UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
BY PATRICIA MILLER OCTOBER 14, 2015
While most reactions to the 13 conservative cardinals who sent a letter to Pope Francis complaining that the outcome of the family synod was rigged in favor of progressives focused on the intrigue over the letter’s content and (supposed) signers, another significant element has flown largely under the radar.
Rather than highlight doctrine, tradition, or more direct social harms, the dissenters couched their concerns in terms of the effect of any reforms of marriage practice on the church, warning that it risked going the way of shrinking liberal Protestant denominations if it abandoned “key elements of Christian belief and practice in the name of pastoral adaptation.”
This is a long-standing contention of conservatives, as voiced most famously by Ross Douthat, who offers as proof the Episcopal Church, which aggressively adopted a host of progressive reforms to stay relevant, “[y]et instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace.”
It’s true that the Episcopal Church did go in a progressive direction, from being the first Christian church to approve the use of birth control in 1930, to consecrating women priests, to electing the first openly-gay bishop. And it’s also true that the church has seen a rapid decline in the US, but there’s no proof of cause-and-effect here. Some note that the culprit many be a “sharp decline in the birth rate among those descended from the British Isles or Northern Europe,” as well as the paucity of Episcopalians among the many immigrant groups who populate the U.S. The demographic picture for the Catholic Church wouldn’t look nearly as rosy if it weren’t for the fact that Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. are overwhelmingly Catholic.
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