Posted on 08/05/2010 10:30:41 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
IN THE small world of traditional French Catholicism, everybody knows about Abbé Francis Michel. For the past 23 years this small, stubborn figure in his well-worn soutane has been responsible for the cure of souls in the village of Thiberville in Normandy. The locals like his conservative style, even though his Latin services would not suit all French churchgoers. The village’s 12th-century church, and the 13 other places of worship under his care, are kept in good repair by his supporters. (These days, some priests in rural France must cope with as many as 30 churches.)
Since the start of the year Abbé Francis has been at war with the region’s bishop—in church terms, a liberal—who has been trying to close the parish and move him to other duties. Uproar ensued in January when the bishop came to mass and tried to give the priest his marching orders. Most villagers followed Abbé Francis as he strode off to another church and celebrated in the old-fashioned way. He has made two appeals to Rome, both rejected on technicalities; a third is pending.
To Father Francis’s admirers Thiberville is a pinpoint of light against a sombre background: the near-collapse of Catholicism in some of its heartlands. In the diocese of Evreux, Christianity has been part of the fabric of life for 15 centuries. Of its 600,000 inhabitants, about 400,000 might call themselves, at least loosely, Catholic. But the number of priests under the age of 70 is a mere 39, and only seven of those are under 40. That is just a bit worse than average in a country that, as recently as the 1950s, boasted 40,000 active priests; in a few years, the number under 65 will be a tenth of that. This suggests a body that is not so much shrinking as dying.
On closer inspection French Catholicism is not dead, but it is splintering to the point where the centre barely holds. The brightest flickers are on the fringes: individuals like Abbé Pierre, founder of the Emmaus movement for the homeless; “charismatics” whose style draws on Pentecostalism, and traditionalists who love Latin rites and processions. Meanwhile, the church’s relatively liberal mainstream is almost in free fall. As conservatives like Abbé Francis see it, it is largely the liberals’ own fault: “They keep selling and closing properties, while we [traditionalists] are busy building and restoring.”
Among Europe’s historically Catholic lands, France is an outlier. Its leap into modernity took the form of a secular revolution; that differs from places like Ireland or Poland, where church and modern nationhood go together. Things are different again in Bavaria or the southern Netherlands, where the church inspires local pride; or in Spain, where Catholicism is at issue in an ideological war.
But in many European places where Catholicism remained all-powerful until say, 1960, the church is losing whatever remains of its grip on society at an accelerating pace. The drop in active adherence to, and knowledge of, Christianity is a long-running and gentle trend; but the hollowing out of church structures—parishes, monasteries, schools, universities, charities—is more dramatic. That is the backdrop against which the paedophile scandal, now raging across Europe after its explosion in the United States, has to be understood. The church’s fading institutional power makes it (mercifully) easier for people who were abused by clerics to speak out; and as horrors are laid bare, the church, in many people’s eyes, grows even weaker.
A couple of decades ago Ireland defied the idea that modern societies grow secular: churches were packed. But last year, after a decade of mounting anger over clerical malpractice, the nation was stunned by two exposés of cruelty by men and women of God. First, a nine-year investigation found that thousands of children had been maltreated at church-run industrial schools and orphanages. Then a probe of the archdiocese of Dublin, over the three decades up to 2004, not only found widespread child abuse by priests but police collusion in hiding it. Five Irish bishops offered to step down; the pope has accepted three resignations and is considering the others. When a new bishop, Liam MacDaid, took office on July 25th, he presented a stark picture: “Society has forced us in the Irish church to look into the mirror, and what we saw [was] weakness and failure, victims and abuse.”
Ireland is still a churchgoing nation; about half claim to attend mass weekly, and there has been an uptick since the economy turned sour. But in a land that used to export priests and nuns to the world, vocations have dried up. In a couple of decades there could be a French-style implosion. That need not imply a collapse in Christian belief; but as one Catholic history buff puts it, rural Ireland could go back to its early medieval state, when a largely priestless folk-religion held sway. Already, popular religion—local pilgrimages, or books on Celtic prayer—does better than anything involving priests. And Ireland’s political class, once so priest-ridden, now distances itself from the clergy.
A state within a state
In Belgium, where Catholicism used to hold a disparate nation together, relations between church and state have been transformed in a spectacular way. On June 24th, as the country’s nine bishops were conferring at their headquarters, the building was taken over by the police. On the same day police raided the home of a retired archbishop, drilled holes in the tomb of at least one cardinal (looking for hidden papers) and took away 450 documents from the office of a church committee that was probing clerical abuse. The committee, headed by a layman, resigned in protest.
What the Belgian and Irish stories suggest is the collapse of a centuries-old order in which the church functioned as a sort of “state within a state”—administering its own affairs, and often the affairs of its flock, by a system of law and authority that ran in parallel with, and could trump, the authority of the state. Europe’s enlightenment may have put an end to the sort of formal theocracy in which popes commanded armies and kings ruled by divine right. But in a messy mixture of ways the authority of church and state has remained intertwined across Europe.
Even now quasi-theocracy dies hard. Ireland’s hierarchs have lost their grip on secondary and higher education, but primary schooling is still a church-based affair; even non-Christian youngsters are drilled in Catholic teaching. In France the Catholic hierarchy had until recently an informal place in the establishment. Nicolas Sarkozy may be the first French president who does not see the archbishop of Paris as a natural interlocutor. Mr Sarkozy, whose own roots are secular and Jewish, speaks of the church from an outsider’s distance.
As the Irish case shows, the most insidious links between church and state are often informal ones, which can leave priests and bishops virtually exempt from scrutiny. But all over Europe the child-abuse scandal has made secular powers keener to reassert their authority, and less willing to accept the Catholic church as a semi-autonomous power. In almost every country, therefore, the church is in decline as an institution—a situation in contrast to its vibrancy in Africa, Asia and much of Latin America, and the energy brought by Latinos to the church in the United States. But its decline across Europe is not uniform; in each country, the church faces a different mixture of threats and residual strengths.
Across southern Europe an intense, atavistic attachment to Catholic tradition remains, sharpened by a perceived challenge from the fast-growing Muslim neighbours. In Italy Catholicism, as a mark of cultural difference in a homogenising world, is held dear in some unlikely quarters: among atheist intellectuals, for example. As recently as 2006 a research institute, Eurispes, asserted that the share of Italians calling themselves Catholic had risen by eight percentage points over 15 years, to 88%. It also found that 37% of Catholics claimed to be regular mass-goers. Despite the decline of its flagship party, the Christian Democrats, the church has muscle; it has seen off challenges to Italy’s strict curbs on in vitro fertilisation.
But Italians are less pious than they pretend. A study of central Sicily, published this year, found that only 18% of people actually went to church, although 30% said they did. And the Eurispes study of Italy found that 66% backed liberal divorce laws and 38% supported euthanasia. Only 19% favoured abortion on demand, but 65% could accept the practice in cases of rape. Strikingly, more Catholics than non-Catholics supported cohabitation by unmarried couples. Behind supposed religious uniformity lies a range of views. “Rather than Catholicism, it is more accurate to talk about Catholicisms,” says Giuseppe Giordan, a sociologist of religion. “There are those who identify completely with the teaching of the pope, and those who dissent—both from the traditionalist and liberal viewpoints.” Among those who—paradoxically—find Pope Benedict XVI’s church a tad liberal are xenophobic groups that fear Islam: they groan at the sight of Catholic charities running halal soup-kitchens for immigrants.
Across much of traditionally Catholic Europe, there is massive dissent from the church’s teaching on morality. If the Vatican has lost credibility in this area, says Mr Giordan, it is for reasons that go beyond sex: it has failed to see that since the 1960s, there has been “a huge anthropological change in favour of…freedom of choice. People are no longer prepared to obey instructions.” The pope’s defenders—like Giovanni Maria Vian, editor of the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano—would insist that Pope Benedict does believe in human freedom: he would prefer a small church of freely committed believers than a giant flock herded in by custom or constraint. But in many parts of Europe, critics of the Vatican feel it still tries to tilt the playing-field—by clinging on to old privileges—rather than embracing religious freedom.
The end of obedience
In Spain the church presents all these contradictions: it is culturally very strong, and rooted in one half of a divided society. It is losing its sway over people’s behaviour but retains a loud and controversial voice. Some 28% of people in Spain call themselves practising Catholics, and another 46% non-practising Catholics; as many as 38% profess devotion to a particular saint or image of Christ or the Virgin Mary. But secularism, and a long-term backlash against the Catholic authoritarianism of the past, is on the march: 2009 was the year when town-hall weddings finally overtook those in church.
In recent weeks thousands of Spanish Catholics have joined church-backed rallies against a new, liberal abortion law, part of the ruling Socialists’ programme of radical change. In other measures, gay marriage has been legalised and religious (in effect, Catholic) education has been downgraded. Rallies in favour of the new abortion law were just as large, though, and a centre-right government would be unlikely to change it. The church can still mobilise, but it cannot impose its will.
Among the Catholic nations of Europe, Poland stands out as the only place where seminaries are full and priests abound. The percentage of churchgoers remains high, though it peaked, at 55%, in 1987. But Catholicism has no monopoly over Poland’s public square; the country played host this summer to a European gay pride march, and this year’s musical hits include a song by a famous crooner, Olga Jackowska, in which she discloses that she was abused by a priest as a child. Nor is Polish Catholicism immune from social changes; a survey of Polish priests found that 54% said they would like to have a wife and family, and 12% said they already had a stable relationship with a woman.
But for Poles Catholicism retains a huge emotional power. It is true that Polish Catholicism has a vitriolic fringe, prone to bigotry and anti-Semitism. But there are several positive traditions on which the church can draw, ranging from the efforts of John Paul II to improve relations with Jews to the tolerant nature of the 17th-century Polish Commonwealth, which had room for Protestants, Jews and Muslims. Unlike the once-mighty Latin churches at whose behest the New World was conquered, the Polish church sees itself as honourable but embattled: a defender of the nation against invasion and a comfort in its darkest days.
Embracing humility
Poland’s tradition—or rather, some carefully selected bits of it—is one place to which the Vatican might look if it wants to shake off the habit of arrogance that has bedevilled its responses to the child-abuse scandal. It is true that most of the cases took place in the 1960s and 1970s; the culture of cronyism and impunity which made such horrors possible is now well in the past, and most of the institutions involved have been shut for decades. But many of today’s senior bishops were part of the world that tried to cover these things up. That is deeply embarrassing for the elderly men who now run the church, including the 83-year-old pontiff. And their reaction has ranged from slow to staggeringly insensitive.
As a rule of thumb, the reaction has been especially clumsy in parts of Europe (including Rome itself) where the church has recent memories of enjoying unchallenged power; and much more intelligent, and appropriately humble, in places where the church was used to fighting its own corner in a noisy democratic space.
Take the sunny Saturday in May when the Dutch diocese of Roermond, in the country’s Catholic south, commemorated 450 years of life. In deference to the public mood, the festivities were reduced in scale, and a note of repentance was added to a dignified cathedral service. A small group of child-abuse protesters rallied outside, but the impression was left of a church already working to clean its stables.
In the French city of Lyon, where St Irenaeus hammered out some of the basics of Christian doctrine 19 centuries ago, the church is downsizing in a different way. One of its best-known priests is Father Christian Delorme, an admirer of Gandhi who has been speaking out for poor Muslim immigrants since the 1970s. As pastor of two parishes near the city centre, where families of Spanish or Portuguese origin rub shoulders with North Africans, he is kept down to earth by having to conduct at least 200 funerals a year. Some of his colleagues, he says, refuse to take funerals because they feel they should be preparing their flock for the time when there are no priests available. But he officiates willingly, feeling that this is his biggest chance to meet people who are mostly unchurched. At 60, he regrets the decline of the progressive French Catholicism that flourished in his youth—and also of Christian culture in general. Businessmen he lectures to do not even know the rudiments of doctrine.
But he is too busy, and intellectually active, to wallow in gloom or pessimism. As he sees things, the regime of laicité has protected the French church from the dangers of power over the vulnerable. Catholic schools exist in France—but not the vast network of unaccountable authority that led Irish, Belgian and Bavarian priests into temptation. French Catholicism is a battered tree, but it can still sprout new and unexpected branches. In places like Italy, where the church shelters behind a high wall of culture and convention, the hardest days may still lay ahead.
(yawn)
No coincidence. I was writing to you (with cc to the other folks).
See, Alex, I have attempted to always defend you when I read somebody attempting to lump you in with Catholic-bashers. You do have an interesting on-line method of bookmarking references, but otherwise, I have always said that you've put up good, bad, and ugly regarding the Church and I have never read in your posts the un-Christlike vitriol I've read in others.
The question comes in if you were posting this out of Christian concern for the state of Christian Europe (that was my assumption) or if you were posting it for some other purpose. I assumed the most positive rationale earlier, but if I am mistaken, please let me know.
Frankly, I think some of the Protestant crusaders on this forum go completely overboard with their blame-Catholicism-for-everything foolishness. But instead of trying to whitewash the past and pretend that Luther and Calvin are the root of all evil, perhaps Catholicism should look inward first and wonder why God divided His Kingdom, even as He did in the days of Solomon's son.
Shalom.
Quite true.
No such guarantees extend, however, to Joe Bloggs' personal understanding of that word.
You wrote:
“Seen that many times. Catholics KNOW they aren’t Christians. And Christians KNOW they aren’t Catholic.”
The ignorance and bigotry of that statement is incredible.
Are you Catholic? Are you Catholic? No, Christian. They get off this Catholic thread.
Tell me again about ignorance and bigotry - and DON’T assign it to me. PUT IT WHERE IT BELONGS if you want to show ANY CREDIBILITY!
False. Utterly false.
How else, when entering any large city filled with Novatianists, Priscillianists, Cartophrygians, and other heretical sects, all calling themselves ‘Christian’, am I to find my true brethren, whose church was founded by Christ himself? Surely, a name is necessary. If it weren’t for heretics, ‘Christian’ would be quite sufficient. ‘Catholic’ is my first name and ‘Christian’ my surname; by the latter is the general group I identify meant, and by the former is my own, Apostolic group meant.-- Pacian of Barcelona, AD 390 or before
LOL! Is that The BEST you have?
Are you Catholic? Are you Catholic? No, Christian. Get Off this thread - can’t YOU READ - it’s for CATHOLICS ONLY!!
Only if this is the first step. With as many steps back as Europe has taken, it may be a while before they back to the starting line.
You wrote:
“Are you Catholic? Are you Catholic? No, Christian. They get off this Catholic thread.”
Sorry, I don’t think it happens that way. When someone denies being Catholic, then they don’t belong on a Catholic caucus thread. I am a Christian. I can post all I want on a Catholic caucus thread because I am a Catholic Christian. A non-Catholic - whether still some sort of Christian or a non-Christian - cannot post on a Catholic caucus thread. This is not difficult to understand.
“Tell me again about ignorance and bigotry - and DON’T assign it to me.”
I assign it to those who exhibit it.
“PUT IT WHERE IT BELONGS if you want to show ANY CREDIBILITY!”
My credibility is not in question here. Yours might be - especially when you made the completely erroneous claim you made.
You wrote:
“YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT perhaps too excited to reply first before understanding set in.”
No, I didn’t miss anything and I understood EXACTLY what you said.
“I’m not saying any Christian WANTS to be on a Catholic thread. For what? I have no problem at all they have their own thread and think it’s a good idea. From what I have seen and done myself, posters MISTAKENLY have posted on the caucus threads.”
Yes, they have mistakenly posted on the threads.
“And immediately attacked with - Are you Catholic? Are you Catholic? When they read “Christian” - OFF this thread - can’t you read - Catholics ONLY.”
And?
“It’s not rocket science from those threads to see Catholics have repeatedly shown Catholics aren’t Christians nor are Christians Catholics by their statement. And I’m NOT in disagreement with them AT ALL”
And that shows that I understood your point perfectly - and you’re wrong. Catholics by definition are Christians. What they aren’t is Protestant. When a Protestant (or perhaps much more rarely an Eastern Orthodox Christian) posts illegally on a Catholic caucus thread he is told to leave. He is not told to leave because he is a Christian. Nor are Catholics not Christians. I understood your post correctly the first time, and you are still wrong.
“Sure it is - you can’t even admit to that!!”
I freely admit that I cannot admit to what isn’t true. Everything I have said in this thread is irrefutably true while you have posted irrefutably erroneous nonsense. That’s probably why you have not even attempted to offer any proof - ANY PROOF AT ALL - for your bizarre claim. I also believe no one thinks you will attempt to offer proof for your bizarre claim. My credibility is just fine. You have as much credibility as you do proof: NONE.
“Sorry, chump - you had a chance to make it right for yourself. I gave you the benefit of the doubt you didn’t understand at first.”
I understand perfectly and always did. You were wrong from the start and still are. The fact that you are wrong will be shown when you go completely belly up by not offering a single shred of evidence for your bizarre claim.
“So my statement stands - you can ‘try’ to dispute it all you want ‘with words’ but there is proof.”
No, actually there isn’t. If there was, you would have posted it. Perhaps you’ll dissemble as anti-Catholics do so often. You might post something that doesn’t say what you claimed, but insist it said exactly what you did claim. We’ll see. I am betting you’ll do one of two things: 1) simply post more angry posts with no evidence at all of your false claim, or perhaps 2) you’ll post something that doesn’t prove what you claimed but insist that you did post proof.
Which is it going to be?
I see you’re also not offering any evidence to Campion either.
Yeah, looks like you’ll just go belly up with no evidence whatsoever.
Same old, same old. Anti-Catholics are so predictable it’s amazing. They seem to have no conscience at all about such mendacity.
Obviously not. A quick review of her posting history will reveal that nearly every waking moment for the last 10 years has been spent in an obsessive truthless attack on the Church.
Catholic Europe is going to crumble and will be replaced by a joyous Protestant springtime in which Europe's citizens will spontaneously embrace the spiritual heritage of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli et al.
Understand that this position is a post-millennial view of the Church, that is, the Paraclete, absent anyone who remains to proclaim the gospel of Law and Grace, will perform a European Great Awakening. Empirical evidence doesn't support this view too well. Its best to watch a few "Rocky" movies and then contemplate the post-millennial view again.
What planet are you on? Does joy over what's happening to the Catholic Church in Europe blind you to the bigger picture on that continent? Europe is in the middle of a great apostasy and is casting off its Christian heritage
I would agree with you there. Personally I think the West is beyond retrieval. Among Rome, Liberation Theology, Social Gospel and the Big Box American Religion, it is difficult to find the Gospel presented in a manner that is consistent with that of the Apostles. I was thinking about what would happen if I were to be blessed with the opportunity to bring somewhat to saving faith. For where would I recommend them to go for further discipleship, growth and koinoneia outside what I could offer ?
There is going to be an Islamic onslaught which will blow away all the nominal, lukewarm and newly apostate former believers of all stripes.
I wouldn't let that trouble you. The Islamic political system (for it does not meet the standards of a true religion), has been a thorn in the sides of mankind since its inception. Some could successfuly argue that it is a regurgitated form a Ba'al worship meaning that it is much older than the sixth century. Nevertheless, because of its primarily Arabic focus, I would more liken the Arabic scourge as the curse of Genesis 16:12, God's punishment to Abraham and all mankind for listening to Sarah rather than God. IOW, they are God's curse to mankind primarily, and secondarily I believe their historic role has been to act as God's "guardian angels" who watch over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount in the same way as the Angels were at the gates of Eden. The point being, to gurantee that there will be no new Temple. When God crushed it in 70AD, it was meant to stay crushed.
Similarly, I would not fret about a world government, for when God threw down Babel because they wanted to be one united front of man against God, our LORD squashed that rebellion. Though there is no explicit promise that they would stay disbanned, I am led to look at the Colossus described in Nebuchadnezzar's dream. The head was made of Gold and was the Babylonian king. The remaining description was not of a one world government, and thus Babel and the Colossus teach us that there is no expectation for a one-world government.
So now we are left with only a few end scenarios here:
Without a doubt, because of the debt financing, the massive levels of corruption, and the huge amount of specialization and entitlement (basically the inability and desire to even feed ourselves outside of the collective) the West, and most likely the rest of the globe is going to be thrown into a thousand years of darkness. That is for certain.
In terms of salvation, nothing is beyond the Paraclete in His ability to call the Elect. What is troublesome here for a mass revival, is the remarkable lack of men and women skilled in the Word sufficiently to be able to preach the Gospel, that is, we have reached that stage where there just isn't enough salt left to keep the meat from rotting. On paper it could happen, one person tells two who each tell too who each tell two more - sort of like the payment the inventor of the chess game asked from the king; but the practical reality is, it would take an even larger transformation of those of the Elect to actually go out and preach it.
As far as evangelizing Asia, I hear from Arminians how wonderfully well their outreach is, but the problem of the Big Box missionaries is true over-seas as it is at home: What you bring people in with is what you bring them to. So if a missionary uses grab-ass and fun-n-games to bring in the unchurched, then the new "converts" will believe that Christianity is grab-ass and fun-n-games. I hope I am wrong here and that the faith is being received in Asia. Afterall, billions in Asia is better than a few million in the West.
The last scenario is one that I find myself more confident in. I believe that the West in general, and the US in particular were brought to their role and position, not just because of Christianity, but because God ordained these nations to bring about the conditions globally that were present in the final days of Sodom and for the anteDiluvians. We read in the Olivet Discourse that they were buying and selling, food, marriage (probably not of the California variety) and people building and planting.
Those things can only happen in a time of prosperity, and clearly we are trending from prosperity for at least a handful of generations. As far as Europe or the US being a people characterized as Christian - that is permanently over. So what we have in the Olivet is a description of the upper-limits, that is we know we are moving rapidly away from a global ability to fulfil any of those economic and social conditions. So while we still have them, it would seem that the time is ripe. Beginning within the next decade, or so, we will most likely be outside of that window for at least a thousand years.
Now our post-millennial friends might point out several things that could be interpreted Preteristically, and as a Realized Millennialist, I could go along with a pre-70 fulfillment in terms of a composite of then with the yet to come, but there is one passage that has been haunting me.
That is the phrase "and because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold". (Matt 24:12) For love to grow cold, it had to be warm in the first place. 1 John teaches us that love is defined by Christians, that is, the Redeemed of the Church. Before Pentecost, we had very low levels of demonstrated love, and since then, when God's grace has been available to people of all nations, it can be understood that love knew its greatest extent and scope. But here it is described as growing cold, which would seem to put the hurt on a Preterist interpretation unless the Post Millennialist would characterize the Church waning in 70AD.
We surely are witnessing global lawlessness, and as each offensive move after another occurs in governments here and abroad, the sentiment of the people ruled by these lawless tyrants is getting closer to mass disobedience to the ruling authorities. The question remains, what is the scope of "love will grow cold" - is that a reference to believers or mankind in general? The word love in this passage is the familiar "agape" which is more of the kind of love that recognizes a "caring for" variety. Unlike philos (brotherly) or eros (sexual), agape is the sort of love that has you graciously bringing food to someone in need at midnight.
If the scope is "believers", then what we can only surmise is that the end-times will be nothing like what the PostMills are describing, not that true believers will stop loving since love is the defining characteristic of the true believer - but may account for the apostate and their falling away and betrayal. Still, this remains a rather grim prospect.
For the past fifteen years I have been predicting what is happening right now. 95% of what I have been expecting has been occuring exactly on schedule. (the missing 5% is the conversion of the American embassy in Iraq to a UN HQ which might still happen if things go sideways in NYC)
I am relieved to see that Glenn Beck is slowing coming around to what is the correct perspective on what we as believers should be doing. With our representatives and judges ruling against the will of the people, it should be abundantly clear that what God has been yelling at us since the beginning of time is still true - when it comes to who is in power, it isn't the ballot box that determines - it is God, and God alone. All that is left is for us to recognize that since God has taken responsibility for ALL politics, that we should focus our energies on that which we are explicitely commanded to do - and that is: Preach the Gospel.
So it isn't a "Calvinist Nirvana" that I am proposing, I do expect that those who are called to be ambassadors of the Kingdom to quit trying to usurp God's role in setting up and toppling earthly kingdoms (which includes Rome), and focus on ministry and the furthering of the Gospel. If you are a Roman Catholic of the Thomas Aquinas variety, then I welcome you with open arms to join in evangelizing the lost while there is still time.
New thread, old lie. Do you really believe that it will be believed because it hasn't yet been refuted on this thread? I don't think you will find many as gullible as you.
Nobody appointed you hall monitor or authorized you to hand out warnings and reprimands in the name of the Moderator.
How many colonies permitted Catholics to vote or hold office? One, Maryland (where one signer, Charles Carroll, was from).
Ironically, there was only one Calvinist too, John Witherspoon from New Jersey.
And he showed up late, too!
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