NYT: US Catholics Keep Faith, but Live with Contradictions (pop. map)

[DeepModem Mom]

Catholics in U.S. Keep Faith, but Live With Contradictions
By DEAN E. MURPHY and NEELA BANERJEE
Published: April 11, 2005




....American Catholics, be they Latinos (in Los Angeles) or African-Americans in Atlanta, or those of Irish, Italian or Polish ancestry in Boston and Baltimore, have come to accept that being Catholic means living with inconsistency. The roughly 65 million Catholics in the United States no longer have as distinctive an identity as they did a generation ago, and as they assimilated more thoroughly into American society, their views on social and moral issues came to mirror those of other Americans.

"Catholics as a whole occupy the mainstream of American life, when 50 or 60 years ago, they were on the periphery of society," said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio and an expert on religion and politics.

As a result, the Vatican's teachings on a number of subjects, including contraception, the ordination of women and homosexuality, are out of step with the beliefs and lifestyles of most American Catholics. But the Americans mostly find a way to stay in their faith by adhering to values most important to them and quietly ignoring those they disagree with....

***

...Fewer Americans these days send their children to Catholic schools. Mass attendance in the United States fell during John Paul's papacy. The church faces an acute shortage of priests. And the sexual abuse scandal continues to roil dioceses across the country....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/international/worldspecial2/11catholic.html?oref=login

[TahitiNut]

1. Easy to see what Utah and the Southeast (w/o Florida) have in common.

:wow:

[DeepModem Mom]

3. A sharp-eyed, and interesting observation! nt

[TlalocW]

2. See that small dark rectangle

In Kansas just north of the Oklahoma border in the center? That's where I'm from, and there were and are a lot of Catholics there.

Considering I now consider myself childfree (no kids and never will have them), I'm pretty lucky none of my high school crushes ever came to fruition.

TlalocW