More Bullsh*t From William Donohue

As noted in prior posts on this blog, the Catholic League is actually a roughly three person operation that nets William Donohue a well into the six figures annual income. Not bad for what's basically a front organization for a non-existent membership. Now, Donohue is trumpeting that "liberal" churches are losing membership within the USA while "conservative churches" such as the Roman Catholic Church are gaining members. Donohue conveniently ignores the fact that without the Hispanic immigrant influx - a group of people Donohue's gay hating conservative allies would deport in a heart beat - the Catholic Church would be DOWN in membership numbers. Oh, and what about the 1 in 3 individuals raised as Catholics who have left the Church as reported by the Pew Form and the Barna Group? As is the norm for Donohue, he cherry picks data and the true facts are irrelevant. Here's what the Pew Form recently found:
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While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration. The Landscape Survey finds that among the foreign-born adult population, Catholics outnumber Protestants by nearly a two-to-one margin.
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Major changes in the makeup of American Catholicism also loom on the horizon. Latinos, who already account for roughly one-in-three adult Catholics overall, may account for an even larger share of U.S. Catholics in the future. For while Latinos represent roughly one-in-eight U.S. Catholics age 70 and older (12%), they account for nearly half of all Catholics ages 18-29 (45%).

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Commonweal similarly reported statistics that ought to have the Vatican trembling - not that the current crop of bitter old men in dresses seem to be getting the message:
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[O]ne out of every three adult Americans who were raised Catholic have left the church. If these ex-Catholics were to form a single church, they would constitute the second largest church in the nation. . . . . Thomas Reese, SJ, the former editor of America, recently described this loss of one-third of those raised Catholic as “a disaster.” He added, “You wonder if the bishops have noticed.”
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“Catholicism,” the Pew study found, “has lost more people to other religions or to no religion at all than any other single religious group.”
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Catholics becoming unaffiliated stressed disagreement with church teachings, both general teachings and church positions on specific issues like abortion, homosexuality, and treatment of women, and to a lesser extent clerical celibacy. In open-ended questioning, they also stressed hypocrisy and other moral and spiritual failures of church leaders and fellow Catholics.
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The track record is that as populations become more educated and socially assimilated, their church affiliation drops. With the Catholic Church increasingly seeing growth only in newly arrived Hispanic populations, the long term prospects are exactly the the opposite of what Donohue would have Kool-Aid drinking Catholics believe.