Fully Restored

Written by James Yorke

I was born in Mullingar and I’m the eldest of four children. Our parents were good Catholics who believed in the power of prayer and gave us a good upbringing.

By the time I received my First Holy Communion I was serious about God. In fact, I had a spiritual experience that day but there was nobody to explain it to me. Not too long afterwards I began to show symptoms of a sickness that caused me to stop walking and have great pain in various parts of my body.

A miraculous healing

Book says MacArthur encouraged widespread Catholicism in Japan in postwar era

A new book says that in the post-war era, Gen. Douglas MacArthur perceived a “spiritual vacuum” in Japan and tried to fill it with spiritual beliefs, including Christianity and Freemasonry.

In the book, 1945 Under the Shadow of the Occupation: The Ashlar and The Cross, authored by Eiichiro Tokumoto, the Japanese investigative journalist said that MacArthur, who then held absolute authority over Japan, believed that faith would help to offset communism, which in the early days of the cold war was gaining popularity, ENI News said.

Tokumoto based his contention on documents that were recently released to the public, that indicate that MacArthur tried to convince missionaries to intensify efforts in Japan, and even suggested mass conversions of the Japanese people to the Roman Catholic faith, according to ENI News.

Young ‘Millennials’ losing faith in record numbers

Posted on 20 April 2012

WASHINGTON (RNS)  A growing tide of young Americans is drifting away from the religions of their childhood — and most of them are ending up in no religion at all.

One in four young adults choose “unaffiliated” when asked about their religion, according to a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.

But most within this unaffiliated group — 55 percent — identified with a religious group when they were younger.

“These younger unaffiliated adults are very nonreligious,” said Daniel Cox, PRRI’s research director. “They demonstrate much lower levels of religiosity than we see in the general population,” including participation in religious rituals or worship services.

Survey finds record 19 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans

Posted on 21 July 2012

(RNS) Unbelief is on the uptick. People who check “None” for their religious affiliation are now nearly one in five Americans (19 percent), the highest ever documented, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press.

The rapid rise of Nones — including atheists, agnostics and those who say they believe “nothing in particular” — defies the usually glacial rate of change in spiritual identity.

Barry Kosmin, co-author of three American Religious Identification Surveys, theorizes why None has become the “default category.” He says, ”Young people are resistant to the authority of institutional religion, older people are turned off by the politicization of religion, and people are simply less into theology than ever before.”

Kosmin’s surveys were the first to brand the Nones in 1990 when they were 6 percent of U.S. adults. By the 2008 survey, Nones were up to 15 percent. By 2010, another survey, the biannual General Social Survey, bumped the number to 18 percent.

Mormons and Baptists compete for converts

Posted on 20 July 2012

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) Jake Pulsipher’s first day as a working missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began at 6:30 a.m. with prayer and exercise, followed by breakfast and study.

Then he put on a black suit, white shirt, and red tie, along with his official name tag, and headed out to knock on doors and tell people about Jesus.

In doing so, he became the latest of 20,000 Mormon missionaries in the United States.

In Knoxville, Tenn., Southern Baptists Kevin and Kristi Cabe quit their jobs and sold their cars and most of their belongings. They’re moving to Brooklyn, N.Y., where they’ll spend their two years as — two of the 4,000 who the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board placed nationwide.

Poll: Nearly 80 percent of Americans are Christian

As Christmas nears, more than three-quarters of Americans identify themselves as Christian, Gallup reports.

Pollsters found that 78 percent of Americans identify with Christianity.

Overall, more than 82 percent of Americans have a religious identity, with this breakdown:

— Protestant/other Christian: 52.5 percent

— Catholic: 23.6 percent

— Mormon: 1.9 percent

— Jewish: 1.6 percent

— Muslim: 0.5 percent

— Other non-Christian religion: 2.4 percent

— None/atheist/agnostic: 15 percent

— No response: 2.5 percent

The findings fit the trend of an increasing percentage of Americans who do not embrace a formal religious identity. In 1951, 1 percent of Americans did not have a religious identity, compared to 24 percent identifying as Catholic and 68 percent claiming a non-Catholic Christian faith.