• Americans’ belief in God, angels, heaven, hell and the devil fell to the lowest point in more than two decades.
• Belief in all five spiritual entities has decreased 3 to 5 points since 2016.
• Americans who regularly attend religious services, Protestants and Republicans were all more likely to believe in such spiritual entities.
Americans’ belief in God, the devil and other spiritual entities has fallen to a new low, according to a Gallup poll released on Thursday.
Seventy-four percent of Americans said they believe in God, while 69 percent said they believe in angels and 67 percent said they believe in heaven, the poll found. Slightly smaller shares — 59 percent and 58 percent — said they believe in hell and the devil.
Belief in all five spiritual entities has fallen between 3-5 points since 2016, the last time that Gallup polled Americans on the topic.
Since the pollster first began collecting survey data on the subject more than two decades ago, belief in God and heaven has dropped 16 points, while belief in hell has fallen 12 points and belief in the devil and angels has decreased by 10 points.

Support for marriage and marriage rates themselves have sharply declined among young people in recent years, leading experts to offer various explanations for the troubling trends as well as potential solutions to reverse them.
Data has long pointed toward a sustained drop in marriage rates for every age cohort following the “Silent Generation,” the group of Americans born roughly between the two World Wars. A recent Pew survey found that just 30% of marriage-age Millennials live with a spouse and a child, compared with 70% of those from the Silent Generation.
A survey in June from the Thriving Center of Psychology, meanwhile, found that about 40% of Millennials and GenZers believe marriage is an “outdated tradition,” with 85% responding that marriage “is [not] necessary to have a fulfilled and committed relationship.”
Speaking on the statistics, W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, said bluntly: “It’s bad.”
Wilcox, who for years has been ringing alarm bells about the decline of marriage rates in the U.S, said collapsing marriage numbers are worrisome in no small part because of the economic fallout that can result.
“Marriage is a wealth-generating institution,” he told CNA. “Having kids outside of marriage puts you at risk of family instability and accumulating kids with more than one partner. That starts you up for men, for child support; for women, single parenthood. Both of which are financially exceedingly difficult to navigate.”
“But I’m more concerned about the social and emotional side to all of this,” he continued. “And what we see in the data are that Americans today who are not married are markedly more likely to report that they’re lonely, adrift in terms of meaning, and about half as likely to be very happy with their lives compared [with] their fellow [married] citizens.”
Wilcox said when he began his research into marriage and family stability, his largest concern was for children affected by the changing family demographics.
“As I see the marriage rate tick lower and lower and lower, I’ve become more concerned about adults,” he said. “A lot of adults, more than one-third of young adults today in their 20s, will never marry. This is record demographic territory we’re heading into.”
Mary-Rose Verret, who with her husband, Ryan, founded the marriage renewal and preparation initiative Witness to Love, told CNA that the problem is nearly as acute among Catholics as it is among non-Catholics.

Today’s Christian believers are facing an ever-darkening world. We are continuously confronted with shocking news reports, disturbing ideologies, and dangerous influences in our own country — outrageous stories vie for our attention. And, of course, our first responsibilities lie close to home. Every day, The Washington Stand focuses on those national concerns.
Still, at the same time, it’s important for us to remain aware of the enormous struggles and threats our spiritual sisters and brothers are facing abroad — far beyond our national borders. With that in mind, let’s focus our attention on one of the most challenging places in the world to be a Christian: The vast continent of Africa.
Here are some recent developments:
In Uganda: On June 18, BBC reported that Ugandan students “… were singing gospel songs before an attack by suspected Islamist militants. ‘Then I heard screaming,’ a woman who lives opposite the school explained.”
In Sudan: During the present civil war, innumerable Christians in Sudan are fleeing for their lives, trying to survive the fighting, and still facing persecution for their faith in Christ.
In Nigeria: Every month, hundreds of Christians are being killed in ongoing attacks. “Christian death tolls include at least 300 in several attacks in Plateau state spanning May 15–17 … more than 100 in attacks spanning May and June in Benue state … 43 in Nasarawa state in mid-May. Tens of thousands were displaced. Whole villages, dozens of church buildings, and thousands of homes reportedly were destroyed …”

German bishops and representatives of the Roman Curia met in the Vatican on july 26 to continue discussions started last year about the German Synodal Way.
According to a joint statement from the Vatican and the German bishops’ conference, the July 26 meeting took place in a “positive and constructive climate” and will be followed by other encounters.
The meeting was convened, the brief statement said, following the German bishops’ November 2022 ad limina visit, when “it was agreed that the theological and disciplinary issues that emerged in particular in the ‘Synodal Way’ would be further discussed.”
The Synodal Way, which began in 2019, is a collaborative effort between the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) and the German bishops’ conference.
During a concluding assembly in March, delegates overwhelmingly passed measures to change Church practices based on transgender ideology and to push the universal Church to ordain women to the sacramental diaconate.
Delegates also voted to adopt same-sex blessings, normalize lay preaching, and ask Rome to “reexamine” the discipline of priestly celibacy.

The Mexican Bishops’ Conference (CEM) has recently presented to the Vatican for its approval a series of Indigenous liturgical adaptations for the celebration of Holy Mass for the “original peoples” of the country.
Speaking with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Cardinal Felipe Arizmendi, promoter of the initiative and one of those in charge of making the presentation to the Vatican, explained that the adaptations have the objective of “advan-cing the progress of inculturation of the Church in the native peoples and of taking responsibility for the celebration of Holy Mass with some elements of these cultures.”
“It’s not a question of creating a new Indigenous rite but of incorporating into the liturgy various ways of relating to God of these peoples and which express the same thing as the Roman rite, but in its cultural form.”
Before the Indigenous liturgical adaptations were presented by the Mexican Church to the Holy See, they had been approved during the 114th plenary assembly of the CEM, held April 17–21. The adaptations were approved by 103 of the 105 voting bishops.
“They asked me to present the text and write it up, to present it to the assembly,” he said. “The vote in favor was last April 19. Now the proposal is already in Rome, at the Dicastery for Divine Worship, awaiting its final approval.” The document was delivered in June. Incorporating elements ‘without harming the eucharistic liturgy’
Arizmendi said that “there are certain elements, which have been studied, that can be incorporated into the Holy Mass without harming the eucharistic liturgy.”
“We were studying and seeing what things could be taken into the Catholic liturgy, what things yes, what things no,” he said.

St. Charbel Makhlouf is known in Lebanon for the miraculous healings of those who visit his tomb to seek his intercession — both Christians and Muslims.
“St. Charbel has no geographic or confessional limits. Nothing is impossible for [his intercession] and when people ask [for something], he answers,” Father Louis Matar, coordinator of the Shrine of St. Charbel in Annaya, Lebanon, told CNA.
Speaking in Arabic with the help of an interpreter, Matar said the shrine, which encompasses the monastery where the Maronite Catholic priest, monk, and hermit lived for nearly 20 years, receives approximately 4 million visitors a year, including both Christians and Muslims.
Lebanese Catholics pray at the shrine of St. Charbel, the country’s patron saint. EWTN News
Matar, who is responsible for archiving the thousands of medically-verified healings attributed to the intercession of the Maronite priest-monk, said that many miraculous cures have been obtained by Muslims.
Since 1950, the year the monastery began to formally record the miraculous healings, they have archived more than 29,000 miracles, Matar said. Prior to 1950, miracles were verified only through the witness of a priest. Now, with more advanced medical technology available, alleged miracles require medical documents demonstrating the person’s initial illness and later, their unexplainable good health.
One of the miracles documented by Matar at the end of December 2018 was that of a 45-year-old Italian woman. Suffering from a neurological disease, she was hospitalized after it was discovered she had tried to commit suicide by consuming acid.

In a new attack against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, the dictatorship of President Da-niel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, has frozen the Church’s retirement fund for priests, according to lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina.
The lawyer is the author of the report “Nicaragua: A Perse-cuted Church?”, which catalogs the more than 500 attacks against the Church in the country since 2018.
“Elderly priests are not re-ceiving their pensions from the national insurance fund for priests, the product of years of contributing, due to the bank accounts of the Catholic Church being blocked,” Molina wrote on the social media site X
“The national insurance fund for priests is an institution that was created more than 20 years ago by the CEN [Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference] intending a retirement fund for priests. It’s not exactly insurance, because it doesn’t cover health issues or other Social Security issues. It’s intended as a retirement fund,” Molina explained to the Nicara-guan newspaper Confidencial Digital.
The fund receives $150 a year from active priests, parishes, and Church institutions in addition to what is collected on Ash Wednes-day.

Officials of the Catholic Church in India have asked the government of Portugal to ease the process of granting travel visas for young people planning to attend the August 1-6 World Youth Day in Lisbon, in order to accommodate almost 1,000 Indians hoping to take part in the event.
Often dubbed the “Olympics of the Catholic Church,” World Youth Day is a massive gathering of young people from around the world launched by St. John Paul II.
Whenever the event is staged in an affluent venue, however, there are often difficulties in granting visas to participants from developing nations, out of concern that some youth will remain behind and become undocumented workers and residents.
In many cases, young people hoping to make the trip are also required to be interviewed by embassy officials, though in some parts of the world applicants have reported not being called for the interview despite repeated requests.
“We are facing a lot of issues and many rejections this time,” Machado said. “We are not even sure whether all registered will get a visa to travel.”
“They look for a guarantee that the visitors will return home” from a third party willing to assume the risk. “That’s very difficult to get,” Machado said. Over 1,300 groups comprised of more than 28,600 individuals from across the United States, will travel to Lisbon, Portugal, for the thirty-seventh World Youth Day (WYD) gathering with Pope Francis.

After 13 weeks of ethnically-based violence in India’s troubled north-eastern state of Manipur, the European Parliament in Strasbourg is holding an emergency debate.
But opposition to holding votes on the resolutions has come from India, through lobbyists employed in Europe by the Hindu nationalist BJP government of Narendra Modi.
“It’s actually extraordinary. It’s quite an unexpected development”, commented Caroline Duffield of persecution charity, Open Doors.
“What it is, they’ve tabled emergency resolutions on the Indian government’s handling of the security crisis in Manipur. And really, the language is scathing, the criticisms are profound”, she said.
Details of attacks on Christians sent to Premier Christian Radio in past days has put the number of burnings of church buildings, schools, seminaries and the homes of ministers at 564, since 3 May.
These amount to 263 churches belonging to the Kuki-Zo tribe, 93 Kuki Christian buildings and 238 churches belong to Christians from the Meitei ethnic group, which witnesses say were destroyed by Hindu Meitei nationalists.
Six political groupings in the European Parliament have tabled the resolutions, which will be voted on tomorrow.
A motion laid by Spanish MEP Miguel Urbán Crespo on behalf of The Left Group criticises the “authorities´ response” to minority groups in India, saying it “has stoked ethnic divisions,” adding that “political leaders and public authorities explicitly advocated hatred towards these minorities with impunity.”
“They’re denouncing the BJP political elite, for the use of nationalist rhetoric”, reflected Caroline Duffield. “So it’s an extraordinary resolution debate underway” she told Premier Christian Radio.
For the European Peoples Party (Christian Democrats), a resolution tabled in the name of Croatian MEP Željana Zovko and 12 others, “strongly urges the Indian authorities to continue to employ all necessary measures” to halt religious violence.

In a new attack against the Catholic Church, the dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua canceled the legal personhood and confiscated the assets of a congregation of women religious.
Members of the Sandinista police “like criminals broke into the house of the Sisters of the Fraternity of the Poor Ones of Jesus Christ at midnight yesterday; they were going to leave the country soon,” tweeted Martha Patrica Molina on July 2.
Molina is a Nicaraguan lawyer and researcher who authored the report “Nicaragua: a Persecuted Church?”, which details over 500 attacks against the Church by the regime.
The Nicaraguan media outlet Article 66 reported that the Ministry of the Interior took the measure July 4 and that the sisters were going to leave Nicaragua next week since the authorities had not renewed their residency permit.
The sisters later tweeted that they have gone to El Salvador to continue their mission to serve the needy.
The rationale used for the decision to seize the convent was that the congregation “failed to comply with its obligations” by not reporting its latest financial statements and because the term of its board of directors had expired in February 2021.