Vatican stalls German bishops’ plan to give Protestants Communion

From Salt Lake-

Disagreements between Catholic bishops in Germany about plans to give Communion to Protestants have spilled out into the wider Roman Catholic Church.

Last Monday (June 4), the Vatican’s doctrine chief, Archbishop Luis Ladaria, informed senior members of the German Catholic hierarchy that the pope believes their plans to make it easier for Protestant spouses of Catholics to receive Communion are “not ready” to be published. The letter signaled that top leaders in Rome were not prepared to let these guidelines become accepted practice in the German church — at least not yet.

The dispute highlights Pope Francis’ plans to move the church away from obsessing over doctrinal purity while giving bishops on the ground more decision-making power.

More here-

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900021295/vatican-stalls-german-bishops-plan-to-give-protestants-communion.html 

Off the Shelf: When WASPs Sting

From National Review-

I’ve been thinking about Protestantism lately. Not so much high-octane Calvinism, which in its present form is a pursuit for bookish men who quite like fractious intellectual argument. That has always attracted me to some degree, but no, I’ve been thinking about something you might call “elite Protestantism” or “Mainstream Protestantism.” A number of things have conspired to remind me that what is often called Progressivism is a mutation of Protestantism.

It started a few months ago when I listened to a First Things podcast in which Michael Doran discussed the theological traditions that inform debates about foreign policy. Doran identifies William Jennings Bryan with a populist-Evangelical tradition of Jacksonian nationalism, and H. L. Mencken with an urbane, Mainstream Protestant or secular tradition of international cosmopolitanism:

The Progressive persuasion conflicts with its Jacksonian counterpart in crucial respects. Though both accord the government a vital role in protecting “the common, everyday fellow,” the deepest concern of the Jacksonian is individual liberty, whereas the Progressive focuses more intently on destroying inequality. The Progressive, moreover, is eager to embrace “collective” initiatives, which in practice means government initiatives. Though some of these will pass muster with the Jacksonian persuasion, the Progressives’ embrace of centralizing government power, even when legitimated in terms of the interests of the common man, often appears as a threat to individual liberty. For the Jacksonian persuasion, the Progressive vision quickly turns into the oligarchy of experts that so troubled William Jennings Bryan.

More here-

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/off-the-shelf-when-wasps-sting/

More U.S. Protestants Have No Specific Denominational Identity

From Gallup-

Americans have become less likely to identify with an official or formal religion in recent decades, and nowhere is this more evident than in the dwindling percentage who identify with a specific Protestant denomination. In 2000, 50% of Americans identified with a specific denomination; by 2016 that figure had dropped to 30%.

This shrinking proportion of Americans who identify with specific Protestant denominations is the result of two trends.

First, an increasing percentage of Americans are "nones," saying they don't have a specific religious identity of any kind. Since the percentages of Catholics, Mormons and those who identify with a non-Christian religion have stayed roughly the same over time, this "rise of the nones" -- from 10% in 2000 to 20% in 2016 -- has generally been accompanied by an associated decrease in the broad category of Protestants, whose numbers shrank from 57% to 47%. Therefore, there are fewer Protestants of any kind in the American population today, and the pool of those who identify with a specific Protestant denomination is smaller.

More here-

http://www.gallup.com/poll/214208/protestants-no-specific-denominational-identity.aspx?g_source=Religion&g_medium=newsfeed&g_campaign=tiles

How fares Protestantism upon its 500th anniversary? Depends on where you look

From Get Religion (with lots of links)

Ed Stetzer of Wheaton College (Illinois) furrowed many a brow with an April 28 Washington Post warning that “if current trends continue” without letup, Americans active in “Mainline” Protestant churches will reach zero by Easter 2039.

Talk about timing.

That bleak forecast – mitigated by U.S. “Evangelical” Protestants’ relative stability – comes in the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation. This massive split in Christianity was sparked by a protest petition posted by 34-year-old German friar and professor Martin Luther on All Souls’ Eve (October 31) of 1517.

The Protestant scenario is rosy at the world level, however, according to anniversary tabulations by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a standard resource for statistics and trend lines from 1900 to the present (media contact here).


More here-

https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2017/5/12/how-fares-protestantism-upon-its-500th-anniversary-depends-on-where-you-look