Friday, March 29, AD 2024 8:04am

Proselytism in the Francis Pontificate

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Proselytize:  to convert or attempt to convert someone from one religion, belief, or opinion to another.

Pope Francis has informed us on several occasions that he does not believe in efforts to proselytize people to embrace the Catholic Faith.  He has called proselytism solemn nonsense.  However, Pope Francis clearly does believe in heavy handed proselytism in other areas.  The sacrilegious light show at Saint Peter’s last week was nothing but a propaganda effort by the advocates of global warming hysteria.  Thus the efforts and resources of the Church are channeled into causes completely foreign to its reason to exist:  to bring the Gospel of Christ to as many people as possible.

It is always interesting to see leftists, once they take charge of an organization, switching its mission to one of supporting leftist initiatives of the day, while the original goals of the organization are forgotten or downplayed.   If one keeps this in mind, the current pontificate is easy to understand.  Of course, any religion that succumbs to this process is on the path to extinction.  The Episcopalians are a prime example of this:

Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is leaving office this month after a tumultuous nine years in office that saw significant conflict and numerical decline in the oldline church.

Statistics released this week by the denomination’s Office of Diocesan and Congregational Ministries indicate that Jefferts Schori is leaving her successor, Presiding Bishop-elect Michael Curry, with decline that is steepening rather than tapering off.

The church’s domestic U.S. membership dropped 2.7 percent from a reported 1,866,758 members in 2013 to 1,817,004 in 2014, a loss of 49,794 persons. Attendance took an even steeper hit, with the average number of Sunday worshipers dropping from 623,691 in 2013 to 600,411 in 2014, a decline of 23,280 persons in the pews, down 3.7 percent.

The numbers are significantly worse than 2013, when the church reported a 1.4 percent decline in membership and 2.6 percent decline in average Sunday attendance. One contributing factor is figures from the Episcopal Church in South Carolina (TECSC), the local Episcopal Church jurisdiction formed after the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina departed the denomination in the autumn of 2012. Updated figures from TECSC show that the body has 6,387 active baptized members and an average Sunday attendance of 2,812 persons. This is down 77 percent from the 28,195 members and 12,005 attendance average previously reported. The Diocese of South Carolina is one of five dioceses to depart the denomination since Jefferts Schori’s election, along with hundreds of individual congregations. The Diocese of South Carolina has accepted an offer of oversight from the worldwide Anglican Communion’s Global South and now functions independently from the U.S.-based Episcopal Church.

Other measures of Episcopal Church vitality also saw decline: the denomination reported the shuttering of 69 parishes and missions, down from 6,622 in 2013 to 6,553 in 2014. Children’s baptisms declined 4.8 percent from 25,822 to 24,594 and adult baptisms declined during the same time-frame from 3,675 to 3,530, a decline of nearly 4 percent.

The number of marriages performed was a rare bright spot, rising from 9,933 in 2013 to 10,337 couples tying the knot in Episcopal Church ceremonies in 2014. The church does not report opposite-sex and same-sex marriages separately in its annual table of statistics. Burials also nudged up slightly, from 28,960 in 2013 to 29,011 in 2014.

While the Episcopal Church has established a continued pattern of steady decline since the early 2000s, the unbroken trend is relatively recent: the church lost only 18,000 members in the 1990s, a plateau that dropped off about the time Gene Robinson of New Hampshire was consecrated the church’s first openly partnered gay bishop.

Go here to read the rest.  People aren’t idiots by and large.  Once they figure out that a religion is no longer about salvation but rather about politics, most of them will head out the door.  That is the disastrous path that the current pontificate has embraced.

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DJH
DJH
Sunday, December 13, AD 2015 7:57pm

“People aren’t idiots by and large. Once they figure out that a religion is no longer about salvation but rather about politics, most of them will head out the door. ”
.
Personally, I would have said money, but perhaps politics is more accurate, since I think money and power can be grouped under that word.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Monday, December 14, AD 2015 4:17am

The first step is to deny them funds to carry on their worldly and devilish mission of redirecting the faithful towards secular goals. As they say: Money talks, B.S walks. Let the later take a hike by denying them the former.

Clinton
Clinton
Monday, December 14, AD 2015 5:52am

If we had any doubts whether this Pope wants us to double-down on
making the Faith more about the political/’horizontal’ and less about
salvation and the ‘vertical’, just look to the different treatments meted
out to the FFI and the LCWR.
.
On the one hand, the FFI is (was) a flourishing order with a strong, orthodox
emphasis on missionary work to bring souls to heaven. Under this Pope,
the FFI is being dismantled. On the other hand, the US congregations
of sisters represented by the LCWR are imploding demographically even
while they increasingly resemble not Catholic sisters but a coven of aging
leftist social workers. The visitation of the LCWR, begun under Benedict XVI,
was supposed to help identify causes for the collapse of the congregations.
However, under Francis it was quickly wrapped up and the LCWR received
a pat on the head and were in essence told “sorry to bother you, carry on”.
.
I think that for some religious professionals, demographics are irrelevant. If
there are only a half dozen Catholics left in America tomorrow, they’d be
OK with that, so long as those 6 Catholics were voting a straight Democrat
ticket and watching their carbon footprint. And everyone else could actually
go to hell for all they care.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Monday, December 14, AD 2015 6:42am

I agree with Michael Dowd. I will not contribute any money to anything “Roman Catholic” until this Pontiff is removed by some means. He is a blasphemous heretic.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Monday, December 14, AD 2015 7:53am

When he uses the word “we”, I wonder what he calls the mouse in his pocket.
.

In fact, we are confronted with choices that cannot be ignored: Good or evil; life or death; Christ or the World.

.Anzlyne
.Anzlyne
Tuesday, December 15, AD 2015 5:50am

They didn’t just flee aimlessly. They were looking for what was disappearing in Episcopal and linked up instead with the conservative And evangelical Anglican Global South

.Anzlyne
.Anzlyne
Tuesday, December 15, AD 2015 6:19am

The “disastrous path” and teachings of this pontificate has the help of those not quite so far left but still complicit by their “conservative liberalism”

cpola
cpola
Tuesday, December 15, AD 2015 7:47am

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, we are obliged to support the Church even when we have a bad pope.

CAM
CAM
Tuesday, December 15, AD 2015 10:40pm

We have watched the Episcopalians implode in the state of Virginia. Many of the oldest parishes are now Anglican. Unfortunately the break-away congregations lost their lawsuit(s) and have been turned out from their historic churches that they have maintained, some for three centuries. So now the he Anglicans are building their houses of worship.
Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori with her husband came to our neck of the woods to preside over the the 350th anniversary of the Episcopal parish. A parish which prides itself on being low church. The current (priestess?) is a single female, and the one before her was a married female. The priest before her was a retired male general and a theologian. One wonders if senior priests are retiring because they cannot stomach the new changes – it’s not just gay and female priests; it’s also changes in dogma. High church to low church to no church.

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