A recent Cardus Institute study says young Canadian Catholics are twice as likely as their elders to attend religious services at least once a month.

Faith's shifting landscape

Cardus' 2022 report "The Shifting Landscape of Faith in Canada" says religious indicators among people identifying as Roman Catholic have declined since 2017.

Fewer said they believe in God, have an experience of God in their life or regularly read scripture, pray or attend religious services.

Younger Canadian Catholics are the exception says Deacon Andrew Bennett from Cardus.

81 percent of young Catholics believe in life after death and, while 91 percent of under 35-year old female Catholics believe this, only 60 percent of older female Catholics do.

Bennett thinks the more Canada's secular society grows, the more Catholicism will become an attractive option for young adults (18-34 years old).

It's a form of rejection rather than escape. Increasingly, young people are rejecting society's "highly subjective idea of truth" Bennett says.

"They are seeking integrity, authenticity and something with real staying power ... and returning to their Catholic roots..."

Personal beliefs

Cardus' 2024 "Still Christian(?)" survey examined the relationship between Canadian Christians' personal beliefs and the teaching of various church denominations.

It found "younger Christians appear to be more intentional or committed to the teachings and practices of the faith than Christians of their parents' or grandparents' generations".

The younger generation "is beginning to desire a more traditionally Catholic life" Bennett says.

"If you look at any church where the Traditional Latin Mass is being offered ... they are bursting at the seams."

At one parish the Latin Mass has become the source and summit for its growing community.

Parochial vicar Fr Kent Grealy says parish growth in young people and families has amounted to about one new parishioner each Sunday for almost the last six months.

He thinks that, apart from an escape from the ideals of modern culture, there is something intrinsic in discovering a higher purpose that leads young people directly to the Gospel.

The romance of faith begins to take shape around that age and draws them into discovering the Gospel, Grealy says.

It "shows them that the nihilistic and materialistic bent of modernity makes life not worth living".

Some advice for parishes

Eric Chow from the Archdiocese of Vancouver says young Catholics crave to find their role within the Church. They're also seeking an identity that is true to who they are and who God has made them to be.

The demographics are changing - young Catholics want Church, and engagement, within its life and leadership formation.

"They are hungry for more than even just a young adult community, something that is not limited to a prayer group once a week" Chow says.

"I think [increased young adult involvement] invites every parish to consider how they might provide support ... tangible on-the-ground leadership opportunities to serve the Church in a greater way."

Source

• Catholic News Agency

Masses are held at Sacred Heart in Havelock three times a month, while the congregation of St Francis de Sales in Renwick gathers for Mass once a month.

However, those churches are to close following the review. Continue reading

Stella (pictured), whose congregation issued the new parish instructions last month, says he would be pleased to receive the bishops "in due course" if they wanted to accept his invitation to present their objections to the instruction.

Several German bishops have sharply criticised the new parish instruction, which underlines the canon law relating to the pastoral care of parishes. Only priests can direct the pastoral care of parishes, the instruction says.

Some commentators see the instruction as a response to plans to drastically reduce the number of parishes in German dioceses.

The Vatican has already blocked the Diocese of Trier's plan to turn 800 parishes into 35. Despite this, the Archdiocese of Freiburg is continuing to press ahead with plans to reduce its 1,000 parishes to 40.

Stella says "care must be taken not to reduce the parish to the rank of ‘branch' of a ‘company' - in this case, the diocese - with the consequence that it can be ‘directed' by anyone, perhaps even by groups of ‘officials' with different skills."

In contrast, the new parish instructions encourage parishes to see themselves above all as a "missionary community," he says.

German bishops's responses to the instruction vary, with some expressing gratitude for the text, others are less positive.

One bishop sees the instruction as a "strong brake on the motivation and appreciation of the services of lay people.'

He fears the text indicates a "conversion to clericalisation" because it emphasizes the priest's role in directing parishes.

A theologian is taking another view, defending the Vatican intervention, saying: "The German criticism completely misses the actual concern of the instruction: the pastoral conversion to a missionary footing."

"But precisely this basic concern of Pope Francis would be highly topical in view of the disturbing recently published numbers of departures from the Church."

The numbers he refers to are statistics issued last month which show a record number of Catholics left the Church in Germany in 2019.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: National Catholic Register

"If the way we do Church doesn't lead to an encounter and a relationship with the person of Jesus Christ then we are doing it wrong," Mr Huntley said.

"And I would say most people don't have that experience. Read more

"What is passive charity?" he asked rhetorically. "That you love one another and do not criticize one another".

During his pastoral visit Francis meets with workers, volunteers, newlyweds, and parishioners young and old. Besides speaking about the three signs, Francis also spoke about rebuilding the Church and discussed doubtfulness, saying it is part of life. Read more

Another is the fact that my wife and I were never made to attend a Catholic marriage preparation course.

If we had been members of a parish where the mind-numbingly dull half-year of expensive weekend retreats had been required, we would have gone through with it, obviously.

Offering up suffering is a gift of the Holy Ghost denied even to the glorious angels in heaven.

I say this because it is only as a kind of purgative trial justly demanded of the pious faithful by Mother Church in the exercise of her disciplinary infallibility that it is possible to make sense of the six-month-long exercise in mandatory tedium known in the US as "Pre-Cana" (the mawkish reference to Our Lord's first miracle is worthy of Hallmark).

The spiritually edifying qualities of these rectory chats on subjects such as "Conflict Resolution Skills" and "Finances" are best summed up by secular interpolators at a website called BridalGuide.com:

You may be wondering, what exactly is Pre-Cana? Don't worry … you won't be hearing lectures about going to church every week and going to Confession.

It's more like pre-marital counselling, to help prepare you for marriage.

In our case, marriage counselling meant two 20-minute conversations with our pastor.

This is as it should be.

When it comes to marriage, Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence is a model shepherd of souls.

A good student of St Paul, he knows what marriage is for, which is why his first priority is the avoidance of sin, not the maintenance of community standards.

Indeed, I have always found modern-day adaptations of the play implausible, because today's Romeo and Juliet would have had to spend a considerable portion of their young lives taking quizzes on "Spirituality/Faith" and "Careers" in order to get the go-ahead from their diocese.

The way the post-conciliar Church cordons off the sacraments is a perfect example of how she has become insufferably middle-class.

Working-class people and bohemian misfits like me are not community-minded.

We loathe the notion of therapy, especially if it involves making small talk with people we don't know about things that are very dear to our hearts.

People with real jobs often work on Saturdays; they haven't got time or money for couples' weekend retreats to horse farms with Fr Dialogue.

Meanwhile, middle-class people enjoy being treated like (rather stupid) children.

They like play-time and share-time and snack-time and loathe the idea of privacy; they enjoy shaking hands and holding hands, which is why their favourite parts of the new Mass are the Sign of Peace and the standing-up Paternoster.

They take positive delight in these things for the same mysterious reasons that they enjoy working for those companies that require semi-annual "team-building exercises" - scavenger hunts and other pre-teen activities between mandatory presentations on LGBTQ sensitivity.

The only thing worse than current Church practice regarding marriage is the preposterous bureaucracy that prevents children from being baptised in a timely fashion. Continue reading

• Image: Portsmith Cathedral

These forces are causing concern in some places, offering opportunity in others, and changing the church in ways that couldn't be decreed by synods or ecumenical councils.

A new publication, Catholic Parishes of the 21st Century is providing an outline of a new image of parish life. Read more

"New and wider parish boundaries will now include previously separate parish communities, making possible a sharing of resources, both human and material. These changes will cause some sorrow and sadness, but also present new opportunities. For many priests it will mean spending less time on administration and more on undertaking their priestly duties and advancing the mission of the Church," says Bishop Jones.

"Sunday Mass is at the heart of the life of the church. It, and parish life, requires the foundational ministry of the ordained priest. Because we now have a reducing number of priests, parish amalgamations will see the formation of larger parishes, fewer in number", he says.

• 18 new parishes have been formed.
• Six of these will have a parish priest and an assistant priest, the others only a parish priest.
• The priest will live in the presbytery beside what will become the main church of the new parish.
• New enlarged parishes may have more than one school under their care.

Source

• The Catholic Diocese of Christchurch
• Image: The Catholic Diocese of Christchurch

A lot has changed in parish life in a quarter-century, yet American Catholics are still predominantly attached to territorial parishes headed by a priest pastor. The model is being stretched and transformed, however, by tremendous demographic changes in the Catholic population. Church leaders are struggling to keep up.

In the years since we began this series on American Catholic laity, the Catholic population in the United States has increased by more than a fifth. It continues to grow at about 1 percent a year and even conservative estimates project that Catholics will top 100 million by the middle of the 21st century. The Catholic population is becoming more culturally and linguistically diverse as well, influenced by immigration from predominantly Catholic countries around the world.

Catholics are also more dispersed geographically than they were in 1987, continuing a late 20th-century pattern of movement out of the inner cities and into the suburbs, out of the traditional Catholic strongholds in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest and into the rapidly growing Sun Belt cities in the South and the Southwest. An unintended consequence of this growth and migration has been a mismatch between Catholic institutions and Catholic population. While more and more large, once-beautiful urban parishes and elementary schools in the traditional Catholic population centers such as Cleveland and Boston struggle under the burden of too few Catholics to provide financially for their maintenance or to keep them vibrant communities of faith, Catholics in Southern cities such as Atlanta and Fort Worth, Texas, are lobbying their bishops for new parishes and schools to accommodate the growth.

In 1987, there were about 19,600 parishes for 54 million Catholics, or about 2,700 Catholics for every parish. By 2011, the number of parishes had been reduced to about 17,800, a net decline of more than 7 percent. Even though most of the parish mergers and closures occurred in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, in areas that have lost Catholic population, there has been no corresponding increase in new parishes in the areas of the country that are experiencing the most growth. Thus, the ratio nationally is now more than 3,600 Catholics per parish. Read more

• Source: National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Hispanically Speaking News