{"id":2358,"date":"2007-03-26T19:24:38","date_gmt":"2007-03-26T19:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/from-the-south.html"},"modified":"2007-03-26T19:24:38","modified_gmt":"2007-03-26T19:24:38","slug":"from-the-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/from-the-south.html","title":{"rendered":"From the South"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Allen has conclusions:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

After recent travels in Africa and Central America, I\u2019ve come to two conclusions about Catholicism in the global south as opposed to the north.<\/p>\n

First, low Mass attendance rates in the north are generally an index of secularism. That is, they indicate Catholic populations for whom religious practice is not a terribly high priority. In the south, on the other hand, they\u2019re usually a measure of the priest shortage. They point to populations that don\u2019t have regular access to a priest, or who never became accustomed to Mass attendance because there was no priest in the area where they lived. For such groups, Catholicism has traditionally been a matter of baptisms, weddings and funerals, along with private devotions and family customs. <\/p>\n

Secularization, at least in the northern sense, is basically non-existent across most of the global south. International values surveys regularly indicate that more than 90 percent of the population in the south regards religion as an important force in their lives. Belief in God, in the afterlife, in spirits and demons, in miracles and the power of prayer, is near-universal. Hence when Catholics don\u2019t go to Mass, it\u2019s not because they don\u2019t believe.<\/p>\n

That brings us to my second conclusion. In the north, when Catholics become frustrated with the church, they usually just drop out, drifting into non-practice. In the south, when Catholics become frustrated, they often become Pentecostals.<\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

These two realities help set the scene for the upcoming fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin American and the Caribbean (CELAM) in Aparecida, Brazil, in early May. Despite an uptick in vocations to the priesthood in some parts of Latin America (Honduras, for example, currently has 170 seminarians, an all-time high), realistically the numbers of new priests will not be adequate to deliver intensely personal pastoral care to almost 500 million Catholics. Hence the bishops will face pressure to embrace a new model, one which sees laity as the primary agents of many kinds of pastoral care \u2013 visits to the sick, youth ministry, leaders of faith formation programs and catechesis, and even as administrators of church institutions at parish, diocesan, national and international levels.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allen has conclusions: After recent travels in Africa and Central America, I\u2019ve come to two conclusions about Catholicism in the global south as opposed to the north. First, low Mass attendance rates in the north are generally an index of secularism. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}