62% Long Island Catholics without religious moral guidance

"As Pope Benedict XVI's visit to New York and Washington, D.C., approaches, a Newsday poll has found that Long Island Catholics view religion and prayer as critical parts of their lives, though they may dissent from church stances on major issues such as allowing priests to marry or the ordination of women.

[...]

The survey found Benedict XVI's visit -- his first to the United States since his election to the papacy three years ago -- is sparking excitement, but not as much as Pope John Paul II's visit in 1995, according to a poll conducted then by Newsday. Some 58 percent of respondents were "very interested" or "mildly interested" in the April 15-20 visit, compared with 66 percent for John Paul II's visit.

[...]

The poll also found Long Island Catholics still consider "moral guidance" the most meaningful aspect of their faith, though it declined from 48 percent in 1995 to 38 percent. It was followed by the sacraments, which 33 percent said was the most meaningful aspect, up from 27 percent in 1995. Other areas lagged far behind: church teachings on social issues (5 percent), closeness with other parishioners (7 percent) and spiritual example of priest and nuns (5 percent).

[...]

Bonner of Molloy College said the relatively high rankings of moral guidance and the sacraments showed that "we must be doing something right." He added, "If people don't get moral guidance from their spiritual leaders where are they going to get it?"

Newsday.com, April 5, 2008

Having heard countless accusations against Atheists that we have no moral guidance, it is with some amusement I see that 62% of Long Island Catholics do not look for moral guidance in their faith. I guess (most) Long Island Catholics and Atheists aren't that different after all - when it comes to morals.

Increasing defection rate among Catholic entrants

"According to official church statistics, from 1978 to 2005 the number of religious priests worldwide declined from 158,000 to 137,000, while religious brothers decreased from about 75,000 to 55,000. The sharpest drop was in the number of women religious, which went from 985,000 to 783,000.

The situation is clearly going to get worse in coming years, mainly because of the aging population of the largest religious orders.

There are other problems, too, including the increasing defection rate of new entrants; in many places, 40 percent to 60 percent of those entering religious order formation programs leave before making their final commitment.

[...]

For example, [Father Lewandowski] said, many orders formed over the last 200 years were based on the secular principle of being useful to society in educational, health care or other social roles, which have now been largely taken over by government organizations or by lay Catholics.

"All of these orders are now in significant crisis," he said.""

Catholic News, Feb-22-2008

The last paragraph shows that it is of the utmost importance with a proper state welfare system.

Ireland is running out of priests

"One-hundred and sixty priests died last year but only nine were ordained. Figures for nuns were even more dramatic, with the deaths of 228 nuns and only two taking final vows for service in religious life.
Based upon these figures The Irish Catholic newspaper predicts that the number of priests will drop from the current 4,752 to about 1,500 by 2028.
The decline in vocations is attributed to the loss of the Church’s authority after a string of sex-abuse scandals. In 1994 the Government collapsed over the mishandling of the case of a paedophile priest Brendan Smyth.

[...]

Ireland is now the vocations blackspot of the world."

The Times, February 27, 2008

In other news:
Pope not Catholic anymore

Priests too secular says Cardinal

"Priests are becoming less obedient and more worldly, a top Vatican Cardinal lamented, adding they are neglecting their duties under the pressures of secular values.
Catholic News Agency and Catholic World News reports Prefect of Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life Cardinal Franc Rode says more responsive to the world, citing a reluctance to wear clerical dress as a symptom of this trend.
"A drift towards bourgeois values and moral relativism are the two great dangers that weaken religious life," Cardinal Rode said.
"The biggest problem today is the climate of secularisation, present not only in Western society but also within the Church itself."

[...]

During the almost 27 years of the Pontificate of Pope John Paul II, the number of religious dropped 25%, expanding the gap between men and women religious, with male religious orders being the most affected by the decline.

Cathnews, February 18, 2008

Great news! Carry on, Joe! There was something else:

"Cardinal Rode said while young people are hearing God's call to a vocation in the priesthood or religious life, he suggests that a lax model of priestly or religious life is unlikely to encourage vocations.
"Young Catholics who are attracted to contemplative life in highly disciplined religious orders are attracted because it is a radical life choice," he said."

Let's see if this is true?

"In a recently released book titled “American Catholics Today: New Realities of Their Faith and Church,” University of Connecticut Professor and Emeritus of Sociology William d’Antonio confirms a consistent trend among younger Catholics – in every survey since 1987, younger Catholics have become increasingly more liberal and less practicing in their faith and values.

[...]

According to the results, only 15 percent of college-aged Catholics said they attended mass. In contrast, 60 percent of those aged 65 and older said they attended church services every week.
Most revealing, however, is the divergence in views among younger Catholics with their parents and grandparents regarding abortion, homosexuality, and divorce. D’Antonio attributes the results to the increasing tolerance that young people give to different lifestyles in today’s culture.
"When I was [that] age I didn't know anyone who was homosexual. When anyone got divorced, it was a scandal,” he says.

[...]

“Cafeteria Catholicism,” the practice of picking and choosing only those beliefs considered “convenient,” has been attributed to the increasing rise in liberal views among many Catholics."

Christian Post, Feb. 17 2008

And as far as I remember, in USA last year, they had to import Catholic priests. Right, here's the story:

Cardinal (Francis George) to ordain 13 new priests -- 12 from overseas

Marvellous!

An Atheist in the Pulpit

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

Psychology Today Magazine, Jan/Feb 2008

A long but very interesting article about priests who lose their faith.

Catholic nuns and monks decline 10% in one year

"Newly published statistics showed that the number of men and women belonging to religious orders fell by 10% to just under a million between 2005 and 2006.
During the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, the number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by a quarter.
The downward trend accelerated despite a steady increase in the membership of the Catholic Church to more than 1.1bn. However, correspondents say even this failed to keep pace with the overall increase in world population.

[...]

The number of members, predominantly women, some engaged only in constant prayer, others working as teachers, health workers and missionaries, fell 94,790 to 945,210.

Of the total, 753,400 members were women, while 191,810 were men, including 136,171 priests and 532 permanent deacons."

BBC, 5 February 2008

You know they're in trouble when even the Catholics can't keep up with the population growth!

Speaking of nuns.
commercial-archive.com

An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science

"Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. [...] We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as "one theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. [...] We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.

[...]

Signatures are current as of 5 September 2007
10,900 signatures collected to date"

Not bad.

If Muslims revered cattle, Shambo would still be mooing

"Shambo, the sacred Hindu bull, was executed by lethal injection on Thursday night and reincarnated the next morning, quite possibly as a member of the Welsh assembly or indeed a spiteful Welsh farmer. [...]

There were fervent protests across the Hindu world but the Skanda Vale sect, which both harboured and revered Shambo, was rather more sanguine. One monk said: “This will simply add to the drama of his life cycle and he will come back again.” In which case, what was all the fuss about?

[...]

It was isolated from other livestock and, being divine, was unlikely to find its way into the food chain. The campaign to have it killed seemed motivated at least in part by pure vindictiveness on the part of those angry, badger-strangling Welsh farmers. And a sort of paralysis on the part of the authorities, terrorised by their own health and safety legislation and indeed by the baying farmers.

[...]

The only conclusion is that by this stage they wanted the creature dead and there’s an end to it.

But I wonder too if the members of the assembly would have dared to make their decision if it were Muslims rather than Hindus who chose to revere cattle? And what would have happened if they did? By now there would be priests set alight from Jakarta to Rabat, effigies burnt, fatwas issued. Cardiff airport would be missing an international departure gate.

The assembly would probably have come up with a compromise: okay, the bull lives but it has to wear a burqa when it goes out. I suppose Britain’s Hindus can console themselves with the thought that having their sensibilities trampled on suggests they are a community with whom the rest of us feel at ease and can thus victimise with impunity."

Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times, July 29, 2007

Religion clashes with science in modern Russia

"Ten leading researchers have forwarded a letter to President Vladimir Putin, calling him to take urgent action against "the advance of clericalism." The signatories include Nobel laureates Zhores Alfyorov and Andrei Vorobyev, and fellows of the Russian Academy of Sciences Mikhail Sadovsky and Sergei Inge-Vechtomov, so the president can hardly shrug off their request.

What prompted them to sound the alarm was the recent 11th World Russian National Sobor (Assembly), held under the aegis of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose resolution calls on the government to add the ABCs of religion, under the name of Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture, to the list of compulsory school subjects. The Church thinks all children should be taught one Christian denomination - the one to which the majority of the population belongs.

[...]

Everywhere you go in Russia, you see a cassock. Priests bless warships and submarines, and sprinkle holy water over ballistic missiles. The Church has even published a Businessman's Manual of Morals. It fulminates against Western liberal values as erroneous and downright immoral.

The pendulum has swung to the side opposite militant atheism, and it is now likely to upset Russia's cultural balance."

RIA Novosti, 23/ 07/ 2007

Why Are Atheist Books Best Sellers?

"First and most significant is the amount of evil coming from within Islam. Whether Islamists (or jihadists, Islamo-Fascists or whatever else Muslims who slaughter innocents in the name of Islam are called) represent a small sliver of Muslims or considerably more than that, they have brought religious faith into terrible disrepute.
How could they not? The one recognized genocide in the world today is being carried out by religious Muslims in Sudan; liberty is exceedingly rare in any of the dozens of nations with Muslim majorities; treatment of women is frequently awful; and tolerance of people with different religious beliefs is largely nonexistent when Muslims dominate a society.
If the same were true of vegetarians -- if mass murder and violent intolerance were carried out by vegetarians -- there would be a backlash against vegetarianism even among people who previously had no strong feelings about the doctrine."

realclearpolitics.com July 10, 2007

That's all very well, but here's an interesting part regarding the very "unfortunate" secularisation of Europe.

"I have taught college students and have found that their ignorance not only of the Bible but of the most elementary religious arguments and concepts -- such as the truism that if there is no God, morality is subjective -- is total."

Morality is subjective. Heard it all before, yet monkeys help eachother. Now watch this:

"Indeed it is virtually impossible to distinguish between a liberal Christian or Jew and a liberal secularist. Neither holds any text to be divine, both get their values from their hearts and minds, and they come to identical conclusions about virtually all moral issues."

How's that for "subjective morality"?
This just goes to show that the sum of human experience, or the human history if you like, has given us more information about good morality than religious texts.

While I think Prager has some nice clear thoughts in between here, he conveniently forgets that it's not only Islam which is the background for these books. American creationism is considered as maybe the most puerile fringe of Christianity. A couple of pedophile priests would never sway anyone, but systematic idiocy will.
Islam is a very serious problem, of course, but being liberals we are terribly understanding to people with lousy childhoods and poor education in violent countries. But God-fearing Americans have the possibility to get a proper education, and all they wish is to corrupt it with silliness from Genesis.

Terrorism may have been the final straw, but the reason why Atheist books are best sellers is because there's a lot more to religious problems than Osama Bin Laden.

Don't gimme that old-tyme religion

Religion can be used equally to justify violence [...] and pacifism. Religion can be anything; it's like a synonym for society, culture or human nature. The problem with religion isn't that it's good, necessary or bad[...]. It's that religion can be all of that or anything else. There's nothing clear or pointed you can say about it to which you can't find a counterexample.

[...] Johnny has betrayed and negated his own nature, his self, by treating others, who are essentially like him, with hate and destruction. You look for help or rescue, but your core is no longer there. You've eradicated it. That's a far stronger source of moral suasion than some priest threatening you with hellfire. It's what people sense about themselves, and always have. Any claim that morality requires religion founders on the fact that humans in all eras have managed to act decently toward each other.

Religions have often tried to conscript and endorse the basic impulses of morality. But they don't create it [...] and can't enforce it effectively. When they try, the results are often contradictory: wars and hatred rather than peace and harmony. Go figure.

[...]

For most of what matters in mundane realms such as politics and morality, we're on our own, and we'll do better if we acknowledge that. If this be secular humanism, make the most of it.

Rick Salutin, Rabble.ca, July 6, 2007

Goebbels on Atheism

"The European Crisis
[...]
Behind the Soviet leadership's pious phrases, we detect the grotesque face of Bolshevist atheism. It has not been liquidated, but rather it is only waiting to begin again its own work of liquidation, completing its work of extermination in the European states that it began with hundreds of thousands of priests in the Soviet Union. Only then, perhaps, will the Christian churches learn what combative enmity to religion really means.

Goebbels, Das Reich, 28 February 1943


"Make Way for Young Germany
[...]
No, the Marxist traitors were the ones who betrayed socialism, and the church was betrayed by those who claimed to defend Christianity but in reality made coalitions with God-denying atheists, thus destroying the foundations of national and Christian morality.
We have two Marxist parties for the workers. Are things going well for workers?
We have two Catholic parties. Has Catholicism been saved? No, the opposite is true. Ever since the Marxist parties in Germany began their fevered games, the workers have lost their jobs and their prosperity, and since the Christian-Catholic parties have joined with Marxism, God-denying atheism has gone about its work unhindered. These parties are the cause of the misery of the German people; the best thing for Germany is to kick this dead system's fat hacks in the rear."

Goebbels, speech 31 July 1932

"Communism with the Mask Off
In Germany we have religious controversies which arise from profound questions of conscience but have nothing whatsoever to do with a denial of religion. These controversies are exploited sometimes by harmless and sometimes malicious critics and a parallel is drawn between them and the absolutely dogmatic atheism of the Bolshevic International."

Goebbels, speech 13 September 1935.

Am I the only one who thinks the rhetoric of Goebbels sounds uncannily familiar to the run of the mill American evangelical?

Church is trying to impose its will through back door

"Priests make bad politicians. Do the cardinals and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church realise what a hornets' nest they are stirring up when they say that Roman Catholic MPs should follow the church's teaching when voting on abortion? They are messing with the democratic process - and Roman Catholic MPs could pay the price."

The Herald, June 05 2007

Cardinal to ordain 13 new priests -- 12 from overseas

"Cardinal Francis George will ordain 13 new priests Saturday.

[...]

U.S. bishop leaders say they're importing more priests because of a clergy shortage."

Chicago Sun-Times, May 17, 2007

You know a religion is in decline in a country when they have to import priests.

[Psychology] Appaling acts in God's name

"The [Catholic] priest who hears confessions encounters a wide range of sexual practices, ranging from adultery to homosexuality, and masturbation to zoophilia. Do we really understand and appreciate the force of this knowledge on a priest whose sexual experience is limited? Isn't this something like the experiment in which people are instructed not to think about a white elephant, and who then find themselves unable to avoid thinking of that elephant? "

Nielsen, M. E. (2003). Appalling acts in god's name. Society, 40(3), 16-19.