THE POPE, RELIGION, AND THE WEST

I've been waiting for someone to say it, and now John Derbyshire has done it.

Vigorous, handsome, plain-spoken, clear in his convictions, and obviously afraid of nothing terrestrial at all, John Paul II shone like a lighthouse through the fog of fear, doubt, and defeatism that had shrouded the West and its values through the 1970s.

It is therefore sad to reflect that the quarter century of his papacy was a terrible disaster for the Roman Catholic Church. Regular attendance at Mass* all over the traditionally Catholic world dropped like a stone all through John Paul II’s papacy. Everywhere in the great Catholic bastions of southern Europe — Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal — the story is the same. In France, “eldest daughter of the Church,” the only argument is whether regular Mass attendance today is just above, or just below, ten percent. In Ireland — Ireland! — the numbers declined steadily from the 90 percent of 1973 to 60 percent in 1996, since when they have fallen off a cliff, to 48 percent in 2001 and heading south. A hundred years ago the U.S. Church imported priests from Ireland; now Ireland imports them from Nigeria.

Why is this happening?

...the real culprit is the irresistible appeal of secular hedonism to healthy, busy, well-educated populations. We live, as never before in human history, in a garden of delights, with something new to distract and delight us every day. None of that is enough to turn the heads of those who are truly, constitutionally devout; but not many human beings are, nor ever have been, that committed to their faith. And so the flock wanders away to the rides, the prize booths, and the freak shows.

Is he right? There is still the interesting phenomenon of Evangelical Protestantism here in the United States, which seems to be growing, even among healthy, well-educated and prosperous people. Fundamentalist Islam seems also to be making gains among well-educated folks in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Yet, he has a point. Roman Catholicism is dying in Europe (Protestant denominations are doing no better). But that may be explained by the fact that Europe as we have known it is dying. All the old pillars of that continent are falling. It's peoples are increasingly cutting themselves loose from their sense of identity through religion and nationality (always the strongest forces on that continent), and, as a consequence, beginning a dramatic demographic fadeaway. The day may come, in a hundred years or so, when Europe's churches and cathedrals, if they exist at all, exist only as museums. The throngs of the faithful will march towards the mosques and minarets, heeding the call to prayer echoing off the walls of London, Paris, Berlin and Rome.