Discombobulating

TWO recent news items caught my attention.

First, Muslims are increasingly outnumbering Christians. When I searched for reasons, I came up with this. Muslims proselytize or target for conversion members of other religions. Christians on the other hand target Christians of another sect. Like Catholics proselytize Protestants and vice-versa. How can Christians increase when they are just moving from one Christian sect to another?

Christianity is the religion, not Catholicism which is just one sect. If we want Christianity to spread we should not be convincing people to move from one Christian sect to another.

If Catholic and Protestant Christians believe in Jesus Christ and abide by his teachings it is self-defeating that they just move from one room to another in the same building. It’s a waste of time that could better be spent looking for ways to work together in imparting solid Christian values on a very corrupt and unjust nation.

It is discombobulating that we would rather argue with each other which would be the true Church when we believe in the same Lord. Second, millenials are leaving the Catholic Church.

Social analysts suspect, and I agree with them, that the reason is they are not inspired or challenged by a Church that spends most of its time on meaningless (to them, anyway) traditional rituals and age-old dogmas they cannot relate to in a meaningful way.

Instead of re-evangelizing millenials in ways suited to their contemporary situation, bishops and priests are business as usual “saving souls,” not the whole human person, through traditional acts of faith and piety that do not grab millenials whose angst is way different from that of their parents.

Fernando Bermudez of Spain has this to say: “Religions die when they fail to inspire, enlighten, console, transform.” Old Catholic folks have been inspired and have acted admirably on that inspiration. But they will all soon be gone and leave behind millennial sons and daughters that have still to feel “inspired, enlightened, consoled and transformed” by the Catholic Church.

The youth truly are the hope of society. But they cannot be such if they are helplessly distraught at the corruption and injustice of political and economic leaders and their religious leaders (in this case the Catholic Church as I cannot speak for Protestants) are failing to inspire and challenge them towards transformative (of society and Church) action.

Christianity is increasingly outnumbered by Muslims (not that it really matters as far as God the Father is concerned) because Christian sects are pirating members from one another and the Catholic Church is failing big time to inspire and challenge millenials. This is badly discombobulating.