Decline of religion

[MR. Macabre 666]

500 Swiss Catholics left the church in last 3 weeks.  And seems church bosses aren't worried about lost souls as much as lost money.  Because in Switzerland, faithful pay a "church tax" and church coffers are taking a big hit.

I like how we do it in America.  I just stopped going to mass, stopped dropping money in the basket, and ignored the mailers from the Archdiocese of Seattle begging for money until they gave up.

Do you live in/around Seattle? We moved up here in '94 from SO. CAL. about 75 miles north of Seattle.

[LinuxGal]

I like how we do it in America.  I just stopped going to mass, stopped dropping money in the basket, and ignored the mailers from the Archdiocese of Seattle begging for money until they gave up.

Do you live in/around Seattle? We moved up here in '94 from SO. CAL. about 75 miles north of Seattle.

About  15 miles south of Seattle here.

[Fake Messiah]

The world's departure from organized religion

There's a global, fast-growing population of people without a religion. That's according to a new AP-NORC Poll.

By the numbers: 3 in 10 U.S. adults said they had no religious affiliation.

About half of them identify as atheist or agnostic, and the other half say their religion is "nothing in particular."
The shift away from religion is even starker among younger adults, with 43% of 18- to 29-year-old Americans responding "none," when asked which religion they follow.

But fewer than 20% of U.S. adults over 60 are "nones."

The trend is gaining momentum across the world, AP reports from several countries:

In Japan, 70% of people in Japan say they have nonreligious feelings.

Nearly 80% of Italians say they're Catholic. But most view it as a tradition, with fewer than 20% attending services weekly.

Israel, a country with about 7 million Jews, is remarkably nonreligious: Just 33% said they practiced "traditional" religious worship. Conflict between secular and ultra-religious Israelis has grown in recent years.

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/06/organiz...nreligious

[Thumpalumpacus]

Associated Press has a good series on nones here. It has coverage from several nations, not just America.

[The Grand Nudger]

The us is actually an outlier in one under-reported way. Generally speaking, when qol goes up religiousity goes down and vv. In the us, qol has gone -down- ...markedly...in the time that religiosity has gone down. I can't help but think that has something to do with jesus being pressed into service for the state.

[Fake Messiah]

Meet the 'nones': An ever increasing group across Europe with little to no religious affiliation

In Italy, the cradle of Catholicism, new research suggests that only 19% of citizens attend services at least weekly, while 31% never attend at all - and it's a trend already growing in some European nations.

They’re called the “nones” and are growing in numbers every day.

It’s a term for those increasingly rejecting organised religion, even in countries in which faith is typically at the core of their very identity.

Scandinavian countries and north west Europe - think France and the United Kingdom - have been well known for their widespread secularism for years.

According to recent findings from the Pew Research Centre survey, 78% of Italians still profess to be of the Catholic faith.

So far, so believable.

Dig a little deeper though and you’ll see a very different picture.

The Italian statistics agency, ISTAT, says only 19% attend services at least weekly - while 31% never attend at all.

“‘I don’t have time, I don’t feel like it’ - there isn’t a real reason. That’s what’s scary”, the Reverend Giovanni Mandozzi, a parish priest in the central mountain village of Isola, tells AP.

Despite his attempts to persuade his parishioners to return to services - “I tell them, ‘I do Mass in under 40 minutes, you can leave your pasta sauce on the stove, and it won’t even stick to the bottom of the pot” - attendance is at an all time low.

Mandozzi is forced to preach in a former butchers shop after two earthquakes in the Abruzzo region have caused significant damage to Isola’s church since 2009.

Next door, though, the atmosphere can best be described as buzzy. The venue? A bar - packed with young families.

“Sunday used to be church with your family. Now youths don’t even want to hear about it, like an ancient thing that’s useless”, the mother of two teens expands.

At another bar nearby - which, a little ironically, faces a mediaeval chapel - a group of friends in their 20s enjoy a drink.

Catholicism is still a central part of another rite of passage for many - wedding ceremonies.

They remain the choice of about 60% of Italians marrying for the first time.

Catholic funerals, too, are still said to be favoured by 70% of Italians, although some funeral directors are opting to build ‘neutral’ wake rooms in their establishments to appeal to those keen not to focus on God at the end of their lives.

To qualify as ‘highly religious’, respondents had to tick at least two boxes out of the following criteria: attending religious services at least monthly, praying at least daily, believing in God with absolute certainty or saying that religion is very important to them.

In Greece, for example, roughly half of adults fall under that category whereas, in countries like Denmark, Sweden and the UK, that number falls to just one in 10.

That statistic doesn’t mean, though, that all countries in Western Europe have low levels of religious commitment - and also that not all countries in Central and Eastern Europe are at the higher end of the index.

https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/08/meet...s-affiliat

[LinuxGal]

Despite his attempts to persuade his parishioners to return to services - “I tell them, ‘I do Mass in under 40 minutes, you can leave your pasta sauce on the stove, and it won’t even stick to the bottom of the pot” - attendance is at an all time low.

[Fake Messiah]

In the pope’s homeland of Argentina, Catholics have been renouncing the faith and joining the growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated

In the pope’s homeland, there’s a woman who believes in angels and calls them aliens. Another proudly identifies as a witch. And there’s a spiritual guru so turned off by the Vatican’s opulence that he left the church to help others connect spiritually outside organized religion.

All three are former Catholics who have joined many other Argentines in the growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated. Known as the “nones,” they identify as atheists, agnostics, spiritual but not religious, or simply, nothing in particular.

Robles grew up Catholic but became disenchanted while visiting the Vatican during the Great Jubilee of 2000. At a papal Mass, he listened to a sermon on humility — and found himself questioning how the church’s vast wealth conflicted with that message.

“I was next to a gold column larger than my apartment,” Robles said. “It just unsettled me so much that I said: ’This is not the truth. They’re speaking about one thing and doing another.’”

Most Latin Americans are Christian, and Catholicism remains the dominant religion; about two-thirds of Argentina's 45 million people identify as Catholic. But the church's influence has waned. There’s discontent following clergy sex abuse scandals and opposition to the church’s stances against abortion and LGBTQ rights.

“The growth of those without a religion of belonging in the pope’s country is very striking,” said Hugo Rabbia, a political psychology professor at the National University of Cordoba.

He said the percentage of people who don’t identify with a religion in Argentina doubled within the last 15 years. That's similar to the United States and some other nations.

Disenchantment with the church has led some to formally quit Catholicism, including Lin Pao Rafetta. He is part of the Argentine Coalition for a Secular State that is leading an apostasy movement.

“I started to have a series of reasons to abandon the institution,” said Rafetta, who was fired from a Jesuit university as an art history professor after renouncing the faith in a “Collective Apostasy.” Other Argentines signed renunciations as well.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ap-ar...24316.html

[Fake Messiah]

Archdiocese of New Orleans says parish closures were necessary. More are likely.

Many Roman Catholics in the New Orleans area were heartbroken last month upon learning their neighborhood parish would close as part of a sweeping consolidation plan by the local church.

Few were surprised.

Members of the 13 affected parishes, which will become five newly combined parishes on July 1, had known for more than a year that their churches were being considered for closure. But more than that, the signs were in the empty pews each Sunday. Fewer families were baptizing children. Mass attendance, inching down for years, never quite rebounded from the pandemic. In church bulletins, the pleas for contributions came ever more frequently.

In interviews Thursday, archdiocesan officials defended their decisions to close or consolidate the parishes, which are located primarily in the Gentilly area, on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish and in the River Parishes. They provided financial records and other documents they say guided the decisions about which parishes to close. Those documents indicate that all but two of the parishes were operating in the red. Some had fewer than a dozen baptisms over a four-year period and little or no participation in youth ministry programs.

Like Catholic leaders around the country, Archbishop Gregory Aymond is dealing with a host of financial pressures at a time when Mass attendance has slumped. In New Orleans, the country's second-oldest archdiocese, with half a million Catholics and 111 parishes, aging churches are in need of millions of dollars in repairs. Meanwhile, changing demographic patterns mean some parishes are graying in a city that is steadily losing population.

Looming over it all is a decades-long record of horrific sin: more than 500 alleged instances of child sexual abuse by local clergy, forced into the light in recent years by lawsuits, media reports and Aymond's release of a list of credibly accused priests that continues to grow. Now under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the church's potential settlements for that abuse could cost well in excess of $100 million.

https://www.nola.com/news/business/new-o...06a4f.html

[Fake Messiah]

Only 20 seminarians are studying to become Catholic priests in all of Ireland

A Catholic crisis: why priests in Ireland are fading into history and not being replaced

In Ireland, where religion has played such a big place in its past, for better or for worse, fewer and fewer people are attending mass on Sunday, and even less are willing to commit themselves to the sanctified life of a priest.

According to a survey conducted by the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) last year, 15% of priests are over 75 and still working, over 25% are aged between 60–75, and just 2.5% of serving Catholic priests in Ireland, meanwhile, are under 40.

“What we see now is priests in their mid to late seventies trying to run three parishes”, Father Tony Flannery, a now 76-year-old retired priest from county Galway and founding member of the ACP tells Euronews.

“And there is nobody coming after them”, he adds. The amount of clergymen retiring is surpassing the number of young people committing to the priesthood.

This year, only 20 seminarians are studying to become Catholic priests for Ireland’s 26 dioceses at the national seminary in Maynooth. Weekly Mass attendance, which stood at 91% in 1975, was down to 36% in 2016 according to figures from the Irish census.

In parish priest Father Joe Deegan's opinion, the biggest problem for the church is the fall-off in the number of people practicing their faith.

https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/a-c...r-AA1kzERO