Fr Anthony Paganoni, Scalabrinian, continues a series for The Record this week reflecting on what, if any, future the Church has in Europe and why this is important for us.
A recent survey for Le Monde des Religions revealed that the number of self-described Catholics in France had dropped from 80 per cent in the early 1990s to just 51 per cent in 2007. The editor of the magazine claims: “In its institutions, but also in its mentalities, France is no longer a Catholic country”. Yet until very recently France was regarded as the first daughter of the Church.
France is not an isolated case. A number of indices confirm the claim. In a range of countries, surveys across Christian denominations regularly ask people how important religion is to them. In many Muslim countries, some 90 per cent declare that religion “plays a very important role” in their lives, while in the US the figure is about 60 per cent. The average figure for Europeans is 21 per cent, with national variations: Italy 27 per cent, Germany 21 per cent, France and the Czech Republic 11 per cent. A significant number of Europeans declare themselves nonreligious or atheist. In Britain a 2004 survey found that only 44 per cent admitted any belief in God, with 35 per cent denying that belief and 21 per cent stating that they “don’t know”. Among the 18-34 age bracket, atheist respondents sat on 45 per cent.
Church attendance is in rapid decline. Forty per cent of Americans report attending a place of worship weekly, compared with less than 20 per cent in most of Europe: 15 per cent in Britain, 12 per cent in Germany and in Scandinavian countries less than five per cent.
However there are some notable exceptions (higher rates of attendance) in Catholic countries such as Poland, Croatia and to a lesser extent Italy. The American figure for seldom or never attending a place of worship stands at 16 per cent. But as of 2000, these categories registered 60 per cent in France, 55 per cent in Britain and about 60 per cent in Scandinavia and in Holland. Young people are far more likely to be ‘never-attenders’ than regulars.
Across the continent, numbers now studying in Catholic seminaries are often only a tenth of what they were 50 or 60 years ago.
Such figures have given rise to an unrelenting number of grim forecasts. George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, suggests that if the Church of England were a human being, “the last rites would be administered at any moment”. He sees the Anglican Communion “as an elderly lady who mutters away to herself in a corner, ignored most of the time”. The Catholic Cardinal of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, stated that “Christianity as a sort of backdrop to people’s lives and moral decisions has now almost been vanquished”. In Germany, Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne has said, “We never had as much money as in the last 40 years, and we have never lost the substance of the faith as much as in the last 40 years. In the Cologne Archdiocese, there are 2.8 million Catholics, but in the last 30 years we have lost 300,000. For every baptism, there are three funerals”. In Switzerland, in 1970, the proportion of babies who were baptised was 95 per cent; in the year 2000 it was only 65 per cent. And, sadly, does anyone foresee that trends will not be following a sliding curve in the immediate future?
To be continued…