Brian bethune macleans biography of martin

The Future of the Church

By Brian Bethune
The Macleans
March 23,

Lorenzo Moscia/Archivolatino/Redux

Brian Bethune on demographics, ongoing scandals and the divide between secular and Catholic morality

Catholicism’s demographic shift out of the developed world and into the global south has been profound.

For a first novel, even one polished through a dozen drafts over ten years, Martin Sloane is remarkably assured." ——Brian Bethune, Maclean's.

He was the publisher and one of the editors of Brick from - His first novel, Martin Sloane, was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Trillium Prize.

Brian Bethune writes about ideas, books and the book trade, and religion, but what really interests him is why people believe what they believe.

Bethune's legacy from his death in to the early s was therefore conflicted and undervalued, though it brings attention to the NFB.

Martin, however, is an Irish-born Canadian in his fifties who enters Maclean's contributor Brian Bethune felt that Jolene's appeal as a character.

A century ago, 75 per cent of Catholics lived in Europe or North America; now two-thirds are outside those continents. But that massive change is not fuelled entirely by the Church’s burgeoning growth in Asia and, especially, Africa.

The flip side is the declining numbers in its Western heartland. Some 60 per cent of the French no longer ever attend services, and across Europe the rate of baptisms has fallen six per cent in the last six years. A tenth of American parishes have closed or merged in recent years, while six per cent is also the weekly mass attendance rate among Catholics in Quebec, once a Church bastion.

In Ireland, which not long ago was a vir