This from Anthony Ruff OSB in a recent post at Pray Tell, Losing faith in Catholic church’s direction ...
"[...] I admit that my impression is based more on anecdote than hard data. But the anecdotes I hear from all parts of the country are piling up. And they are very disturbing. A permanent deacon’s wife – last I knew, this traditional Catholic woman was active in the pro-life movement – no longer attends Mass ever since the Pope’s and curia’s scandalous response to the sex abuse scandal. A young Catholic couple – the wife has an aunt in a committed lesbian relationship – leaves the Church over its treatment of homosexuals. A Catholic theology professor is worshiping at a Lutheran church on Sundays. A Catholic graduate of a Catholic college choses not to baptize his child in the Catholic Church because of its treatment of gays and women. Two Catholic people long employed at two Catholic publishers ask themselves how much longer they will stay Catholic and when they will make the break with it. A young women near the end of her studies in pastoral ministry, in tears, asks herself why she wasted all this time and money preparing to minister in a Church she no longer wants to associate with. Most every week I hear at least one such story.
Then there is the data. Adult baptisms in the US Catholic Church have declined 40% since 2005. Catholic infant baptisms in Boston are down 46% since 2000, Catholic marriages down 54%. The diocese of Leeds will loose 40% of its clergy within five years. In Ireland 16 men began seminary this fall – in the 1980s it would have been over 150.
The overnight collapse of the Catholic Church in Quebec and the Netherlands is legendary. Increasingly I’m asking myself whether we are now at the beginning of such a collapse."
Sadly, a blogging friend, PrickliestPear, has recently left.
