Patricia Miller, "The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition" (RD magazine, April 30, 2014).
The downright embarrassing bottom line:
Writing in The Atlantic, [Public Religion Research Institute's] Robert Jones gets at the truth behind these numbers: "there is more support for official Roman Catholic Church positions among white evangelical Protestants than among Catholics."
[Hat tip to JM]
4 comments:
Many evangelicals are Catholics who left the church due to the VCII changes and non-excommunication of pro-aborts, particularly the catholic liberal Democrats. Unfortunately, if you ask these same (lapsed/former) Catholics how many believe in the Church's teaching on divorce, adultery, fornication, real presence, holy sacrifice of mass, and confession (necessity of sacraments), and also Blessed Virgin Mary -- ALL have apostasized (of course, those in the VCII church have apostasized on these issues also).
Forgot to mention the evangelicals' views on 'birth' control and sterilization which has also infected all the Catholics that went evangelical
I'm not sure the numbers matter as much as the animus driving the questions. Why ask Christians these questions?
One answer is to support the notion that Christian morality is losing its binding property: whereas Christian morality was once a codified set of commands enforced primarily by fear of God's justice, it is today a barrel of monkeys given the run of the household by modern culture's confusion of love with license.
Of course, protestantism has always been more or less a barrel of monkeys. Fractiousness is its defining quality. With Catholicism, that "quality" has lately been an inebriation with the idea of evolution, adaptation to the times, an effort bearing the priceless imprimatur of the bestest council ever.
So Catholic morality is "under construction": nobody agrees on what it is, and what it requires of one. Yesterday abortion, today "The Poor," tomorrow, maybe a reevaluation of scientology?? Nobody knows what the final structure will look like. Possessed of a natural desire for grace -- or perhaps of a natural presumption of grace -- Catholics are "adapting to the times."
Nothing new here. We all know that large numbers of self-identified Catholics do not practice the faith nor do they believe what the Church teaches.
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