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Is the Catholic Church losing its grip? : Comments
By Brian Holden, published 28/7/2008The Catholic Churches' cathedrals are among the West’s most magnificent artistic achievements - and they will remain to be its headstone.
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In ethical matters the Church now lags behind secular society by many years. As someone has pointed out, the Church does not even have the broad support of its own members on issues like contraception, sexual morality and so on.
The decline of the Church in the west may well be attributable to the disconnection between Church 'teaching' and modern education. It may, however, be a mistake to extrapolate the present rate of decline to predict the total demise of the Church. That would be bad mathematics and, I suspect, very poor sociology.
There are more Christians today in China than there are Church-attenders in Australia. That is in spite of it being alien to Chinese culture and having been brutally suppressed by the Communist government for the last fifty years or so.
The promise of everlasting life in heaven may not be an accurate interpretation of Jesus' teaching and its certainly very poor theology but it appeals to a lot of people. It gives expression, albeit very clumsily, to the hope that this life is not entirely meaningless. Most of us recognise the silliness of the heavenly promise because we are 'educated'.
It is possible, however, that new Churches might arise that find new ways to proclaim the Gospel more faithfully. That is my hope and that is why I believe the Church, in one form or another, will persist for a long while yet.