by designs 7 Replies latest social current
How would you describe the state of the world's religions currently. Which ones do you see making reforms and progress or bound to old traditions, or split between old and new approaches to social, environmental and political concerns.
JWs
Islam
Catholics
Protestants
Judaism
Hindus
Buddhists
Jains
Sikhism
Bahai
Folk/Native religions
Others
Bishops to Pope: 'the party is over' ? .... 'two-thirds of all Roman Catholic churches in the Netherlands would have to be shut or sold by 2025'
By Tom Heneghan December 3, 2013
(A health centre unit is built inside a former Catholic church in Eindhoven that has been sold because of dramatic falls in levels of churchgoing in the Netherlands. Photo taken 20 March 2012/Tom Heneghan) Dutch bishops visiting Rome this week have given Pope Francis a dramatic snapshot of the steep decline of Roman Catholicism in its European heartland.
Both Catholic and Protestant Christian ranks have shrunk dramatically across Europe in recent decades, and hundreds of churches have been sold off to be turned into apartments, shops, bars or warehouses. In the Netherlands, churches have been closing at a rate of one or two a week.
The bishops told the pope in Rome on Monday that about two-thirds of all Roman Catholic churches in the Netherlands would have to be shut or sold by 2025, and many parishes merged, because congregations and finances were “in a long-term shrinking process”.
Their five-yearly report blamed a “drastic secularization” of society, although a critical group of Dutch lay Catholics said the scandal of sexual abuse of minors by priests, which has afflicted many Catholic dioceses around the world, had also driven many people away, as had the closures themselves. The only bright spot for the Dutch church was the finding that the election of the popular Pope Francis in March appeared to have slowed the exodus this year.
Francis has made it his mission to restore the Church’s relevance with a message of simplicity and charity, although his parallel plan to open up its hidebound institutions may take years to make itself felt. (A painting is removed from a former Eindhoven Catholic church sold to the city and being turned into a library and cultural centre.
Photo taken 20 March 2012/Tom Heneghan) Cardinal Willem Eijk, head of the Dutch bishops’ conference, said that the bishops’ 90-minute meeting with the pope had examined the Dutch Church’s decline and the effects of the scandals that first came to light in 2010. Tens of thousands of children were abused by priests over decades, according to an independent inquiry, and the Church has apologized and begun paying large sums in damages.
More than 23,000 Catholics quit the Dutch Church in 2010, the peak of an exodus in which an average 18,000 have left each year since 2006. This year, however, only about 7,500 had left by October.
Catholicism is still the Netherlands’ largest faith, officially claiming 24 percent of the 16 million population. Next come the Protestant churches at 18 percent and Islam at 5 percent. But Eijk told Vatican Radio that government estimates put the Catholic total at 16 percent, falling to 10 percent by 2020.
And the bishops’ report said a mere 5.6 percent of those declared as Catholics actually went to church regularly. Ad de Groot, a lay Catholic leader in Eijk’s archdiocese of Utrecht, said secularization and the sexual abuse crisis had prompted people to leave in the past.
But now, the very plan to close churches is alienating the Catholics who are left, he said. De Groot’s group acc uses the bishops of merging parishes without consulting those who are losing their local churches.
“Many people are angry and disappointed,” he said.
His group told the Vatican last week that half of practicing Catholics would drift away in coming years as their churches closed.
They are all in various degrees of inevitable decline.
The center of people's social lives has shifted away from a community church. I remember when the Wt. said No to official congregation picnics, this was sometime in the late 60s. I thought at the time uh oh.
Christianity has had it's reformation. The power of the church was broken half a millennium ago. Now it has to rely on people's superstition. Education is the enemy of superstition.
Islam is still waiting on its Martin Luther. It remains a dangerous, oppressive blood-thirsty cult.
Ultimately the honey (spirituality) has to be free of arsenic (religion).
It seems we are in some interim phase where certain religions or groups within those religions could be described as "progressive".
I have for example come across Catholic nuns that are very active spiritually and very non-religious.
I have also come across persons in religion that denounce religion.
The late Robert Farrar Capon (an Episcopal priest): "Religion, therefore, is a loser, a strictly fallen activity. It has a failed past and a bankrupt future. There was no religion in Eden and there won't be any in heaven."
The Watchtower "ruling religious clergy class" therefore seems to be one of the few that still push religion to the max.
Fernando- We are seeing this Goal Post Stand by several religions. You wonder what the conversations were like when the GB came up with their latest Faithful And Discreet Slave mumbojumbo interpretation, was there any This Is Our Last Stand discussion.
I think (neo)pentecostalism it's the last breath of organized christianity. Organized religion it's in decline, just local decentralized congregations seems to survive. People will avoid mega centralized religions. Theists will be more and more self service believers (like tec).
