Many social trends work against it, from declining church attendance to the declining size of Catholic families that once happily dedicated one in the bunch to the seminary.
The fight over the yellow brick church, Our Lady of Vilnius on Broome Street, was a reminder of the bitterness left by the archdiocese's decision in 2007 to close nearly two dozen parishes because of declining church attendance.
For a while now, declining Church attendance, the rise of the nones, and an increasingly secular society have all seemed like the biggest threats to the future of Christianity in America.
But the bottom line is, though it may seem self-evident that declining church attendance is evidence of something gone wrong, would we rather see churches that accommodate society's ills grow?
Declining church attendance is the second most important factor.
Some compositional changes have had a downward pressure on the trend, leading to a decline in contact (i.e., rising education, declining church attendance), but these pressures have been compensated by counteracting compositional changes (declining sibsize) and by behavioral changes.
All trends are as expected: the relative number of women with paid work has increased, the level of education has increased, the number of siblings has declined, church attendance has declined, and the proportion of married people has declined.
The researchers compared the beliefs and practices of congregations and clergy at mainline Protestant churches whose attendances were growing with declining churches.
The 1960s may have borne witness to a hardening of Protestant working-class attitudes, but this bitterness became further calcified when the Troubles erupted and school attendances declined, church congregations disappeared and inner-city communities became "sink estates" controlled by the new loyalist paramilitaries of the UVF and UDA.
When one looks at young people who did not attend college, the decline in church attendance is even greater with 76percentt saying that their religious attendance had fallen.
