THE GUARDIAN

The Catholic church has a vital role to play in 21st-century life. But it risks extinction if it fails to modernise

Monday December 20, 2004

Over this coming week, millions all over Europe will crowd into churches for the carols, the cribs and the celebration of the birth of a baby to a single, probably teenage, mum a couple of thousand years ago. Christmas church attendance will be the last shibboleth of Christian devotion in Europe to fall: it has a wealth of sentiment, mid-winter cheer and good tunes to keep pulling the crowds. But the crowds are deceptive, most among them don't darken a church doorway between one Christmas and the next, and each year there's a little more room in the pews and not quite such a crush at the back as the slow decline of Christian belief throughout Europe inexorably continues.

The Catholic church has been slow to grasp this historic phenomenon. Perhaps, as a global church with the faith thriving in other continents, it hasn't felt the issue quite so acutely as, for example, Methodists who openly acknowledged a few years ago that at the present rate of decline there would be no Methodists left by 2050. No such statistical calculations have been produced by anyone in the Catholic church, let alone put out in a press release. Asking about something as basic as the rate of decline in the number of Catholic priests in this country leads to a fruitless chain of answering machines. These are facts that the Catholic authorities have no interest in publicising.

One has a sense that among the upper levels of the Catholic hierarchy (average age probably well over 60) there is utter bewilderment and confusion. Most of them will have grown up in the profoundly traditional Catholic cultures that simply no longer exist in Spain, France, Italy or Ireland. Their frame of reference, their understanding of faith and life, is quite literally of another world - that of deeply conformist, often peasant societies, where the priest was a figure of unquestioned authority and power. When they became priests, full of idealism, no one wrote into their job description that they would be managing the decline of a 2,000-year-old institution; no one warned them that they would be steering the church into a new dark age. I'm reminded of the poignant sculpture on the corner of San Marco in Venice where the Holy Roman emperors cling to each other, looking over their shoulders with barely concealed panic.

The Catholic hierarchy, it seems, has very little idea of what to do to stem the tide, let alone reverse the decline. Apparently, the Pope is wont to suggest that some persecution would do the job nicely - it obviously worked in Poland through much of the 20th century, generating an intense Catholic devotion. But since there is no prospect of a Nazi or Russian invasion, the church will have to come up with something else.

The paradox is of course that while the Catholic hierarchy struggles to come to terms with the de-Christianisation of Europe, some of the most devout religiosity in Europe is now among Muslims - Islam is being Europeanised and the neighbourhoods of some European cities, such as Rotterdam and Birmingham, are being Islamicised. The conversations I hear among Muslim contemporaries are far closer to the religious principles I was brought up with than anything I hear among Catholic contemporaries: devotion to God, self-sacrifice and the preoccupation with an orthodoxy of belief. Alongside the political identification with Islam among Europe's Muslims, there is also a profound spiritual revival. This latter gets all too easily overlooked by a secular society that, for example, finds it easier to understand "jihad" as a form of terrorism as opposed to the much more orthodox understanding of a personal inner struggle to subjugate the ego. As the middle-aged Muslim mother and teacher teasingly puts it to her classes in Lancashire: "I commit jihad every morning as I struggle out of bed before dawn to say my prayers."

I find the contrast between my own Catholic faith, paralysed in Europe by its own rapid decline, and the passionate vibrancy of Muslim faith fascinating, thought-provoking, but never disturbing. It seems to me that a dismantling of Catholicism's overweening imperialism was long overdue. I see the disintegration of arrogant, unaccountable priestly authority - speeded by the horrific paedophile scandals - as essential. Within living memory, priests have fallen from the near-gods status of my Irish grandmother's deferential times to a much greater humility. As the priestly authority has declined, that of those in the pews over their own lives has increased. The blind obedience and stifling conformity of 50s Ireland or Spain has, thank God, disappeared for ever.

But as ever the danger is of the proverbial baby and bath water. It becomes harder and harder to explain how two millennia of meditation and reasoning on the human condition may be worthy of consideration. There is an extraordinary arrogance to the modernity that tosses aside so contemptuously the faith and ethical traditions that have sustained generations of our forebears. Are we so different? Are we so superior?

Too often, communication between believers and non-believers is a dialogue of the deaf and both sides are guilty of simply shouting louder. Where does one begin with the colleague who casually announces he "hates all religions"? The generalisation is so sweeping, so incurious, and so final that it is utterly meaningless. It's like saying one hates everything British - damning in the same breath both Shakespeare and slavery.

I persist in thinking that the Catholic tradition has a huge contribution to make to the understanding of the predicaments the human race faces: the global extremes of wealth and poverty, the environment, the tragedy of depression and loneliness. For all the considerable and, in many respects, desirable increases in personal freedom, the aggressively materialistic secular democracies of the west have not reduced the sum of human suffering nor increased the sum of happiness.

Part of that contribution lies in the particular insight Catholicism developed over the 20th century into how market consumer capitalism has the capacity to commodify all aspects of human activity. It maintains an outright opposition to the instrumental use of human life that has become so pervasive - from the child's education tailored to meet the requirements of a future generation of pensioners, to the workforce's emotions manipulated to increase the company's share price. Catholicism makes a strange bedfellow with the anti-corporate movement, but they fight on some similar battlegrounds with the same arguments: people not profits.

But to my frustration, little of that gets heard. The Catholic church's internal panicked paralysis is to blame. It has unforgiveably fudged crucial issues such as the use of condoms in Africa and paedophile priests - obfuscating vital issues with complex theology - and in the process has lost the respect of those who might otherwise at least have listened. Church apparatchiks are fond of saying they think in centuries, not days or years, but perhaps it's a habit they need to kick. Unless they focus on today, within a few decades those pews, even at Christmas, will be looking very empty.

mailto:"m.bunting@guardian.co.uk"