In the 85th anniversary issue of Commonweal, Mark Jordan reviews The Future Church by Vatican correspondent John L. Allen, Jr.:
The heart of Allen’s study describes ten critical trends the church must navigate if it is to retain market share. Otherwise, “Catholicism won’t rise to the occasion of these new challenges—it’ll be steamrolled by them.” The trends include developments in “the Catholic biosphere” like “Expanding Lay Roles” and “Evangelical Catholicism,” outside influences like Islam and Pentecostalism, and megatrends like globalization, multipolarism, demographics, and ecology. Two concluding chapters describe the author’s methodology for settling on ten trends (he lists another twenty-five that he considered), and offer a “stand-alone summary” of what Allen calls the “upside-down church” he envisions as Catholicism’s future: a universal church dominated by the culture, practice, and theology of Southern Hemisphere Catholics, who already constitute a majority of the world’s Catholics.
Continue reading at Commonweal.
The phrase “retaining market share” says it all.
Religion as business, which is what all churches and religions to one degree or another are.
And in the case of the “Catholic” church, big-time business—the worlds first power seeking transnational corporation. A “religious” corporation which would, if unimpeded, take whatever steps it could to “rule” the entire world, which did not become world dominant by practicing the Gospel of Jesus.
Plus anyone who quotes George Weigel on the future of religion is admitting how deluded he or she is.
Remember that George wrote a book in which he claims that there is no “salvation” outside of the “Catholic” church. Protestant churches, especially those of a liberal persuasion, are of course completely beyond the pale—so too with liberal catholics.
Such a claim is of course completely untrue and and offense to all other Faith Traditions.
Plus Weigel associates with USA right-wing religionists who have no time at all, in a now instantaneously connected globalized world, for the necessary project and process of Ecumenicism.
We possess the “truth” and you are therefore inherently. Therefore what is there to talk about, or agree upon.