Comments on: Migrant communities fear for kids in secular NZ https://nzcatholic.org.nz/2018/07/10/migrant-communities-fear-for-kids-in-secular-nz/ The New Zealand National Catholic Newspaper Thu, 13 Jun 2019 23:35:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.1 By: Gregory Bourke https://nzcatholic.org.nz/2018/07/10/migrant-communities-fear-for-kids-in-secular-nz/#comment-25937 Thu, 13 Jun 2019 23:35:38 +0000 https://nzcatholic.org.nz/?p=18191#comment-25937 This is the million dollar question isn’t it? This wasn’t the plan was it? We were supposed to go out and baptize the World and perhaps it’s baptized us.
So where are the Pakeha/Palangi/European Catholics? Where are all the Pakeha younger than 50? Where are the battalions of school alumni since 1970? Where are your grand-children?

Another interesting question is what will be changed or adopted by the institutional Kiwi Church to prevent the same loss in the new immigrant communities over the next 30-60 years?
What will be the ‘discerning’ ‘imagining’ by the strategic working groups of 2050 when there are as many participating Filipinos, South American, Indian, African, and Asian Catholics in thirty years as there are current Pakeha Catholics in 2019?

Anyone who has used Google maps and GPS knows that movement and progress is not the same as reaching the destination. Sometimes Google Maps-GPS leads you down a dead-end, while all the time producing interesting, distracting, and encouraging commentary.
If we really are a humble, listening Church then we might do well to turn the map around. We could be still, we could watch, and we could listen to what the new immigrant communities do and say compared to what Kiwi Catholics don’t do, don’t say, and have discarded over the last 50-60 years.

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