Holy mess: 11 million Irish Americans leave Catholic Church
September 25, 2009 by Infowars Ireland
Empty pews: Catholics are fleeing the Church in record numbers - particularly Irish American Catholics
By Niall O’ Dowd
www.irishcentral.com
A new survey shows 34 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population, say they have no religion.
Even more significant is that one-third of those, about 11 million people, are Irish Americans.
The survey by professors at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, does not explain why Irish Catholics are by far the highest number of people who are losing their religion every year in America.
We can only surmise the reasons for this, but I have some definite ideas. Think church sex scandals. Let’s look at the timeline first.
The number of non-religious or “Nones” has nearly doubled between 1990 and now.
* In 1990, Nones accounted for 8.2 percent of the population
* In 2001 they accounted for 14.2 percent
* As of 2009, they account for 15 percent
The report estimates that the figure will grow to 25 percent in 10 years time — making non-religion the largest “religion” in America.
Why are so many Irish Catholics leaving the faith? The obvious reason to me is the church sex scandals. They disproportionately affected Irish Catholics and most of the abusers we read about were Irish Catholic priests.
Certainly, based on evidence from Ireland where hundreds of thousands have fled the church and vocations have plummeted after the church scandals there, America with a similar experience is unlikely to be any different. Read full article…
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my experience in the church is that priests have too much power
and priests certainly have shown a number take for granted they will not be challanged regardless of what they get up to wink wink nudge nudge say no more
a lot of catholics depending on how much they who believe in the priests ordained powers “concecrate the host cofession etc “complain about unacceptable behaviour by priests would be akin to taking on superman and we know what eventually happens to his enemies don’t we
whay do you expect with catholics believing to different degrees the power of the priest to carry out the sacraments the bread becomes the actual body of christ and confessionall etc to complain about dodgy priests would be akin to taking on superman and expecting to win the ones that are caught the ones that should be caught and the ones who have turned a blind eye it makes it worse than the stuation that has beeen reported i’mm sure
Just because some priests make terrible mistakes and hurt alot of people they are now being punished for it so get over it there are alot of great priest in this country who are genually concernerd about us as catholics. for instances my priest when this whole thing came to a head at mass was crying telling us how ashamed he feels because of the ones who have commited these crimes but there are protistant ministers who molest kids every day and you never here about it but if a catholic priest sneezes its on the news or front page of the news paper. there is good and bad in all as humans . So while people like to crucify the priests lets investigate so me protistant ministers who are molesting children and commiting these crimes