Three reasons to be cheerful: Religion in decline in the USA, Mexico and Germany

Good news comes in threes, or something like that. But three fresh reasons to be cheerful from new stories in the last 24 hours charting the decline of religion in the USA, Germany and Mexico.

First we learn that Hispanic Americans are abandoning religion. This is the headline in the New York Times to a story which charts the various ways in which Hispanics are leaving religion, including the fact that the number of Hispanic Americans who identify themselves as having no religion has more than doubled between 1990 and 2001.

Then we have the Catholic church in Germany which has lost nearly 700,000 followers who de-registered themselves as Catholic between 2000 and 2005 - and guess what, every time the German Pope Benedict visits Bavaria - there has been a dramatic rise in the number of departures from the church!

But the protestants in Germany don't have much to shout about as they are predicting their church membership to dramatically shrink to just one third of today's figure by the year 2030.

And then this article from Mexidata that concludes that the Catholic Church is in decline in Mexico:

"...the Church in Mexico has been damaged by a series of sex scandals. Cardinal Rivera has faced charges that he protected child-molesting priest Nicolas Aguilar and encouraged his victims to forget about what had happened to them. As awful as that sordid affair is, probably more significant for the Church’s declining authority is that it has simply been overtaken by a society that grows more intellectually independent and secular with each day."

Comments

[Maria]

I don't get it. Why is that such good news?