Patricia Miller ecstatically touted that the apparent "demographic free-fall" of the Catholic Church is "good news for the country" in a Thursday item for Salon. Miller bemoaned the American Catholic bishops' "outsize role in U.S. politics" in the past, given their opposition to abortion, contraception, and same-sex "marriage," and asserted that "with their flock fleeing and Pope Francis espousing a more conciliatory form of Catholicism less focused on the pelvic zone, the U.S. bishops don't look so powerful."
The far-left website prominently featured the writer's article, "The Catholic Church's American downfall: Why its demographic crisis is great news for the country," on their main page on Thursday, and displayed their anti-Catholic colors with a triumphant second headline: "Ding dong, the Church is dead: There's a huge political upside to the decline of Christianity across the country." [see image above]
Miller first pointed out the "big news out of the new Pew poll on Americans and religion was the precipitous drop in the number of Americans calling themselves 'Christian.'" She continued by zeroing in on another statistic from the poll, and gave her ideologically-informed take on this figure:
But there's another number lurking in the poll that may prove just as consequential: there are 3 million fewer people calling themselves Catholic today than in 2007, the last time Pew conducted their extensive poll. As a result, the share of the U.S. population that identifies as Catholic dropped from approximately 24 percent to 21 percent.
Why is this such big news? Because despite unpopular popes and still-simmering pedophilia scandals, the percentage of Catholics in the U.S. has remained remarkably steady for decades. The relative stability of the Catholic population allowed many on the Catholic right to dismiss calls for reform in the church and gave the Catholic bishops political clout when it came to opposing things like no-cost contraception in the Affordable Care Act in the name of "Catholics."
The Salon writer, who released a book in 2014 spotlighting the "nearly fifty-year struggle to assert the moral legitimacy of a pro-choice position in the Catholic Church," then explained why the number of Catholics has declined in the U.S.:
The reality is that the Catholic Church has been shedding adherents for a long time. But it was gaining new parishioners just as fast, thanks to the dramatic increase in Hispanic migration to the U.S....But now the Hispanic influx into the church has slowed, largely as a result of a decline in Hispanic migration to the U.S., which since hitting a peak in 2007 has dropped as a result of the recession. And Hispanics too are increasingly abandoning the Catholic faith.
As she detailed the change in demographics, Miller contended that "the big decline in the number of Catholics may give progressives in the church a critical boost going into this fall's Synod on the Family, which is part two of the historic meeting of bishops that Pope Francis called to consider reforms like allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion." She also played up that there's "evidence...that it's the lack of evolution on hot-button doctrinal issues that's precisely what’s driving Catholics from the church," and cited a 2007 Pew survey that found that "two-thirds of former Catholics who have become unaffiliated say they left the Catholic faith because they stopped believing in its teachings."
After using her "good news for the country" claim about the decline of the Church, the left-wing author concluded that "Catholics will have literally voted with their feet, abandoning the religion of their birth to help create a new coalition of modern freethinkers and freelancers that can oppose many of the very policies their old leaders insist on clinging to and insist will be their salvation."
So it's not so much that it's "good news for the country," but hoping beyond hope that the radical left finally gets to crush the Catholic Church in the United States, as it tried to do south of the border in Mexico nearly 100 years ago. To the disappointment of Miller's ideological fellow travelers, the Church survived, thanks to the example of heroes and martyrs.
