John Allen: "Evangelical Catholicism triumphant"

Here's a good article by John Allen, I included the ending below.

In the United States, evangelical Catholics may be a minority, but an undeniably dynamic one. Sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke published research in the mid-1990s suggesting that dioceses with a strong emphasis on traditional Catholic identity generate more priests. Comparing 10 dioceses identified by a cross section of experts as either “traditional” or “progressive,” they found that traditional dioceses outperformed progressive ones in terms of ordinations by a factor of about three to one.

Anecdotally, one could cite multiple eruptions of evangelical Catholic energy, from the Communion and Liberation meetings in Rimini, Italy, which annually draw more than 700,000 Catholics committed to challenging secularism, to World Youth Day, an international Catholic youth festival centered on the pope that routinely draws crowds in excess of a million and is one part liturgy and one part rock ’n’ roll. The expansion of evangelical-tinged Catholic media and an ever-growing host of Catholic blogs reflect this trend, as does the proliferation of Catholic schools and colleges marked by evangelical fervor. Former Domino’s pizza magnate Tom Monaghan is building an entire Florida town, Ave Maria, that might be described as the world’s first planned evangelical Catholic community.

In a 2004 Communio piece, Portier of the University of Dayton argued that a disproportionate share of undergraduate and graduate theology students and parish ministers are drawn from the evangelical camp.

Evangelicals may not drive other views out of the church anytime soon, but the impulse is clearly more than a top-down phenomenon radiating out from Rome.

With this one-two punch of grass-roots ferment and official support, the Vatican’s latest expressions of evangelical Catholicism feel less like the dying ripples of a wave that has already crested and more like harbingers of things to come.

As Catholics we're supposed to be evangelical as a result of being baptized. It seems that some Catholics let other Christian groups "steal" titles and attributes of the faith. I have a Catholic friend who lived in Utah for awhile. He said there were some Catholics he knew, especially among the younger folk, that had some looser morals than they should have had as a kind of reaction against pervasive Mormon strictness. Some of them literally didn't realize that the Church taught a lot of the same stuff.

That reminds me of a joke. Moses comes down the mountain with the Ten Commandments and said, "Well, I got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I talked Him down to ten. The bad news is that the prohibition on adultery still stands."

Hey, that reminds me, haven't heard from Jackie M in awhile....