Popular religion

Here's a sobering story about how Catholicism is contracting in Latin America, even as Pentecostalism is expanding. This is not a new story. Nor is it a new story about how mainline Protestantism is collapsing in the US, while Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism are booming. Catholic blogger Mark Shea captures what's most challenging about the Latin American Catholic story. Excerpt:

[I]f the Church is to respond adequately to the people she serves, we have to know what people are seeking and why. Those who snort at the hordes who are leaving the Church in Latin America and say, "Good riddance! Who needs a bunch of Pentecostals!" are, not to put to fine a point on it, betraying the Church's mission of evangelization and seeking to make the Church a sort of Liturgical Club. This Congregationalist mentality is just another form of Protestantism in the long run.

The people described in this article are seeking something and their desire is not simply contemptible and dismissable. Is it partly disordered. Of course. So are your desires. So are everybody's. So the Church must either prudently begin to assess what the need is (warts and all) and respond to it. But for the Church to, as some members of Fortress Combox Utopia Catholica suggest, just sneer and continue to hemhorrage is not an option that her missionary mandate allows her to take.

Mark's observation is something for all Christians to take to heart. A couple of years ago, I think, I was making mild fun of Joel Osteen for his shallow, folksy, feelgood presentations, when a Catholic friend pointed out that Joel Osteen didn't become so popular by failing to meet the needs of people. Rather than satisfy myself with pointing out what was wrong with Joel Osteen, my friend said, it would be more profitable to find out why people are drawn to what he has to offer, and why they aren't drawn in similar numbers to what more traditional forms of the Christian faith have to offer.

He had a point. It is tempting for many of us to turn up our nose at popular religion, because so much of it is awful (you wouldn't believe the televised religious junk on our cable system in Dallas). And we must constantly keep in mind that truth is not decided by popularity. Still, my own spiritual struggles, and my own spiritual brokenness, have made me less rigid than I used to be, and more aware of what it means to be poor in spirit, and even at times a beggar. I think back to the proud man I was one winter's day in 1998, on a pilgrimage to Fatima, tromping through the gaudy Portuguese tourist town from the bus station, appalled by all the Marian kitsch in the shop windows. It was enough to make you want to have a moneychangers-in-the-temple fit. And yet, to go out onto the plaza in front of the basilica, and to see the poor walking on their knees on the cold, wet asphalt in prayer -- the same poor that would go home with their trunks filled with the glow-in-the-dark statues of Mary, and suchlike -- is to be faced with a spiritual and human reality that one might not be prepared for. I know I wasn't.

People need God, and as messed up as we all are, we will go get Him where He can be found. Or more to the point, where we, in our frailty, can find Him and His mercy.

UPDATE:For a picture of the kind of conditions that most Christians (and Muslims, and everyone else) on the planet will be living in this century, check out this piece. How does the Church universal do effective ministry in these vast slum cities? The challenges seem unimaginable -- and if nothing else, make the concerns of us First World Christians over matters like homosexuality, the role of women in the clergy, the Latin mass and so forth seem really ... small. Not unimportant, mind you, because they are important. Just small by way of comparison.