We certainly seem to have a theme going today - dramatic spiritual experience, Muslims converting to Christianity, Keith's rant, and Phillip Jenkins's interview.
And now John Allen, writing from Honduras, touches on all these issues - with a new twist: Priestly vocations are rising dramatically although the percentage of Catholics in Honduras has dropped sharply!
"Rev. William Okoye, founder of the All Christian Fellowship in Nigeria and chaplain to the country’s president, Olusegun Obasanjo, told NCR in early March that the “explosive growth” of Pentecostalism in his country initially came at the expense of other Christian bodies, “especially the Anglicans and the Catholics.”
“Some years ago, this was an ecumenical problem,” Okoye said in the office of his sprawling church in downtown Abuja. “Now, the other churches are more accommodating. The Catholics allow the charismatic renewal movement. The Anglicans do the same thing, so their people can remain Catholics and Anglicans, but they act like Pentecostals.”
“To a large extent, that has stemmed their losses,” Okoye said.
Okoye said that in his own congregation of several thousand, he notices substantially fewer ex-Catholics than was the case perhaps 10 or 20 years ago. Today’s growth, he said, is more likely to come in the north of Nigeria, among people who were once nominally Muslim but who today are attracted to the dynamism and family spirit of Pentecostal Christianity.
Rev. Orestes Zúniga Rivas of the Iglesia di Diós in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, one of the two largest networks of Pentecostal churches in the country, said much the same thing in a March 20 interview.
“There are fewer converts today [from the Catholic church] because the charismatic option exists within Catholicism,” Zúniga said.
“Today, it’s common for us to hold spiritual retreats where Catholic charismatics will join us, but then they return to their own church with no problem,” he said. “There are others who come to our church as well as the Catholic church, which is no problem for us, because you can find God anywhere.”
Today, Zúniga says, new converts to Pentecostalism do not come from practicing Catholics, but from Hondurans who have been largely “unchurched.”
That growth is clearly visible in both Nigeria and Honduras. In Nigeria, Christians are roughly half the population of 140 million, with Pentecostals today representing as much as 50 percent of the Christian total. In Honduras, once an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, Pentecostals are today 35 percent of the population, and Zúniga believes they could eventually be as much as 50 percent.
Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez of Tegucigalpa told NCR on March 20 that it would not surprise him if the Honduran population is one day evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants, with most of the latter being Pentecostal.
Some of our people were never real Catholics,” he said. “They were baptized but had no real formation. Today, we’re more consolidated, our laity are more involved, and we’re growing in terms of those who are really alive in the faith. It’s not that we are losing, we are gaining,” he said.
Rodriguez pointed to rising vocations to the priesthood as one sign of growth. A generation ago, the seminary population in Honduras had dwindled to the single digits; today, there are 170 candidates in the seminary in Tegucigalpa, and the number is expected to continue rising."
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