22 millioner har forlatt Kirken – 6 millioner har blitt katolikker – immigrasjonen berger Kirken. Dette er tall fra USA. Fra Norge har jeg ingen tall her, men den voldsomme immigrasjonen av katolikker til Norge, får oss nok til å glemme at vi også mister mange.
John Allen skrev i går (og det er flott å lese en journalist som har greie på ting) om sine intervjuer med folk som er ansvarlige for undersøke religiøs tilhørighet i USA – «the 2008 «Religious Landscape Survey» from the Pew Forum». Allen oppsummerer sine synspunkter slik (men les gjerne hele artikkelen):
the banner headline was that there are now 22 million ex-Catholics in America, by far the greatest net loss for any religious body. One in three Americans raised Catholic have left the church. Were it not for immigration, Catholicism in America would be contracting dramatically: for every one member the church adds, it loses four. On the other hand, the study also found that the Catholic church has a higher retention rate than other major Christian denominations, and that 2.6 percent of the adult population is composed of converts to Catholicism, representing a pool of nearly six million new Catholics.
Naturally, critics of various aspects of Catholic life, such as the sexual abuse crisis or what some see as an overly conservative ideological drift, see the defections as proof of malaise. … Equally predictably, Catholics content with the status quo play up the good news.
Given the disparities in interpretation, I turned to the director of the Pew Forum, Luis Lugo, to try to understand what the data really have to say. I spoke to Lugo by phone Thursday morning, and we were joined by Pew senior researcher Greg Smith.
Here’s the bottom line: In comparison with other religious groups in America, the Catholic church’s struggles aren’t really with pastoral care, but missionary muscle. Overall, Catholicism serves existing members fairly well, as measured by the share that chooses to stick around; what it doesn’t do nearly as well is to evangelize. The data do not reflect widespread dissatisfaction in the pews, at least to any greater extent than other religious bodies face. Instead, they reveal a problem with getting people into the pews in the first place.