{"id":7685,"date":"2004-03-18T07:56:42","date_gmt":"2004-03-18T07:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/revisiting_the_word_from_rome.html"},"modified":"2004-03-18T07:56:42","modified_gmt":"2004-03-18T07:56:42","slug":"revisiting_the_word_from_rome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/revisiting_the_word_from_rome.html","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting the Word from Rome"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reader points me to Something John Allen pointed to last week that I missed<\/a>, a report from the Council on Culture on the status of belief and unbelief in the world.<\/p>\n

Here are the key findings from that survey, which will inform the deliberations of the council about pastoral strategies for the Catholic church:<\/p>\n

\u2022 There is no overall rise in disbelief in the world. It is largely a Western phenomenon with little impact in Asia, Latin America, Africa or the Muslim world.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Militant atheism is diminishing and has little public influence, except in officially atheistic states: Cuba, North Korea, China, Vietnam and Laos. There is, however, a \u201cwidespread cultural hostility towards religions, especially Christianity and Catholicism\u201d in the media, and also within \u201cMasonic groups active in various governmental and international non-governmental organizations.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2022 Religious indifference and practical atheism are growing. The report describes the present as the era of homo indifferens, that is, a person indifferent to the existence of God and whatever practical consequences God might have for daily life. Happiness is reduced to economic and sexual satisfaction.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Atheism today hinges on lifestyle rather than gender, generation or class. \u201cAmong women who work outside the home, and above all among career women, the level of unbelief reaches levels almost equal to those of men.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 There is a notable fall in the number of people attending church. These statistics, according to the report, do not betoken a rise in unbelief, but a transformation of religious belief and practice. Today, people believe but do not belong, which produces a \u201cdeconfessionalization.\u201d Institutions are losing their credibility, while exotic practices such as magic and witchcraft gain ground.<\/p>\n

\u2022 In all quarters, and especially in the West, there are signs of a new searching which is more spiritual than religious. There are two characteristics to this search, the report says: first, a refusal to acknowledge a role for institutions in mediating rapport with the transcendent; second, the divine is not recognized as a personal being. This explains the attractiveness of Asian spirituality, where human and divine submerge into a \u201csingular wholeness.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report lists several causes for these phenomena, including the modern tendency to make the human person the center of the universe and the historic limits of Christianity. It also blames the mass media for \u201cdamaging the credibility of the church,\u201d and in this context mentions priestly sex abuse scandals:<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch revolting perversions are sometimes used and diffused, exploited or even orchestrated by third parties who use the mass media with the deliberate effect of damaging the reputation of the entire clergy and to the detriment of the entire church,\u201d the report says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reader wanted me to particularly note the allusion to Masonic activity, which perhaps is more than “old guys doing lame rituals” in other countries. But as a whole, I’m taken by the lack of responsibility in this report. There are certainly cultural reasons for unbelief, but I say that if a culture falls into contempt for Christianity and seeks spiritual wholeness Anywhere But Christianity, Christianity might just bear some responsibility for that – from top to bottom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader points me to Something John Allen pointed to last week that I missed, a report from the Council on Culture on the status of belief and unbelief in the world. Here are the key findings from that survey, which will inform the deliberations of the council about pastoral strategies for the Catholic church:…<\/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-7685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nRevisiting the Word from Rome - 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\/2004\/03\/revisiting_the_word_from_rome.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Revisiting the Word from Rome - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A reader points me to Something John Allen pointed to last week that I missed, a report from the Council on Culture on the status of belief and unbelief in the world. 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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\/7685","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=7685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}