The U.S. Church in Decline?

I read an article posted over at Roman Catholic Blog that talks about the rise in importance of the U.S. Catholic Church from the ground up in american society.

Somewhere in the last 50 years, however, the mainline Protestant churches went into catastrophic decline. The reasons are complex, but the result is clear. By the 1970s, a hole had opened at the center of American public life, and into that vacuum were pulled two groups that had always before stood on the outside, looking in: Catholics and evangelicals.

Their meeting produced one of the least likely alliances in the nation's history, and it can be parsed in dozens of different ways. "Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft," the New Republic claimed this month as it attempted to explain the Catholic ascendancy on the Supreme Court. That explanation is, as Christianity Today replied, mostly just a condescending update of the Washington Post's old insistence that evangelicals are "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." But the New Republic was at least right that the rhetorical resources of Catholicism--its ability to take a moral impulse born from religion and channel it into a more general public vocabulary and philosophical analysis--have come to dominate conservative discussions of everything from natural-law accounts of abortion to just-war theory.

I think the article sums up in general what I am noticing today in the U.S. The bishops would like the church to become more like the anglican or lutheran mainline churches, while the lay catholic in the pews are more akin to the evangelicals they find preaching on tv and in the corner churches.

What I think is happening in America and the world today, is that the promise to Peter by Christ in Matthew 16 is being born out. "that the fires of hell shall not prevail against you".

When Terri Schaivo was fighting for her life, The catholic church was the loudest and most consistant voice in her defense. Granted the voices were not from the USCCB, but from the lay persons, parish priests and if I remember correctly, even the pope issued a statement on this as well. The church consistantly takes the lead in opposing abortion and euthanasia as well. Look at the video on any tv on the march for life in D.C. from Monday. Most of the religious were catholic and I'd venture that most of the teens present were also catholic school students.

I'd venture that a pruning of the church is taking place and that the church will be stronger for it.