bilingual surveys the Catholic chunk of the Latino population was 65 and 68%.  In the Landscape Survey it was 58%.  Incoporating those numbers into the total population would boost the Catholic percentage from 23.9 to 25.1%.  This falls in the line with other surveys of the American population that has found Catholic membership holding steady at 25% for the past two decades.

There are some interesting numbers that can be drawn from this error.  Pew stated that Latino respondants who completed the full English survey identified themselves as Catholic only 48% of the time.  According to a Pew Hispanic Survey from 2006 59% of Latino’s can speak English.  By doing some math with these numbers I found that of Spanish-speaking Latino’s 89-98% identified as Catholic.  Now I am willing to acknowledge that I using numbers from multiple surveys and that introduces many problems but as a general statement it can be seen that as Latino’s assimilate they are rapidly losing their Catholic character.

According to the 2006 survey 23% of first generation immigrants spoke English, 88% of second generation, and 94% of third generation.  So with a few caveats we can speak of the Spanish speaking cohort as mainly first generation immigrants and the English speaking cohort as later generations.  What this allows us to see is the disintegration of the ability to pass Catholicism onto the new generations once they have reached America.  Catholics are losing 46-51% of later generation Latinos.

Please join the St. Pius Young Adults for Eucharistic Adoration on Friday the 7th.  We’ll be meeting in the church at 6pm.

For those of you who don’t know this practice dates back to St. Francis of Assisi in Italy.  Adoration spread to France during the later battles of the Albigensian Crusade.  It was so well received the practice continued as perpetual (24 hours a day) adoration until the chaos of the French Revolution six hundred years later.

This will be the first of a couple posts on the Pew Survey. 

The Pew Forum has completed a vast survey of the American Religious Landscape.  They released their first report last week, you might have seen some of the headlines.  “Ex-Catholics third largest religious group in America”, “Protestants are barely the majority.”  Many of these statements are misleading.  Here’s a table of the data for the major religious groups in America.

Most of the new reports focused on the raw numbers.  Catholics lost a lot of members.  Protestants are in net decline, almost entirely attributable to the mainline churches losses.  A better way to look at the numbers is to compare by percent lost and gained.  When you do that you see some interesting things.

While 10% of the American population is ex-Catholics, Catholics retain members (32%) better than all but two religious traditions.  Only Jews and Mormons retain members better (at 26% and 28% respectively).  Baptists are the next religious group at 40% and Lutherans lose 42%.  No other major religious group loses less than 50% of their members.  So in fact, although our youth catechesis programs were atrocious in the 70’s and 80’s they were not the primary cause of our net loss.

You could look at the number of people entering the Catholic faith and say that the number of Catholic converts easily outnumbers the entire Anglican/Episcopalian church.  But that would be to miss the point again.  In looking at the converts as a percentage of each church the Catholic church has been abysmal.  Catholic converts make up 11% of the members in the church.  To give you some perspective Jewish converts make up 18% of their church (that’s a religion that doesn’t seek to evangelize).  The next two groups were Mormons at 24% and Baptists at 26%.  Every other religion/denomination was over 30%.

What is clear from these numbers is that we live in a religious marketplace, this is especially true of Protestants.  Most Protestant denominations lose half of their members from childhood to adulthood but gain back most of the that number in adult conversions.  Mormons, Jews, and Catholics still have some stickiness to their religions but also have trouble bringing new members in.  For Jews this makes sense because of the ethnic nature of their religion and the fact that they do not proselytize.  For Mormons and Catholics this is surprising and troubling.  Especially for Catholics since our convert rate is so poor.  In my next post I will talk about why this may be happening and what we could do.