Tide turning for Catholicism?

L’il Bro Thom tipped me off to this interesting piece from the Catholic Report:

The Tide is Turning for Catholicism
This is a little saying I have been uttering for weeks now. I thought I would put these words into an essay to lay out why the tide is turning towards Catholicism.
…

I believe the tide started to turn in April of 2005. In that amazing month the Catholic Church was on center stage. Pope John Paul II died on April 2 and the world was gripped by the events at the Vatican throughout the month of April. The life of this amazing man from Poland was constantly being shown on various news and information channels.

The world then saw the amazing pageantry of the Catholic Church with the burial of Pope John Paul II and during the conclave when the College of Cardinals convened to elect a new pope. This was followed by examinations of the life of Cardinal Ratzinger now Pope Benedict XVI… Catholics and non Catholics were gripped by these events. Catholics who admitted to being less than faithful in their church attendance were now going to Mass and churches reported a spike in attendance.

I can testify to this (as can Buster), as I wrote here

It has been my stunned privilege to receive mail from people all over the world, and of every sort of background, who are writing that something, indeed, has been stirred within them. This morning alone came two emails from Catholics who are returning to the faith after being away for a very long time. This is a small, hardly-read blog, and yet I’ve received literally scores of such emals, from people who have found themselves stumbling into a church, falling to their knees before the Tabernacle, or people who write that they were at a prayer service, singing a hymn they have sung a hundred times before, but this time they burst into tears and spent the whole service in deep, profoundly private prayer which left them “changed.”

What is happening, this stirring, it is intense, and it is real. It is more than people wishing to be part of the latest trend. It is more than mere emotionalism. When a forthright and self-confident woman I have known for years writes to me that she has spent her whole life disavowing organized religion and now she is set to begin RCIA classes, and enter the Catholic church because she “literally felt myself being shoved through the door,” we are not talking about folks undertaking something lightly. “And,” she writes, “when I get in there, don’t think I’m going to stand for anything less than REAL Catholicism! I want chants! I want Latin! I want the bells and smells! I do not want Fr. Relativity and Sr. P.C. Green Goddess.”

I am still getting emails – fewer, but a couple a week – from Catholics or “almost Catholics” who are making their way back to church, and who traces the longing to return to the funeral of JPII and the election of Benedict.

Dave Hartline’s piece continues:

The Catholic Church’s perceived conservative stance was deemed an impairment to many but some of the more liberal mainstream Protestant churches that were trying to be all things to all people were finding their numbers plummeting. The world seemed to be saying what most school age kids say about discipline, they claim to hate it but secretly desire it.

That’s borne out when we see “progressive” religious orders dying out while new, JPII-and-Cardinal-O’Connor inspired orders are thriving and running out of space.

Interesting reading, anyway.