{"id":3138,"date":"2007-02-01T10:12:22","date_gmt":"2007-02-01T10:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/crystal-ball.html"},"modified":"2007-02-01T10:12:22","modified_gmt":"2007-02-01T10:12:22","slug":"crystal-ball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/crystal-ball.html","title":{"rendered":"Crystal Ball"},"content":{"rendered":"

Using the currently empty see of Kinshasa as a starting point, John Allen looks at growth trends in the global Catholic population:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The post has been vacant since the January 6 death of Cardinal Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Etsou-Nzabi-Bamungwabi, who was 76. Etsou became archbishop in 1990, during the final years of the famed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, and he denounced the violence of the civil wars which raged in that era. Later, Etsou also rejected the anti-democratic tactics of Mobutu\u2019s successor, Laurent Kabila, and he raised doubts about behind-the-scenes international influence in the victory last summer of Kabila\u2019s son, Joseph, in national elections.<\/p>\n

Congo is today a nation of 63 million, roughly 55 percent of whom are Catholic. <\/p>\n

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

One footnote: In recent years, it has become fashionable to dismiss French-speaking Catholicism as largely a spent force, despite the impressive character of some its leadership, such as Cardinals Godfried Danneels in Brussels and Jean-Marie Lustiger in Paris. Both France and Belgium have low Mass attendance rates, with 50 percent of the French reporting that they never attend religious services at all. A majority of the French, 51 percent, say they don\u2019t even believe in God.<\/p>\n

The rise of the Democratic Republic of Congo in global Catholic affairs, however, may give French-speaking Catholicism a new lease on life, in the same way that Brazil has long provided Portuguese bishops, theologians and lay activists with a disproportionate echo in the global church. French-speaking Congolese clergy and lay leaders naturally see France and Belgium as points of reference, reading the theological literature produced in French, inviting French-speaking Catholic VIPs to give lectures and host symposia, and otherwise regarding the French and the Belgians as primary sources of Catholic culture.<\/p>\n

In that light, French-speaking Catholicism may have a future in the 21st century after all.<\/p>\n

In the same spirit, it\u2019s worth noting that by 2050, Uganda and Nigeria both will have grabbed spots on the Catholic \u201cTop Ten\u201d list, meaning that in 43 years four of the ten largest Catholic nations in the world will have English as a dominant language, as opposed to just two today. (In both cases, that\u2019s including the Philippines). English is already the language of economic and cultural globalization, and increasingly it will become the language of ecclesiastical globalization as well.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Using the currently empty see of Kinshasa as a starting point, John Allen looks at growth trends in the global Catholic population: The post has been vacant since the January 6 death of Cardinal Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Etsou-Nzabi-Bamungwabi, who was 76. Etsou became archbishop in 1990, during the final years of the famed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCrystal Ball - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/crystal-ball.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Crystal Ball - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Using the currently empty see of Kinshasa as a starting point, John Allen looks at growth trends in the global Catholic population: The post has been vacant since the January 6 death of Cardinal Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Etsou-Nzabi-Bamungwabi, who was 76. 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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\/3138","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=3138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}