By REY FLORES
“The United States is a significantly less Christian country than it was seven years ago. That’s the top finding — one that will ricochet through American faith, culture, and politics — in the Pew Research Center’s newest report, America’s Changing Religious Landscape, released Tuesday [May 12]” — USA Today.
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Are we really losing our religion or is this the latest in a volley of attacks on Christianity by the mainstream media?
I find studies like these, especially the ones about Christianity, unfounded for a number of reasons. The main reason is that many secular institutions conduct surveys with random test subjects that oftentimes represent an already indoctrinated and dumbed-down sector of society.
If I were to be dropped off either from a time machine from 60 years ago or from a spaceship from another planet into any random Catholic Church on any given Sunday, I’d probably have to agree that the Pew study is correct.
However, if I were to have been dropped off at any Traditional Latin Mass parish, I would conclude that my experience there debunks Pew’s study.
How dare anyone say our faith is dying? It’s easy for researchers to interview and survey subjects who have been already deliberately malformed in the faith for generations and ask them if they still attend services, let alone anything real about the Catholic faith.
The study is titled America’s Changing Religious Landscape and reports that between 2007 and 2014, the Christian share of the population fell from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent, driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics.
The keyword there is “mainline,” and that’s low hanging fruit for researchers.
Either way, I don’t think any of us can deny that some of these numbers are indeed true about the declining numbers in people who actually practice and still attend Mass, at least on Sundays. If you do indeed pick any random Catholic church and end up attending a lukewarm, feel-good service, then yes, you are more than likely to see empty pews, scarcely populated by aging baby boomers who prefer the distortions of the preconciliar era to the timeless beauty of the Traditional Latin Mass of the saints.
It is terribly sad to see many of our old, beautiful churches and entire parishes die off, but I’ll tell you what: 70.6 percent, if it is an accurate number, is still pretty good a stronghold we have as all Christians put together in this country.
One of the major factors that I believe is to blame for our decline, however, is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which has gotten itself so mired in American politics that we’ve ended up with too few shepherds who speak up on the Culture of Death and the socialism that is ruining this country.
Pope Leo XIII wrote the following statement in 1899’s Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae: “[I]f anybody wishes to be considered a real Catholic, he ought to be able to say from his heart the selfsame words which Jerome addressed to Pope Damasus: ‘I, acknowledging no other leader than Christ, am bound in fellowship with Your Holiness; that is, with the chair of Peter. I know that the Church was built upon him as its rock, and that whosoever gathereth not with you, scattereth’.”
The Pew report may contribute to the claim that Christianity is now irrelevant in our country. But what I see every Sunday in my pastor, in many other solid priests, throughout my own parish, and in my wife and children is the Church Militant.
The Holy Roman Catholic Church has outlived many empires that today are nothing more than dust and words in the history book. We have survived schisms and all sorts of internal strife, but the Devil never wins because we know that Christ is eternally triumphant.
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(Rey Flores is a Catholic writer and speaker and can be contacted at reyfloresusa@gmail.com.)
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