A Portrait of Priests and Nuns, Watching the Decline of Catholic Culture
Catholicism’s reach and influence in the western world has been waning for decades, a large yet incremental shift difficult to document with a camera. Photographer Mika Goodfriend does so, beautifully, by focusing on the small and the personal in his series Fraternité Sacerdotale.
The series provides a glimpse into the lives of the priests and nuns living in Fraternité Sacerdotale, a hotel in Montreal for traveling clergy. These men and women of the cloth are the dignified face of an institution in sharp decline throughout much of the west.
“The Catholic faith in Quebec is an endangered species,” Goodfriend says. “Everyone in the Fraternity was aware of the massive shift towards secularism.”
In Quebec, that shift began in the 1960s with the Quiet Revolution, a massive reform that shifted many social services—including health and education—from the church to provincial government. As the Church ceded control and society secularized, many of the abbeys, convents and other buildings were taken over by universities or made into condos.
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/mika-goodfriend-fraternite-sacerdotale/
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