Where Are the Faithful?
BY AWAKE! CORRESPONDENT IN SPAIN
“Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.”
EDMUND BURKE, 18TH-CENTURY BRITISH STATESMAN.
ON A windswept plain in the northern reaches of Spain lies the small town of Caleruega. The medieval town is dominated by an impressive Romanesque convent. It was erected 700 years ago in honor of Domingo de Guzmán, the founder of the Dominican order, who was born here. For seven centuries the convent has housed nuns who choose to live in silence and seclusion.
The convent’s roof leaks, and the ancient walls are beginning to crumble. But the mother superior is concerned about a more pervasive decay—the crumbling of religion itself. “When I entered the convent nearly 30 years ago, there were 40 nuns here,” she explains. “Now there are only 16 of us. There are no young ones. Religious vocation seems to be something of the past.”
What is happening in Caleruega is occurring throughout much of Europe. There has been no wave of antireligious feeling, just a quiet, inexorable desertion. The great European cathedrals minister to the tourists rather than attract the local “faithful.” The once indomitable church—be it Protestant or Catholic—is being overcome by apathy. Secular rather than religious concerns dominate people’s lives—a trend church spokesmen call secularization. Religion just does not seem to matter anymore. Might the religious climate in Europe be a foretaste of a similar decline about to sweep over other parts of the world?
What Is Happening to Church Attendance?
This phenomenon is nothing new in northern Europe. Only 5 percent of Scandinavian Lutherans attend church regularly. In Britain a mere 3 percent of professed Anglicans go to Sunday services. But now, European Catholics in the south seem to be following the example of their northern neighbors.
In France, a predominantly Catholic country, only 1 out of every 10 citizens goes to church once a week. In the last 25 years, the percentage of Spaniards who consider themselves “practicing Catholics” has slumped from 83 percent to 31 percent. In 1992, Spanish archbishop Ramon Torrella told a press conference that “Catholic Spain does not exist; people go to Holy Week processions and Christmas Mass—but not [to Mass] every week.” During a papal visit to Madrid in 1993, John Paul II warned that “Spain needs to return to its Christian roots.”
The irreligious mood has infected the clergy as well as the laity. The number of newly ordained priests in France dropped to 140 in 1988 (less than half the figure for 1970), while in Spain there are some 8,000 who have abandoned the priesthood in order to get married. On the other hand, some who do continue to minister to their flocks are doubtful about their message. Only 24 percent of Sweden’s Lutheran clergymen feel they can preach about heaven and hell “with a clear conscience,” while a quarter of the French priests are even unsure about the resurrection of Jesus.
Pleasure and Preference Before Piety
What is taking the place of religion? In many homes recreation has supplanted worship. On Sundays families head for the beaches or the mountains rather than church. “Going to Mass is boring,” shrugged Juan, a typical Spanish teenager. Religious services cannot compete with soccer matches or pop concerts, events that draw crowds and fill stadiums.
The falloff in church attendance is not the only evidence of the religious decline. Many Europeans prefer to pick and choose their religious ideas. Nowadays official church dogma may bear scant resemblance to the personal beliefs of those who profess that particular religion. A majority of Europeans—be they Catholics or Protestants—no longer believe in life after death, while over 50 percent of French, Italian, and Spanish Catholics do not believe in miracles either.
The hierarchy seems powerless to prevent this ground swell of nonconformity. Nowhere has this been more noticeable than in the papal campaign against birth control. In 1990, Pope John Paul II urged Catholic pharmacists not to sell contraceptives. He claimed that these products “contravene natural laws to the detriment of a person’s dignity.” Likewise, the Catechism of the Catholic Church insists that “conjugal love of man and woman thus stands under the twofold obligation of fidelity and fecundity.”
Despite these stern injunctions, the average Catholic couple blithely go their own way. Families with more than two children are now the exception in the Catholic countries of southern Europe. In Spain, condoms—which were almost a black-market product two decades ago—are regularly advertised on television, and only 3 percent of French Catholic women say that they adhere to the official Catholic ruling on birth control.
Clearly, Europeans are turning their backs on the churches and their teachings. Anglican archbishop of Canterbury George Carey graphically described the situation in his church: “We’ve been bleeding to death,” he said, “and that is a very urgent issue we’ve got to face up to.”
Not since the upheavals of the Reformation has the religious edifice of Europe looked so shaky. Why have many Europeans become indifferent to religion? What is the future of religion?