From: People For Peace
Colleagues Home & Abroad Regional News
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
NAIROBI-KENYA
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011
This week’s edition of The Tablet published overwhelming revelation of the new poll suggesting that the public have a negative view of the Church and are indifferent over the impact of the papal visit. According to the poll, commissioned by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales to mark the anniversary of the papal visit, 70 per cent of the 2,000 British adults questioned said they felt the Church was out of touch with modern society.
;
Even though for the Catholics questioned – 9 per cent of the total surveyed – that figure dropped to 59 per cent, the Catholic Church is collapsing in the developed countries. This is because they are not following the Teachings of Jesus Christ. Instead, it has become a sort of Corporation, with accumulation of wealth and power as its goal.
Other than wealth and power however, child abuse, especially in USA where around 19,000 people have so far come forward as being child abuse victims by priests is cited as the reason why.
The individual dioceses ended up paying out $2 billion in damages to some of them. It was the same in Ireland where 15,000 came forward as abuse victims and were paid over $1 million in damages. Many of the Bishops have resigned to prevent investigation of their activities.
During his recent visit to Germany, Pope Benedict XVI was strict with his followers, more and more of whom are leaving the Church – a point the pope even addressed during his four days in his native country where the scandal has cast a shadow on the Vatican, with allegations touching his former archdiocese including his brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, director of the choir there from 1964 to 1994.
Benedict’s native Germany has been rocked by a series of clergy-abuse allegations since January, when former students at Berlin’s élite Jesuit high school, Canisius College, went public with accusations against two former priests at the institution. Similar allegations then emerged at other Catholic schools and institutions in German, including a Benedictine monastery and several boarding schools.
German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger condemned the “wall of silence” within the Catholic hierarchy, accusing the church of hiding behind a 2001 Vatican directive that called for cases of abuse to be investigated internally before going to state authorities. “This directive makes clear that even serious abuse allegations fall under papal confidentiality and thus should not be forwarded on outside the church,” she said.
Viewing church negatively is not only a Catholic problem alone-Protestant churches are the same, especially losing young adults in “sobering” numbers. Seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30 — both evangelical and mainline — who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23, according to the survey by LifeWay Research. And 34 percent of those said they had not returned, even sporadically, by age 30. That means about one in four Protestant young people have left the church.
“This is sobering news that the church needs to change the way it does ministry,” says Ed Stetzer, director of Nashville-based LifeWay Research, which is affiliated with the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“It seems the teen years are like a free trial on a product. By 18, when it’s their choice whether to buy in to church life, many don’t feel engaged and welcome,” says associate director Scott McConnell.
The statistics are based on a survey of 1,023 Protestants ages 18 to 30 who said they had attended church at least twice a month for at least one year during high school. LifeWay did the survey in April and May. Margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Asked why in 1500 the Roman Catholic Church was all powerful, especially in Western Europe, the answer is because its power had been built up over the centuries and relied on ignorance and superstition on the part of the populace. It had been indoctrinated into the people that they could only get to heaven via the church.
This gave a priest enormous power at a local level on behalf of the Catholic Church. The local population viewed the local priest as their ‘passport’ to heaven as they knew no different and had been taught this from birth by the local priest. Such a message was constantly being repeated to ignorant people in church service after church service. Hence keeping your priest happy was seen as a prerequisite to going to heaven.
To go by this, you would be expected to give to the church via the collection at the end of each service (as God was omnipresent he would see if anyone cheated on him), you had to pay tithes (a tenth of your annual income had to be paid to the church which could be either in money or in kind such as seed, animals etc.) and you were expected to work on church land for free for a specified number of days per week.
You were told that if you did not go to heaven then the likelihood was that your soul had been condemned to Hell. Basically if you knew that you had sinned you would wait until a pardoner was in your region selling an indulgence and purchase one as the pope, being God’s representative on Earth, would forgive your sins and you would be pardoned.
This industry was later expanded to allow people to buy an indulgence for a dead relative who might be in purgatory or Hell and relieve that relative of his sins. By doing this you would be seen by the Catholic Church of committing a Christian act and this would elevate your status in the eyes of God.
It is argued that it is one of the reasons why Pius XI’s first encyclical as Pope was directly related to his aim of Christianising all aspects of increasingly secular societies. Ubi archano, promulgated in December 1922, inaugurated the “Catholic Action” movement.
Similar goals were in evidence in his encyclicals Divini illius magistri (1929), making clear the need for Christian over secular education, and Casti Connubii , (1930), praising Christian marriage and family life as the basis for any good society, condemning artificial means of contraception, but also acknowledging at the same time the unitive aspect of intercourse as licit.
Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.
Nor are those considered as acting against nature who in the married state use their right in the proper manner although on account of natural reasons either of time or of certain defects, new life cannot be brought forth.
For in matrimony as well as in the use of the matrimonial rights there are also secondary ends, such as mutual aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence which husband and wife are not forbidden to consider so long as they are subordinated to the primary end and so long as the intrinsic nature of the act is preserved.
He condemned, in his 1928 encyclical, Mortalium Animos, the idea that Christian unity could be attained by establishing a broad federation of many bodies holding varying doctrines (the widespread view among Protestant ecumenists); rather, the Catholic Church was the one true Church, all her teachings were objectively true, and Christian unity could only be by achieved by non-Catholic denominations rejoining the Catholic Church and accepting the doctrines they had rejected.
People for Peace in Africa (PPA)
P O Box 14877
Nairobi
00800, Westlands
Kenya
Tel +254-7350-14559/+254-722-623-578
E-mail- ppa@africaonline.co.ke
omolo.ouko@gmail.com
Website: www.peopleforpeaceafrica.org