I met Arinze too, when he visited Notre Dame in November of 1999. I was really impressed with him and would love to see him as the next pope. The Church is dead in Europe, but it is growing in Africa and I think the papacy should reflect this.
Arinze visited the seminary I studied at back in 85 or 86. He stopped at my room to chat. Very friendly and gregarious--but I would not want to see him as pope. I don't think he understands the conflict over the liturgy very well. Nice guy, though.
The Church is not dead in Europe.
The same dynamic that is going on in America is going on in France, but it is so far under the radar screen that nobody notices. And unlike in America, where religion is a statistic the government keeps and political parties use, in France religion is not tallied by the government.
And yet, if one looks very carefully and thinks about what one sees out in the provinces, one discovers something that is not commented upon or noticed, but which is real.
The French ARE having children. Lots and lots of children.
As many children, in many cases more children, than the Arabs in the Paris banlieu.
And yet France is said to be depopulating of the European French.
It is, but it isn't.
Follow me, because this stealth trend is not remarked anywhere.
The French who are having children: 3,4 even 5 of them, are the devout Catholics in the provinces. They are not small in number. They are real, and they are persistent, and their faith has not died. In the North and in the South, and sometimes even in the Ile de France when the talented mandarins move there because they do well on the national concours, the devout Catholics are still having babies.
France is not disappearing. It is changing on two poles. Arab immigration and reproduction are increasing Mohammedan numbers, but Catholic reproduction in province is increasing the population of devout Catholics. The secular middle is riding down the train of diminution.
Over time, the balance of the population is shifting with the new generation. There are more Catholics being born than meets the eye, because no eye is looking for that, and yet one need only travel about and really LOOK and one sees it.
Those people are Catholics, and devout. Full stop. They fill the Churches at midnight on Noel, from Normandie through Anjou and the Languedoc. And they are there, most of them, the next Sunday too. The Catholic universities of the provincial towns are not empty caverns, but full of students, and many of them are Catholic, and believing.
No, the Catholic Church in Europe is not dead. It CANNOT die. There is remnant of the faithful which is not only holding fast, but having children. What the American commentator Taranto calls "The Roe Effect" is happening in the province of France (and presumably elsewhere too), but there is no organ of the state to document this, and no think tank that cares about these things or would think it worthy of tracking were it to be noticed.
This does not mean that Europe will experience a Great Awakening any time soon. But the Church is alive, and will always be alive wherever there are believers in Christ. The meek are, ah slowly, inheriting the Earth.