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Lee's avatar

I understand the intent here, but I think these sorts of analyses of pastoral initiatives miss the deeper point: religious practice is waning for reasons over which pastors have little or no control. Aparecida, no Aparecida, eucharistic revival, no eucharistic revival, latin mass, vernacular mass, Veritatis Splendor, Amoris Laetitia - none of these isolated items impact the massive, society-wide rejection of religion (not just Catholicism) going on in developed, Western culture. It's happening to Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, everybody.

I had a college football coach who was a salty Irish Catholic, former NYC cop, who had served in Vietnam. He was given to say: "there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole."

Not many foxholes in our comfortable Western lifestyle. We are inoculated from questions of deeper meaning by our comfortable life, and our melting pot culture leaves us with very few shared values outside of discussions about how the weather makes us feel and how our daily commute is annoying.

We should stop looking to our pastors exclusively to lead us out of this mess. Instead we should think about those little towns in France that Thomas Merton described in the Seven Story Mountain. Paraphrasing, he noted that every street in town was oriented in some way back to the tabernacle in the church in the center of town. We have to live our own lives with constant reference to our worship of God in the Eucharist and our love of our (often very non-religious) friends and colleagues (without hitting them over the heads with our beliefs). If our friends don't see that our faith makes us happier and better people and gives us something significant that is absent from their lives, nothing is ever going to change in these trends. Nothing.

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Oswald's avatar

The first time I read the Cardinal's remarks, I admit that my first instinct was to doubt the actual effectiveness of Aparecida given what we know about the decline of Catholicism in the Americas (and I know I was far from the only one). Glad to see the Pillar doing a hard analysis of the data here to confirm people's suspicions. Granted, there certainly would have been a decline since 2007 with or without Aparecida, but I think it's clear that there is little to no evidence that it has been a success, even if you can't call it an outright failure.

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