To the Editor:
With regards to the Catholic Church seeking parishioner’s suggestions I’d like to offer some insight as to the realities the Church that ‘God in the flesh’ built 2000 years ago is facing in this cruel and secular world. Please keep in mind He warned us that His Church and His followers would be persecuted. What’s happening here in Bayonne with the diminishing church attendance is also taking place nationwide. There are many factors contributing to the weakening of Catholicism in America that include the constant attack by the forces of evil and by secular media that push to advance their anti-Catholic agendas that promote divorce and adultery, same gender marriage, promiscuity and abortion, etc. This decline has been long known and documented yet the Bishops have failed to come up with effective ways to deal with the problem.
The strategy they are again putting into effect here in Bayonne of linking, merging, and ultimately closing our churches have been tried before with obviously futile results. This is not a new strategy. It has proven to be ineffective and in no way helps the church to grow, but it is rather the easy way out of a situation that needs all hands on to effectively curtail the problem. The church is in dire need of more sacrifices from the bishops and priests to face the problem head on and to lead the parishioners by example; otherwise the church will continue to suffer the consequences of our failures.
Let’s take Bayonne as a microcosm of the problem. In Bayonne with a 25 percent Latin-Hispanic population, the majority of which are Catholics, the Archdiocese insists on fulfilling their obligation by maintaining only one church with just one Spanish Mass for the entire city and hardly any other services to meet the needs of this demographic change. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is well aware of the changes that point to the fact that 40 percent of all Catholics in the nation are Latin-Hispanics. They admit that without the growth of this 40 percent the Catholic Church would be in worse shape with the dwindling of Catholics drifting away from the church.
“The Roman Catholic Church has known for years that its future in the United States depends heavily on Hispanics. The church which is the largest religious denomination in the country is already 40 percent Hispanic, and the demographic change is inexorable: within the next few decades, Hispanics are expected to make up a majority of American Catholics.” (The New York Times May 5, 2014)
The closing of schools and Churches and/or their merging is not the answer to this problem; the answer lies in a more proactive approach by all concerned to include the going outside the churches and into the neighborhood to evangelize like the ongoing nationwide ‘Saint Paul Street Evangelization’ movement and/or other ways to bring the Gospels and the truth about God’s Holy Catholic Church door to door and street corners. The opposite of this would be to continue doing what we’ve been doing that obviously does not fulfill Our Lord’s command to go out and make disciples of all nations.
FELIX R. RIVERA