Can the Pope Recapture Europe?

The Vatican is convinced that Europe must be re-evangelised, but can it overcome 'grassroots relativism'?

Pope Benedict XVI wants to strengthen the 'geo-religious' relationship between Catholicism and Europe. Photograph: Reuters

From The Guardian

By Massimo Franco

On 21 September 2010, Benedict XVI officially declared that the west needed a "new evangelisation" . This was news in itself. It was viewed as an admission of the weakness of the Catholic church, and not a temporary one; and the acknowledgement that today's Catholicism represents a minority in western countries, and a shrinking one. But in a more general perspective, this was a major "geo-religious" step for the pontiff.


The pope is convinced of the strategic relation between Christianity and Europe as its natural geographic and cultural ground for proselytism. And he wants this relation to be reasserted and improved. When, in June 2010, he announced his plans for a new ministry to revive religion, no details were given of its structure, content and goals. There was no secret: the Vatican knew it had to deal urgently with that problem, but hadn't yet figured out how to accomplish this mission. Benedict XVI just felt something very radical had to be done.

Now, a year after its establishment, the pontifical council for the promotion of the new evangelisation represents a significant benchmark to measure the Vatican's capability to regain some influence in what was once "its" Europe. Things are moving on in terms of the organisation and mobilisation of Catholicism in Europe. Under the guidance of a dynamic bishop, Rino Fisichella, former chancellor of the Vatican's Lateranense University in Rome, a network of meetings and initiatives has been planned. But the major challenge is to elaborate a map of western Catholicism, identify its difficulties and check the strategy put in place to succeed. In fact, what the Catholic church is facing is mainly a cultural difficulty, not a religious one.

It has to fight against the slippery enemy of what the Vatican perceives as "the supremacy of the fragments": a cultural approach which tends to isolate and disperse western societies, and by consequence also Catholics: a sort of "grassroots relativism". The first task Fisichella has given to himself and his ministry has been to recall that "do-it-yourself Catholicism" is not a solution to the crisis of the faith. On the contrary, it represents a major danger. It is viewed as the wrong answer to confronting modern times and to adapting to them. The Catholic recipe is to follow the pope's teachings and those of the bishops' conferences; and to reunite a Catholic "army" disoriented and eroded by secularism, painfully hit by sex abuse scandals and the competition both from evangelical Christianity and Islam.

But how? The controversy that greeted Benedict XVI on his visit to Germany is another danger sign. The visit was preceded by a book on the de-Christianization of Germany: Gesellschaft ohne Gott, (A Society Without God)by sociologist Andreas Puttman. "The religious implosion will have epochal dimensions in the long run", he writes.

Furthermore, the Vatican daily Osservatore Romano remarked on 20 September that there are currently more practising Muslims than Catholics in France. Geopolitics and religion don't seem to walk arm-in-arm in Europe. The Vatican's assumption that without Catholicism the west is destined to decline is not as widely shared as might appear.

A further source of misunderstanding is the disconnection between the Vatican and a number of European governments on the handling of sex abuse scandals. The building of a Catholic network and the "Mission Metropolis" project due to organise a unifying religious date in 12 large European cities in 2012, seems aimed at showing that the strength is still there: forces must just be recollected and reoriented. "Identity" is the key word. But which identity? Today's Europe seems the motherland not of a united Catholicism, but of Catholics belonging to different national tribes. This may be a great opportunity, or a persistent handicap.