Pope Francis on 10 Reasons Why People Reject the Church

Speaking on the New Evangelization, and using the Emmaus Journey as a framework, the Pope encouraged his listeners to reflect on why people reject the Church today—why, like the Emmaus disciples, they decide to walk the other way. To bring people back to Christ and his Church, we must understand why they leave in the first place.

To that end, Pope Francis offered ten specific reasons:

1. The Church no longer offers anything meaningful or important.
2. The Church appears too weak.
3. The Church appears too distant from their needs.
4. The Church appears too poor to respond to their concerns.
5. The Church appears too cold.
6. The Church appears too caught up with itself.
7. The Church appears to be a prisoner of its own rigid formulas.
8. The world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past.
9. The Church appears unfit to answer the world's new questions.
10. The Church speaks to people in their infancy but not when they come of age.

Continued here

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Holy Cannoli links to this post

Aug 20, 2013

Dr Bobus

Aug 18, 2013

All 10 are contained in one reason:
The Soul of the Apostolate has been suppressed.
cf. Dom ChautardMore

All 10 are contained in one reason:

The Soul of the Apostolate has been suppressed.

cf. Dom Chautard

Holy Cannoli

Aug 17, 2013

10 Reasons Why People Reject the Church

1. The Church no longer offers anything meaningful or important.
2. The Church appears too weak.
3. The Church appears too distant from their needs.
4. The Church appears too poor to respond to their concerns.
5. The Church appears too cold.
6. The Church appears too caught up with itself.
7. The Church appears to be a prisoner of its own rigid formulas.
8. The world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past.
9. The Church appears unfit to answer the world's new questions.
10. The Church speaks to people in their infancy but not when they come of age.

Response to the points in the above list:

1) The teachers (bishops) are complacent and unwilling to teach and preach traditional Catholicism thereby offering little or nothing to laymen.
2) The bishops are weak which gives the appearance that the Church is weak as well.
3) Their needs? The laity don't know what their needs are and will never know if they depend on a lazy do-nothing episcopate.
4) The Church is not poor. Its shepherds are poor and are unwilling to teach.
5) The teachers are indifferent so I suppose this could be interpreted as 'cold.'
6) The shepherds are caught up with themselves and are unwilling to 2Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.

Points 7 – 10 could easily be answered if the 6 points listed above were addressed in earnest.
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Your Holiness, the Catholic Church needs a leader -a strong leader/teacher - and not a social worker. His job is not to minister to the poor but to make sure the various Catholic agencies that are supposed to minister to the poor are doing their jobs well.

YOU are the only person who can do that. If YOU don't do that, it won't get done, and no amount of social work on your part nor these little lists on why Catholics are abandoning the Church, nor the kissing of hundreds of babies, nor meetings with footballers nor distributing the Eucharist in paper cups at WYD can make up for that.

Use the power of your office to compel bishops to teach and to again respect traditional Catholicism. Discipline those who refuse. If done authoritatively and effectively, lists like the one above will not be necessary.

Sincerely,
H.C.