You're the Church. Young people are leaving in droves. What do you do?

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I agree Christian rock has no substance I we provide plenty of Christian rock for the kids but no good answers the church needs to understand young people want answers not the church trying to be cool
 
snarflemike said:
What, if anything, might the Church do to slow or reverse this trend?
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2 Pet 1 gives 7 attributes to add to our faith in never ending amounts.

5 For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if these things are yours and abound, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins. 10 Therefore, brethren, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall; 11 so there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

And if one doesn’t do this? Peter says they will fall
 
glencor63 said:
People are no longer afraid of the hierarchy. Traditions are discarded everyday. Catholics leave the Church because they don’t know the biblical roots of their faith. I suspect that poor catechesis is rooted in a fear of the laity rebelling.
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Highly wrong speculation. And needlessly provocative. I was there before and after Vatican II. No one “rebelled.” We understood obedience to Holy Mother Church.
 
That’s one option. We had picture cards as kids. It had an illustration on the front and a bible story on the back. I knew the stories through repetition over many years. Every Catholic should have a bible and access to a bible study. Sunday School is essential, not a luxury. No child in CCD should be allowed to be without a bible. Bibles should be provided at the earliest age possible, perhaps as a baptismal gift. Knowledge of scripture is essential to knowing and understanding God. You cannot know God if you are ignorant of scripture. A friend of mine no longer attends Mass. She started going to a non-denominational church and small group where she learned basic biblical facts that I knew as a 5 year old child. She attended 16 years of Catholic school. I was appalled. No, she has still not returned to Mass.
 
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Many people did remain Catholic because of fear in the past. There was a real fear that the Catholic hierarchy could keep you out of heaven if you said or did anything displeasing. Clericalism was and is still a real problem. To challenge a priest was viewed as challenging God. Fear of family and community ostracism kept people in the Church. It’s no different than why many Jews never consider Christ’s messianic claims.
 
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That is not true. The fear you’re trying to create did not exist as described. It was called respect for authority. We loved our priests, and priests had families that brought them up.
 
You know what? Your pointlessly provocative posts will be flagged.
 
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There was a fear of authority. There was a fear of breaking ranks. There was a fear of ostracism. I’m not going to argue the point.
 
The post isn’t provocative. It’s answering a question as to why Catholics leave the faith by the millions today.
 
In 5th grade we had a teacher who would exclusively read from this children’s bible I find this was not helpful at all if you going to read from a bible with children you need to explain to them the significance of the story I think that it should be a requirement that ccd teachers have proper understanding of the bible and the catheism also the church should bring back the Baltimore catechism as it is much easier for kids to understand and update it for use citing the scripture passages the answers come from lastly every teacher should have both a didache bible and a catcheism of the council of trent. Some ccd programs are abysmal my aunt teaches ccd where they have 10th graders learning what the 10 commandments are this should have been taught to them a long time ago the curriculum for some ccd programs has teachers going over the same things over and over grade after grade. Some teachers aren’t even qualified to teach one 4th grade teacher tried to tell me that Jesus was born in Nazareth I corrected her and she told me I was wrong. Thankfully the program at my parish has gotten much better in confirmation we finally went over the catcheism so it will improve
 
Reference: Ireland, Quebec, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, Brazil, Mexico, etc. People don’t stay Catholic out of Tradition anymore. They don’t stay Catholic out of “obedience”. People stay Catholic because they believe what the Church claims is true. Millions don’t believe the claims and have left. The question is why don’t they believe and what can the Catholic Church do to prove its claims.
 
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indeed there is, but we are talking about ways to get young people specifically to mass, and having a Christian rock band is not one of them
 
That is way more than a stretch. Gospel music has a history that should be studied, not reduced to a line in a post.
 
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I do agree with that I think that possibly setting up cultural parishes could be useful but as a young person myself I find the whole thing silly and a bit disrespectful especially when you do it during adoration I went to a church once where they had one of these they it was like a rock concert but it was adoration they treat mass and adoration as a show where we have to be entertained it is just so forced I couldn’t take it seriously. Then another time I went to a different one of the adoration things was like a Pentecostal thing people were hysterically laughing breaking down one kid was making a total mockery out of the whole event.
Last Sunday I went to a corpus Christi procession it was one of the most moving things I’ve been to the choir was singing the pangua lingua people reverently processed outside of the church little girls threw pedals to make way for the monstrance. It was truly a beautiful experience that is how we should bring show Christ to others
 
Vico said:
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PatK63:
The church needs to clearly define its teaching on homosexuality. Define how we love the sinner while hating the sin. Youth go to college and meet peers who have same sex attraction and accept them. They believe the church is being unfair.

We need to be able to explain that we don’t make the rules, God does, while accepting the sinner.
It would help if we could explain where SSA comes from. It is not an easy fix!
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I think that was done in the Catechism:
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But the Catechism doesn’t do the last one, it doesn’t “explain where SSA comes from.”
 
jeannetherese said:
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GordonP:
And also by the fact that the school does not require its teachers to be Catholic, so it is impossible for the school to argue that it considers its teachers to be in a ministerial position.
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Non-Catholics are also ministering to the students. As exemplars, they are expected to uphold Catholic morality in teaching-both in word and deed.
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It puzzles me, too, that someone who is not Catholic could be considered to be a Catholic “minister”. The reason they do that is probably because they can then claim that these non-Catholic teachers are exempt from non-discrimination laws which otherwise might apply to them if they were officially considered to be staff instead of Catholic “ministers.”
 
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