Friday, March 29, AD 2024 7:45am

PopeWatch: The Francis Effect

Mass attendance in the US is on the decline:

 

An average of 39 percent of U.S. Catholics attended church weekly during the heart of the Francis papacy, from 2014 to 2017, Gallup found in a survey released April 9, which represents a significant drop from the 45 percent of Catholics who attended weekly Mass from 2005 to 2008, in the early years of the Benedict pontificate.

Go here to read the rest.  So much for the Francis Effect of luring people back to the pews.  However the thought occurs that for the Pope the decline in Mass attendance may well be a feature of his pontificate and not a bug.

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Don L
Don L
Friday, April 13, AD 2018 6:54am

One of the old goals of the anti-God Marxist secularists was to alter the Church’s mission from one of salvation of souls to one of “social justice.”
Why would any one bother to worship in just another failed social agency?
If and when the Church returns to it’s first mission (Worshipping God and repentance from sin) it will thrive even n this world so contaminated with the diabolical.

Pat
Pat
Friday, April 13, AD 2018 7:20am

And when they bring back the tambourines and Beetles & Simon & Garfunkle tunes (to reflect Francis style and insistence that liturgical rules are for jerks) – the numbers will plunge even further. But, hey, who am I to judge?

Clinton
Clinton
Friday, April 13, AD 2018 12:57pm

The idea of a Sunday Obligation is just legalistic, something put
forward by self-absorbed promethean neo-Pelagians who want
to “feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or
remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the
past”. All those people who used to be in the pews are now
choosing to accompany the Church from the peripheries, I suppose.
(/sarc.)

Didn’t Francis assure us that all those Catholics who were divorced
and civilly remarried were only waiting for his new merciful Church
to readmit them to the Sacraments? Why aren’t they flooding the
pews? I think we all know that his supposed ‘mercy’ for those
Catholics was only a pretext to justify the demolition work this
Pope wanted to undertake, and no one in Rome gives a fig about
declining Mass attendance.

c matt
c matt
Friday, April 13, AD 2018 3:27pm

From the article:

“As Gallup first reported in 2009, the steepest decline in church attendance among U.S. Catholics occurred between the 1950s and 1970s, when the percentage saying they had attended church in the past seven days fell by more than 20 percentage points.”

Hmm . . . what happened in that time frame between the 1950s and the 1970s?

Art Deco
Art Deco
Friday, April 13, AD 2018 3:34pm

I would have expected the effect to be more severe than it has been.

If my own experience of parish life is representative, parish clergy have tuned him out. Parish life goes on. There’s a portrait of him in the side corridor, but otherwise references to him ceased (IIRC) around the latter half of 2014.

Over many decades, we’ve grown used to bad birds in the episcopacy, especially during the period running from 2001 to 2004. I think that may have inured some people. They stink and we’re nose-blind now. Some time ago, Fr. Paul Mankowski, SJ offered that the first six decades of the 20th century were something of a golden age for the occidental clergy. Clergymen were faithful and diligent or knew they better appear to be. Fascinating, after a fashion, how quickly that all went away.

D Black
D Black
Saturday, April 14, AD 2018 9:07am

Fellow leftist Jesuits think Francis is the greatest thing to ever happen to the Church. Catholics that try to follow the Doctrines of the Catholic Church, not so much. In my very active KoC council, I know of one (1) Knight that actually says good things about him. And he’s a democrat.

Dan
Dan
Saturday, April 14, AD 2018 12:55pm

I’m sure the Pope would blame it on those “rigid neo-pelagians” driving people away.

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