H
HagiaSophia
Guest
Catholic “snow birds” have migrated to warmer climates from the northern and midwestern United States, while new Hispanic and Vietnamese immigrants have flavored the southern Catholic mix. Catholics who attend prestigious southern schools like Duke and Wake Forest often stay to work in the New South’s booming industries and to raise families.
Then there are the conversions — every year, one parish I know in South Carolina receives dozens of converts (and baptizes numerous others) at the Easter Vigil. And it’s all adding up: according to a recent Time story, the Charlotte Diocese is growing at a 10 percent annual clip, while Catholics in Atlanta and Houston have tripled since the mid-1990s. While Catholics are still only about 12 percent of the South’s total population (we’re about 25 percent of total U.S. population), Catholics grew in numbers in the New South by 30 percent, while the long-dominant Baptists grew by less than 10 percent.
The Time story noted that Southern Catholicism tends to be “more orthodox” than the Catholicism on tap in other regions of the country. But I wonder if that adjective quite captures the reality of the thing.
My own experience with the vibrant parishes and campus ministries in the New South is that this “growing end” of Catholicism in America (as John Courtney Murray would have put it) is growing precisely because it’s not an heir to many of the post-Vatican II battles that have sapped the strength of Catholicism in the Northeast and Midwest. In the wake of the crisis caused by clerical sexual misconduct and failed episcopal leadership, the church in New England is now replaying all the hoary battles of the past 40 years, further sapping its evangelical energies in the process.
That is emphatically not the situation in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Texas and elsewhere in the New South, where the vitality of evangelical Protestantism is a daily reminder that the church is not about turf wars, but rather mission, evangelization, conversion and service.
**Alas, some Catholics in the New South don’t get it. The new president of Loyola University-New Orleans, Jesuit Father Kevin William Wildes, fretted in Time that Catholicism in the South might simply become “another form of evangelical Protestantism with incense.” Perhaps eager to show that that manifestly wasn’t the case at his school, Father Wildes recently defended his decision to allow The Vagina Monologues to be produced on his campus — thereby demonstrating that “evangelical Protestantism with incense” isn’t the only thing unwelcome at Loyola-New Orleans; neither, it seems, are good taste, common sense, and presidential courage. **
the-tidings.com/2005/0318/difference.htm
Then there are the conversions — every year, one parish I know in South Carolina receives dozens of converts (and baptizes numerous others) at the Easter Vigil. And it’s all adding up: according to a recent Time story, the Charlotte Diocese is growing at a 10 percent annual clip, while Catholics in Atlanta and Houston have tripled since the mid-1990s. While Catholics are still only about 12 percent of the South’s total population (we’re about 25 percent of total U.S. population), Catholics grew in numbers in the New South by 30 percent, while the long-dominant Baptists grew by less than 10 percent.
The Time story noted that Southern Catholicism tends to be “more orthodox” than the Catholicism on tap in other regions of the country. But I wonder if that adjective quite captures the reality of the thing.
My own experience with the vibrant parishes and campus ministries in the New South is that this “growing end” of Catholicism in America (as John Courtney Murray would have put it) is growing precisely because it’s not an heir to many of the post-Vatican II battles that have sapped the strength of Catholicism in the Northeast and Midwest. In the wake of the crisis caused by clerical sexual misconduct and failed episcopal leadership, the church in New England is now replaying all the hoary battles of the past 40 years, further sapping its evangelical energies in the process.
That is emphatically not the situation in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Texas and elsewhere in the New South, where the vitality of evangelical Protestantism is a daily reminder that the church is not about turf wars, but rather mission, evangelization, conversion and service.
**Alas, some Catholics in the New South don’t get it. The new president of Loyola University-New Orleans, Jesuit Father Kevin William Wildes, fretted in Time that Catholicism in the South might simply become “another form of evangelical Protestantism with incense.” Perhaps eager to show that that manifestly wasn’t the case at his school, Father Wildes recently defended his decision to allow The Vagina Monologues to be produced on his campus — thereby demonstrating that “evangelical Protestantism with incense” isn’t the only thing unwelcome at Loyola-New Orleans; neither, it seems, are good taste, common sense, and presidential courage. **
the-tidings.com/2005/0318/difference.htm
