The Promise and Peril of Pope Francis

From The New York Times-

TO understand Pope Francis — his purpose, his program and its potential pitfalls — it’s useful to think about what’s been happening to New York City’s Jews.

From the 1950s on, New York’s Jewish population declined, amid suburbanization and assimilation. But over the last 10 years, the numbers began to rise again, climbing 10 percent between 2002 and 2011.

But this growth was almost all among Orthodox Jews. The city’s Reform and Conservative populations continued to drop, as did Jewish religious observance over all.

As a result, New York’s Jewish community is increasingly polarized, with more Jews at the most traditional end of the theological spectrum, more Jews entirely detached from the institutions of their ancestral faith — and ever-fewer observant Jews anywhere in the middle. What’s happened in New York is happening nationally: a recent Pew study found a similar pattern of growth among the Orthodox and a similar waning of religious practice and affiliation in the rest of the American Jewish population.

More here-

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-promise-and-peril-of-pope-francis.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0