Catholicism in Europe: hopeless or hopeful?

There was a time when American Catholic intellectuals took their lead from Europe, turning to the writers Bernanos, Mauriac, Greene, Waugh, and the theologians Congar, de Lubac, Rahner, Schillebeeckx, and Teilhard--to name just a few--to see how Catholic sensibilities might dynamically engage the modern world. But who are our Catholic role models in Europe today?

Clearly times have changed when contemporary examples do not come readily to mind and when George Weigel suggests Europeans have become "Christophobic," and have betrayed their (Catholic) Christian heritage in favor of a debilitating radical secularism (see First Things, February 2004). I confess to feeling a twinge of sympathy when hearing Weigel criticize Europeans for their refusal to include any reference to Europe's Christian heritage in the new European Union (EU) constitution. The pope raised this issue in the 2003 apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa, chiding the continent for its loss of "Christian memory and heritage" and its "practical agnosticism and religious indifference." These criticisms are no more surprising than the EU's decision about its constitution. Looking at Europe from my post in the Netherlands, it seems that religious practice and belief in God are simply disappearing. Except where the Muslims are concerned, of course, but that is another story.

In the Netherlands, the level of church practice is comparable to that of Italy and Britain, as recently described by Eamon Duffy in Commonweal (November 5, 2004). Only a third of Holland's residents belong to a Catholic or Protestant church, according to research conducted by the Free University of Amsterdam. Belief in a "personal God"--that is, a God intimately concerned with our life--has fallen to a mere 19 percent. Atheism in the strict sense is embraced by only 13 percent of the population, but the highest religious sensibility most Dutch can summon up is the sense that there is "something" more to life, some transcendence that gives life its order and meaning.

These statistics confirm my everyday experience. Try to find a Dutch Catholic parish that compares with those I have known and worked for in the United States, one filled with people of all ages on Sundays, where people invest themselves extensively as volunteers, where financial stability is a given. There are a few, but so far the one parish here of comparable vitality that I have found is not strictly speaking a Dutch parish, but is the English-speaking international parish in The Hague, a gathering place for the families of foreign diplomats and expatriate businesspeople. Even though I am nearly forty, when I attend a Dutch church on Sunday I am always among the youngest. Far too often the only children who come forward for the children's Liturgy of the Word are the children of the catechists themselves. In my neighborhood parish in Utrecht, Mass on the weekend is the exception, as a result of the shortage of priests. Typically, we celebrate a word and Communion service on Sunday, with Mass being offered no more than once in three weeks. The archdiocesan plan for the city of Utrecht is to fuse all the current parishes into a single, multiple-location parish served by a pastoral team by 2010. Flipping through one of the Dutch newsweeklies, I usually turn to a standard feature, an interview with some well-known Dutch person. One of the questions is inevitably, "Do you believe in God?" and the answer is always, "No." Why they bother to include this question is beyond me.

Europeans laugh at glib "American" applications of religious discourse ("God bless America!"), a critique easy to appreciate up to a point. The widespread readiness, or better, determination, to keep "God" out of the public square here has its rationale. There are historical reasons for this secular attitude, having to do with abuses resulting from entanglements of religious and political power. Still, the United States has its own competing cultures and belief systems and history of ideological struggle, and it still makes room for religious perspectives in the societal conversation. Europeans, instead, see religion as irrelevant, or worse, dangerous.

That is an overgeneralization, of course. First of all, despite the ongoing efforts toward unity, Europe is far from being uniform in its attitudes and behavior. Holland's extreme secularism is in some ways unusual. Andrew Greeley is right to remind us to keep things in perspective. In his recent book, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium (Transaction), he reports that Europe as a whole shows more continuity than discontinuity over time when it comes to belief in God and religious practice. This means, first of all, that there was no ideal Christian past, when all Europeans believed in the Triune God and demonstrated this belief through church affiliation and practice. Beyond that, it means that declines in belief and practice are not in free fall across the board in this diverse continent. Greeley finds that religion is on the rise in some parts of Europe (in Russia, Slovenia, Latvia, and Hungary for example), is strong and stable in others (Poland, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria), less strong but stable elsewhere (Italy, Portugal, Spain), while declining in France, Britain, and the Netherlands. (For another, extensive portrait of European religious diversity, see the European Values Study, ongoing since the 1970s.)

In a religious as well as a political sense, there is something to Donald Rumsfeld's tendentious distinction between the "Old" (Western) and "New" (Eastern) Europe, and I find here reasons to be hopeful for the future of faith on the continent. Is it necessarily a law of nature that progress results in secularization? Isn't it just as likely that religious belief, which has been around in various forms throughout human history, will prove more durable than a secularism that is so hostile to the idea of transcendence? Peter van der Veer of the University of Utrecht has pointed out that, in fact, highly secularized countries like Holland are dramatic exceptions to what we find in the world at large, where religion is proving to be pretty resilient. Through its irreligiousness, Holland runs the risk of becoming a backwater, van der Veer argues. A new kind of religious cross-fertilization seems to be taking place. Through the inclusion of Poland's 38 million residents, for example, the European Union has suddenly become a lot more Catholic. Seasonal workers from Poland have already been coming to Holland for years. These new arrivals will probably seek out ways to give expression to their faith in their new surroundings, just as I and other expatriates in The Hague do. Maybe these Catholic newcomers (including actual missionaries who have been sent to the Netherlands, from Argentina and other countries, and African and Asian theologians currently studying in Nijmegen) can breathe new life into this struggling church. Over time, more and more Dutch have joined the parish in The Hague, drawn by the vitality of that community, which has grown fourfold over the last ten years.

So there are reasons to be hopeful with regard to Catholicism in Europe. More important, Americans can still learn some things from the legacy of European Catholic culture, both in its overt and more implicit forms. For one thing, there are a number of exemplary European Catholics who bring their Catholicism intelligently and forcefully to bear in society. Among writers, for instance, there are the Nobel laureates Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz (recently deceased), and the spiritual guides Timothy Radcliffe and Anselm Grun. Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Mechelen-Brussels is an example of a church leader who knows how to bring religious and secular culture into fruitful dialogue. So does Germany's Cardinal Walter Kasper, now at the Vatican. Mary Robinson, former UN high commissioner for human rights and past president of Ireland, has done the same in the political realm, as has the Fleming Els de Temmerman in the field of journalism. The fruits of the spiritual movements tilled by Chiara Lubich (Focolare), Jean Vanier (L'Arche), and Andrea Riccardi (the Sant'Egidio community) are well known. And surely our present pope will have to be counted among the most impressive and influential Catholic leaders and men of culture Europe has ever produced. This is not a meager list, though their work (the pope's excepted) may be underpublicized on the western side of the Atlantic. Perhaps the fact that Americans do not know them as well as some earlier Catholic greats has as much to do with the independence and robustness of American Catholicism--we don't need to lean on Europe to the extent we once did--as it does with the advance of secularism in Europe.

On another level, the influence of Christianity on European culture persists, implicitly, in prevailing values that influence social and political policies. The Christian Democratic parties in Europe play a role in this, downplaying their denominational character while emphasizing how certain (Christian) norms safeguard and promote the human community. The Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, a Christian Democrat, has recently provided a good example of this in his six-month term as president of the European Council. During that time he has sought to advance a discussion of what Europe's economic and social values are and should be. One arguably finds Christian values applied in any number of laws and policies throughout Europe. For example, aversion to the death penalty. Didn't Christ say, "By their fruits you shall know them"? And in ultra-secularized Holland, all citizens have health insurance. I wish I could say the same about the United States. The recent Synod of European Bishops identified several reasons to look positively toward developments in Europe, including progress in human rights, the spread of democracy, and the growing cooperation between countries that have been historical enemies.

Americans might also profit from observing Europe's experience in the challenge of living with Islam. Middle East expert Bernard Lewis recently predicted in the German paper Die Welt that Europe will be a predominantly Muslim continent by the end of the century. If true, will this invite Christians to rediscover their own faith heritage? Will interreligious and intercultural dialogue be furthered or sidetracked when Christians find themselves living so closely to a faith as vibrant as Islam?

The twin challenges of secularism and Islam are likely to become more severe before they lessen, and they are not unique to Europe. Similar difficulties face the church in the United States, if with less urgency for the moment. The possibility remains that new forms of Christian community may take shape in Europe and more rigorous forms of faith may emerge from the deserts of secularism. Reason enough, I think, to continue to pay attention to the continent that nurtured the Catholicism the world knows today.

Timothy P. Schilling teaches church development at the Catholic Theological University of Utrecht. He is on the staff of the Center for Parish Spirituality, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.