Take me to Church. Catholicism in crisis. The good, the bad, the boring.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMIAMI.COM

• What is the one big tent that holds the vast majority of Latinos under its shade, in the US and abroad?
• Language?
• Of course.
• Still, a few million US Hispanics are not fluent in Spanish (if they speak it at all).
• Plus there are countless dialects and accents in the more than a dozen nations that speak Spanish across the planet.
• Cuisine?
• Sure.
• But there are more cuisines than countries in the Hispanic world.
• Soccer?
• Certainly.
• But a lot of Latinos from the Caribbean basin like baseball too.
• Music?
• You bet.
• However there are dozens and dozens of quite distinct genres within so-called Latin music.
• Race?
• Not really.
• Pigmentation among Hispanics goes from 95% cocoa chocolate to borderline albino milk white.
• The one big unifier, if there is one, is Catholicism.
• Even Hispanic Jews, Muslims, Protestants and agnostics are deeply influenced by Catholic tradition.
• Not to mention the various AfroCatholic syncretic cults proliferating in the Caribbean and beyond, such as Santería, Candomblé et al.
• No surprises there.
• The Catholic Church is the mightiest marketing & advertising machinery ever created by man.
• And woman.
• The Catholic Church used to be a wildly innovative and adaptable organization.
• What happened?
• The Catholic Church used to have an uncanny knack for showmanship and proselytism.
• It created the first wiki book: the Bible (jointly with Judaism, of course).
• A remarkable literary masterpiece authored by multiple scribes, written and re-written collectively once and again throughout generations.
• Sheer genius.
• Millennia ahead of its time.
• The Church created the awesome idea of “confession”.
• (Actually, it borrowed it from earlier pagan cults in Mesopotamia).
• A brilliant, powerful concept.
• Free.
• Absolutely confidential.
• The poor man’s therapy.
• And poor woman.
• Kudos to the clergyman (or clergywoman) who came up with such an awesome sacrament.
• True: Islam is a younger faith than Catholicism and has more followers.
• The Prophet Muhammad emerged six centuries after Jesus Christ’s death and his movement managed to attract its present number of 1.3 billion followers against 1.1 billion Catholics.
• Nevertheless, if you throw in Protestants into the equation, the amount of Christians living today on our planet adds up to 2.2 billion.
• But -there always is a but- according to the Pew Research Center Islam is growing more rapidly than any other religion in the world.
• It will nearly equal Christianity by 2050 before eclipsing it around 2070, if current trends continue.
• “The main reason Muslims are growing not only in number but in share worldwide is because of where they live,” Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religion research, tells NPR’s Tom Gjelten. “Muslim populations are concentrated in some of the fastest-growing parts of the world.”
• The finding is part of the center’s report on the future of the world’s religions. You can see the full report at the Pew site, which has also published an interactive tool to help readers drill down by geography and religion.
• “As of 2010, Christianity was by far the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third (31 percent) of all 6.9 billion people on Earth,” the Pew report says. “Islam was second, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23 percent of the global population.”
• Those numbers are predicted to shift in the coming decades, as the world’s population rises to 9.3 billion by the middle of this century. In that time, Pew projects, Islam will grow by 73 percent while Christianity will grow by 35 percent — resulting in 2.8 billion Muslims and 2.9 billion Christians worldwide.
• (source: http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/ )
• It must be said though that Islam is a fragmented mish mash of multiple minor groups and subgroups (Shia, Sunni, Wahhabi, Alawites) who, in some cases, hold radically different points of view conducive to serious mutual tension and internecine armed conflict.
• Catholicism, and Christendom in general, tends to be more cohesive.
• Still, the Church has a big problem.
• Not unlike the problem most other marketing & advertising organizations confront today.
• That problem is…
• (Cue suspense drum beat).
• Attracting talent.
• Yes, the church faces a serious shortage of human resources recruitment.
• When was the last time you heard a kid say he or she wants to be a priest or a nun when they grow up?
• Who wants to become a man or woman of the cloth these days?
• Even if you wanted and tried to, would the Church accept you?
• To be continued.