What has driven people from the Church is that for 50 years we were told that anything traditional was bad, no good, terrible and also immature. Of course the corruption of the clergy accounts from a lot of it, but most Catholics were not aware of how extensive this problem was until recently. The real decline is Catholics - 45% in 1970's, 25% today There's been no real shifts among black Protestants. In today's link he quotes Ryan Burge:īut, the share of evangelicals who are going to church weekly or more has never been higher - same for mainline Protestants. I was able to read The Benedict Option during this lockdown and highly recommend it. I consider him to be one of the most reliable sources of info and ideas on the Church, especially because he has written from an outside-inside-outside viewpoint. I have been reading him since he wrote in the NY Post, remember him writing of his conversion to the Catholic Church and then his exit to the Orthodox Church. The above link is to the latest from one of my favorite writers Rod Dreher. Again, I think a lot of the people in the 1970's - 1980's thought that everything in the Church had to change but the vast majority of Catholics just want solid, true Christianity. So far, I have heard positive feedback and no one seems to be pushing for the 1970's style Catholicism to return. This was written 16 years ago and the day has arrived! Some pastors are much more traditional but I do not hear much complaining about them. There were reflexive gasps from the crowd." "Keeler did issue a warning: It seems many of the younger priests and those currently in seminaries are leaning in an orthodox direction, and in 15 to 20 years these men will be our pastors. One line that jumped out at me was this line about Newsday's Bob Keeler speaking at a local VOTF meeting: I did not link to the article at the time but it is on line here. It showed how the group had good intentions but seem to end up doing nothing more than being another forum for liberal dissenters. In January of 2004 I posted about an article in Crisis Magazine that gave a behind the scenes look into Voice of the Faithful on Long Island (when I was getting the print edition). And, as Schmemann further points out, our status as homo adorans, as primarily in our essence “worshipers of the true God”, is thus replaced by homo faber, or humanity viewed as a mere economic commodity, either as a producer or as a consumer, and as a forger of brave new worlds in the here and now."Īn Inside Look at Voice of the Faithful on Long Island In such a bourgeois regime, where Christianity has been tamed and has become just one more aid or help to our self-improvement in this life (Shmemann’s genius insight), the Kingdom of God has to be gutted of its true supernaturally transformative power and replaced with either the ridiculous Gospel of prosperity or the totalizing social/political Gospel of the Left. This entails as well the de facto, practical atheism that ensues when God’s Transcendence comes to be viewed competitively over and against our worldly fulfillment. It is an idolatry made respectable (and therefore unrecognized as idolatry) by the Church’s modern acceptance of the Enlightenment’s co-optation of the Kingdom of God by politics and economics. It is rooted, rather, in the idolatry of worldly comfort, which I take to be the very essence of the bourgeois spirit. " My claim, therefore, is that the fundamental crisis in the Church today is not rooted, primarily, in sexual perversion. In short, at some point in her history the Church in North America and Europe ceased to be culture-forming and came to be, instead, formed by the culture. But therein resides the true nature of the “winter” in which we find ourselves, and the true nature of the disease that afflicts us. And that culture is largely reflective of the culture that surrounds us. "A nd so my larger point is that the bishops are/were not singularly evil men, but were rather the products of the ecclesiastical culture of their age. I am putting two bits from the article here but the whole thing is really worth reading and pondering: It reminds me of an intellectual version of The Great Façade by Thomas Woods and Christopher Ferrera. This article by Larry Chapp is great (found via Michael Liccione). What I saw at the Abbey of the Genesee and why it matters for the crisis in the Church.
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