European Faith

The shortage of priests is only one of the problems bedeviling the Catholic Church in Europe. The urgent need to revitalize it is cited as a major reason why the world's cardinals who opened their conclave in Rome on Monday to elect a new pope may choose a European.

During his 26-year papacy, John Paul II used the force of his personality in dozens of trips around the Continent to try to bring back European Catholics who had fallen away.

Only 21 percent of Europeans say that religion is "very important" to them, according to the often-cited European Values Study, conducted in 1999 and 2000 and published two years ago. A similar survey in the United States by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life put the number at nearly 60 percent.

The trend away from regular participation has been so noticeable that it has even been given a name: European apostasy.

"European Catholics are not against the Catholic Church," said Ulrich Ruh, editor of the Catholic monthly Herder-Korrespondenz, based in Freiburg, Germany. "They go to church at least once or twice a year and bring their children to be baptized and confirmed. Rather, they have made their own personal arrangements with the church and do not want to be disturbed. They do not want to be evangelized. That is why the pope failed to make the church more attractive."

Part of the problem is the church's emphasis on punishment and sin rather than on inclusion and community.(emphasis mine)

There is growth in Christianity on the Continent, but it tends to be among immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America, who are often drawn to churches described as evangelical, Pentecostal or charismatic.

The trend toward churches like these frustrates and even angers many traditional Catholic clerics. "We're seeing the super-marketing of religion," said the Rev. Jacques Anelli, director of the National Vocation Service of the French Catholic Church. "People consume, and when they don't find an institution they agree with, then they go somewhere else. Bad variations must not make us abandon what we are. The relationship with God must not be done like petty commerce."

When I read this, and these are my thoughts;

I've heard that Darwinism has gone a long way in Europe, that so many European's have stopped believing in any God.