Statement of the bishops: decline of the Catholic Church in North and Latin America
The Catholic Church in North America and Latin America is seeing its decline spread. This is the bitter observation made at the conclusion of the meeting of the representatives of the episcopal conferences of Canada, the United States and Latin America, which was held from February 25 to March 1 in Miami.
Canada, and especially Quebec, is the most affected region of the Americas. The Catholic Church has still not recovered from its fall, which brutally began in the sixties. Today the church attendance of people under 40 is virtually non-existent and the State, as well as public opinion, has left the ecclesiastical institution behind. Recently, certain provincial governments have eliminated public funding of Catholic schools. In addition, a movement began last year to rename the Christmas tree the "holiday tree", so as not to offend the sensibilities of non-Christians. In this region, the moral decadence that developed after the council prevailed over the faith of a people who were once Catholic. It can also be acknowledged that once again, the World Youth Day held in Toronto last summer was nothing but a sprinkling of a reality far-removed from the Catholic Faith.
In the United States, 50% of the population does not actually have a declared religious affiliation. The Catholic Church in fact owes its significant numbers to heavy Latin-American immigration. A symptom of the weak influence of the Churchs teaching is the fact that one marriage out of two ends in divorce.
Even in Latin America, which has always been a traditional bastion of catholicity, the bishops acknowledge a progressive distancing of the faithful from parish life. They deplore that increasing numbers of the baptized live out their religion in their own way. In contrast, the New Age and the evangelical sects are meeting with growing success.
One would have hoped that the bishops would see the obvious lesson in all this. But once again, they search for causes of the disaffection in factors coming from outside the Church, rather than asking themselves the following question: why doesnt the Faith, as it is presented today, excite souls any longer?
