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re: Nicaragua, the Pope Says ...
Submitted by fyl on Tue, 2008/09/09 - 18:49.
During the meeting, the Pontiff emphasized that it is vital for the laity to “receive encouragement from their pastors, obtain profound and continuous religious formation, and maintain perfect faithfulness to the doctrine of the Church.”
While this sounds like a good marketing statement for the "Catholic religion business", it sounds pretty removed from reality in Nicaragua. While sources, the CIA World Fact book being a good example (Roman Catholic 72.9%, Evangelical 15.1%, Moravian 1.5%, Episcopal 0.1%, other 1.9%, none 8.5%) report that Nicaragua is a substantially Catholic country, those facts don't really mean the same as they would in, for example, the U.S.
From my experience, if you ask someone what religion they are, the above facts seem about right. But, if you do a bit more homework, saying you are Catholic here is very different from being a person that attends church. The expression I like to use for the average Nicaraguan is "pragmatic Catholic". That is, they think of themselves as Catholic but are more likely to apply lifestyle choices that make sense for them than what is being passed out by pastors.
Just as another data point, the main catholic church in Estelí (next to the park like everywhere in Latin America) might seat 1000 people. With well over 100,000 people in town, you certainly are not going to be preaching to the Catholic majority. It would seem that to be effective, the church needs to be "down in the trenches" and the pope's statement seems to be very removed from that idea.
Pragmatism
What is true in Nicaragua (100x as many as attend church regularly, claim to be Catholic) is true most everywhere. A massive percentage of Catholics disagreeing with a tiny number of Church teachings and infrequently attending mass, is fairly accurate for the U.S. The operative words in the description are "...they think of themselves as Catholic but...". The thing is, "but", always gets people in trouble when they want to qualify something that, by definition, isn't qualified. The point you are making or implying is -for almost any religious leader of any faith- backwards: Since people don't follow Church teachings, Church teachings should be changed. To a normative leader that is akin to saying that since governmental laws are always being broken, we should change the governmental laws (but no one says that, and for good reason). It is not so easy to compare Latin American Catholicism to the other denominations listed with percentages in the post. It is fairly easy to get kicked out of any of those other churches, yet remarkably difficult to get kicked out of a Catholic Church. This is because in these other Churches the teachings are taken more seriously (not less) and you are judged, collectively, to your face, periodically. In fact, if C.A. Catholics took a lesson from other Churches, then they would become less pragmatic, not more.