Institute for Science and Catholicism

  • Home
  • Institute for Science and Catholicism

Institute for Science and Catholicism Promoting the renewal of Catholic theology of creation and a new science/faith synthesis based on sound scientific data.

See our web page scienceandcatholicism.org

13/11/2025

Dumbing Down Our Faith and Catholic Apostacy
By Tom McFadden, Sr

Bishop Robert Barron is famous for his Word on Fire apostolate. In 2019, when he was Chairman of the Bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, he addressed his fellow bishops gathered at their semi-annual convention in June of that year. He told them:
“Half of the kids we baptized and confirmed in the last 30 years are now ex-Catholics or unaffiliated. To put that into perspective, one out of sis millennials in the U.S. is now a former Catholic. They simply no longer believe the church’s teachings. That is the bitter fruit of the dumbing down of our faith as it has been presented in catechesis and apologetics.”
In the 6 years since nothing has happened at the parish level to reduce that trend. A recent much-quoted study by the Pew Research Center noted that for every person who joins the Church, eight leave. Young parents reading this may say “it won’t happen to my children” but there are plenty of older, heart-broken parishioners who know that “taking a child to mass does not a Christian make.” Catholicism requires faith informed by reason, that is, it has an intellectual content that has not been communicated well in recent decades.
Catholic social researchers such as Notre Dame’s Christian Smith who has been closely studying the religious attitudes of American youth since the early 1990 under a grant from the Eli Lilly Foundation noted in his first book about his research, Soul Searching, that of all of the religious groups he studied it was the Catholic youth who were least capable of articulating what they believe. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), conducts applied social science research on the Catholic Church in the United States. Both Smith and CARA, as well as Pew Research, have found that those who leave frequently cite “science” as their reason for leaving. It is a world-wide phenomenon, social research in Australia reports the same. It is not the operational science that produces cell phones, rocket ships, and the internet the kids are referring to. It is the “pre-historic science” of cosmology, geology, and biology that destroys their confidence in the Bible. By age 13, the typical public-school student has been so immersed in evolutionism that God, if He exits, is far away and remote. The same may be said about many Catholic school students since most Catholic educators promote the “big bang” story of the universe and Darwinian biology with the caveat that “God did it.” Pew Research Center published a study in 2019 that found that 87% of nominal Catholics believed that humans evolved. Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his 1995 book, In the Beginning, that the creation doctrines had disappeared from the books that formed Catholics.
Learn 21st century science and apologetics at
scienceandcatholicism.org

Good discussion about the Earth's magnetic field
23/07/2025

Good discussion about the Earth's magnetic field

The measured exponential decay of Earth

"Let there be Light."
22/07/2025

"Let there be Light."

A review of: 'Children of Light' by Michael Denton.

Address


Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Institute for Science and Catholicism posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to Institute for Science and Catholicism:

Shortcuts

  • Want your organization to be the top-listed Non Profit Organization?

Share