NEWS STORY: Catholicism’s Influence Wanes in Europe

c. 2005 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ They descended on Vatican City by the millions to pay tribute to the “people’s pope.” They waited up to 24 hours to see his body at St. Peter’s Basilica. They slept outside if they had to, and on Friday (April 8) hundreds of thousands of them stood […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ They descended on Vatican City by the millions to pay tribute to the “people’s pope.” They waited up to 24 hours to see his body at St. Peter’s Basilica. They slept outside if they had to, and on Friday (April 8) hundreds of thousands of them stood throughout his three-hour funeral.

Yet few would read this affection for the charismatic Pope John Paul II as a sign of strength for European Catholicism. In fact, the religion is struggling across Christianity’s traditional Western base.


As secularism has increased in Europe, scarcity of worshippers has become routine in the continent’s great cathedrals.

While many cardinals openly lament Europe’s secularization, concerns on other continents _ about AIDS or protecting the rights of Catholics in Muslim-majority countries, for example _ may be viewed as more pressing in the secret papal election that begins this coming Monday. And it is not Europe but Latin America that is considered by some to be the center of today’s Catholic world. Yet, about half the 115 cardinals voting in the conclave are from Europe.

That proportion would be more representative of Latin America, which has only 21 voting age cardinals.

“Half of the Catholic world now lives between the Rio Grande and Tierra del Fuego,” said George Weigel, director of the Catholic studies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. “Still, if (cardinals) decide that the re-evangelization of Europe has to be a huge priority for the next 20 years, then it’s an interesting question: Who best to lead them?

“Is it a European? Perhaps it isn’t a European. There’s been no more European a pope than (John Paul II). That’s why the most striking failure of his pontificate is, it has not ignited _ at least on the institutional level _ a genuine process of Catholic revitalization of Western Europe.”

The Vatican in the past decade has unsuccessfully battled the 25-nation European Union over same-sex marriage, adoption for gay couples, abortion and the general removal of faith from public life. It lobbied the EU to mention Europe’s Christian heritage in its constitution.

“There’s a great sense that Europe is slipping away from the church,” said John L. Allen Jr., Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. “Mass attendance, vocations, political influence of the church, those are in real crisis in Europe. There’s strong current opinion the next pope needs to be able to figure out what to do about Europe.”


While the pope and cardinals press governments not to recognize family relationships besides traditional marriage, within the EU the Netherlands allows same-sex marriage; Denmark, Finland, Germany and Sweden allow registered partnerships; and Belgium, France and some Spanish provinces allow “civil pacts of solidarity” for de facto unions, according to a report on Vatican involvement in EU politics compiled by Catholics for a Free Choice, a U.S.-based dissident group.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands, Sweden and United Kingdom let same-sex couples adopt children, while Denmark and Germany let a person adopt the child of a same-sex partner, the report says.

The Vatican consistently responds to these developments by saying they undermine the family structure.

In July 2002, in response to the EU’s adoption of a report urging countries to ensure access to contraception, which Catholicism opposes, Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family said the EU lacked historical perspective.

“It is a dark and sad moment for this great Europe, which in other times is so deeply anchored in the most solid traditions (and) conscientious of its Christian roots,” Trujillo said, according to a translation of the official Vatican newspaper.

Similar sentiments were heard last year in clashes between the Vatican and EU officials over the EU’s new constitution.

The church and eight of the EU’s 25 countries wanted the preamble to the constitution to specifically mention Europe’s Christian heritage. But many EU officials and countries, including France, Belgium and Finland, worried that doing so would defy the Union’s secular nature and offend non-Christians.


In the end, last June, the EU chose not to refer to Christianity in the preamble. The pope criticized the decision, saying, “One does not cut the roots to one’s birthright.”

There have been other notable clashes.

In Italy, where Roman Catholicism stopped being the official state religion in 1984, a controversial law favored by the church passed last year that restricted options for infertile couples to seek in vitro fertilization. But massive opposition _ 1 million people signed a petition _ forced a referendum to put its provisions up for vote this spring in a referendum.

In France, perhaps the most statutorily secular of all European countries, a law that forbid Muslim girls to wear religious head scarves gained attention last year. What received less notice was that the Catholic Church joined Muslims in opposing the law, which banned all overtly religious garb in public schools.

Still, if Catholics and Muslims can sometimes find common ground against secularization, the Catholic Church is openly worried about the prospect of increased Muslim immigration affecting the culture of a secular Europe.

In 2000, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi of Bologna provoked an uproar when he suggested Italian immigration policies should favor Catholics over Muslims. “There is no such thing as a right of invasion,” Biffi said, and worried that Europe had become a “culture of nothing” that would be unable to resist a future “ideological assault of Islam.”

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, current dean of the College of Cardinals, told a French magazine last August that the EU should not accept Turkey’s membership bid. He said, according to translations, that “Turkey has always represented another continent in the course of history, in permanent contrast to Europe,” and that it “could try to set up a cultural continent with neighboring Arab countries and become the leading figure of a culture with its own identity.”


The Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America, said many Catholic leaders are concerned because “the Muslims are having children and the Catholics are practicing birth control despite what the pope says. And in Paris you have more Muslims going to the mosque on Fridays than Catholics to church on Sundays.”

Among the cardinals, “there’s a lot of concern about almost a `de-Christianization’ of Europe,” Reese said.

Seven years ago the Vatican, while publishing a papal document encouraging Mass attendance, fretted that only 28 percent of Italians go weekly, and just 17 percent of Austrians. In 2000, a study showed that in Britain, Catholic Mass attendance declined 14 percent in the 1980s and another 28 percent in the ’90s. Even in Ireland, where Mass attendance was 90 percent through the 1960s, only about half of Catholics now attend weekly.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Catholics recently interviewed in Italy gave varied reasons for not attending church on Sunday.

Silvia Marchetti, 25, of Rome, said she believes she can have a meaningful relationship with God without the church. She attended regularly with her parents when she was younger and hopes to attend regularly again in the future, but for now, her spirituality is enough for her, she said.

“Some people, they say, `Oh, I go to church, but I have difficulty praying by myself with God.’ Other people, like me, maybe I don’t go to church, but I believe and pray,” she said.

Others take a more pragmatic stance.

Luca Batazzi, a shopkeeper, said he works six days a week, and “my only day of rest is Sunday. I have other things to do.”


MO/PH/RB END DIAMANT

(Jeff Diamant is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

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