Don't know much about mo-ral-i-ty...

While looking for the results and questions on the Pew report on religious knowledge among Americans (the one that's been the news so much recently), I came across another of their reports, The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from 2007.

In it, Question 10b asks, "When it comes to questions of right and wrong, which of the following do you look to most for guidance?"

For Catholics, the results were:

Practical experience and common sense: 57%
Religious teachings and beliefs: 22%
Scientific information: 10%
Philosophy and reason: 7%
Don't know / refused: 5%

So, let's see. The disintegration of the power of our Church to save souls by influencing morality has progressed to the point where less than one-quarter of self-identified "Catholics" turn to the teachings of the Church when confronted with a moral problem.

The average for believers of all faiths was 29%.

And, of course, the salvation of souls is the main reason the Church exists, right? What? Oh, yeah, I forgot. The "spirit of Vatican II" changed all that old-fashioned stuff. We're here to promote "social justice." Drop enough boxers in the "Undie Sunday" box and you're gonna be just fine with God.

Now I feel so much better.

UPDATE:

I forgot to mention that the same survey reports 48% of Catholics responded that abortion should be "legal in all cases" or "legal in most cases."

Yes, I know, it's Pew, and they have an agenda. Still, that ANY Catholics believe that the annual destruction of a million American children in the womb should be completely legal gives testimony to the failure of the Church in our country to give effective witness to its people about the chief moral issue of our time.

Check

I've been researching the teaching of history and civics to potential new citizens, and came upon this from the website of Hopelink Adult Education:

Practice dictation with your students. They will be required to write one or more dictated sentences. The writing does not have to be perfect but must demonstrate that the applicant has a comprehensible amount of writing skills.

A "comprehensible amount of writing skills?" Sheesh. Better test the copywriting staff at Hopelink first. The immigrants are probably already writing better than this -- after all, they've actually studied English.

Here we go again -- maybe

I've been reading A Popular History of the Catholic Church, by Philip Hughes. It's from 1949, when Catholics were still proud (and popularly, if sometimes grudgingly, expected to be proud) of their Church. This passage, about Julian the Apostate's brief attempt to restore paganism to the Roman Empire in the 300's, stood out:

Christians he persecuted, and this not by any frontal attack, but sinuously, by cutting them off from all the culture of the time, forbidding them to teach or be taught, by harassing them with vexatious regulations, and by conniving at the inevitable recrudescence of ancient Pagan hatreds.

Parts of Julian's program are just what is being carried out right now in our own culture, are they not?