I have been reading a number of articles about the ebbing of Christianity, the default position of people born since 1980 as agnostic or atheist and the surge of Islam. The various analyses are interesting and more or less convincing. Official Anglicanism is characterised by an increasingly feminised clergy and theological liberalism. In Roman Catholicism, especially here in continental Europe, the real problem is the lack of priests and the declining availability of an incarnational and sacramental life. That is particularly felt in the country parishes.
So is the solution biblical or canonical fundamentalism? They may be for some people, but young people of today are not looking for authority and more control, but rather are running away from it.
It is curious to read about persecution of Christianity from atheists, and at the same time about persecution of atheists from Christians. How strange that it seems to be a point of view! I have said it before. There is no persecution in the western world. No one is being killed or put in prison for their faith or lack of it. People call themselves persecuted to legitimise and justify themselves. They take the gay marriage issue so personally, but it is not a religious issue but one concerning purely the civil law. Indeed, churches which are against gay marriage are not only not forced to carry out such ceremonies; they are not allowed to do so. It’s easier over here in France with the separation of Church and State. The State can do what it wants and the Church is not forced to celebrate any kind of marriage. I am not really convinced that persecution has arrived, but it might come if the bishops and priests provoke a reaction. Quite frankly, I don’t care what people do in civil life as long as they don’t pretend it’s a Sacrament!
Propaganda is put out according to which most people would be for women priests and the normalisation of homosexuality in the churches, and for married priests in the Roman Catholic Church. Is that true? At any rate, something is being missed in this hubbub of moralising. It is interesting to see how Roman Catholics fear persecution because of clerical sex abuse. It won’t be persecution but justice for centuries of clericalism! The disregard for human beings has gone on for long enough.
There is one thing that could regenerate churches: religious communities in the parishes, urban monasteries and the beauty of liturgy and prayer. That is something done in France for decades, even when they are using more “modern” forms of liturgy. France is one of the most godless countries on this earth, but where there is beauty, liturgy and prayer, people will go to those services. Even in traditional isolated monasteries, people will get in their cars and travel to a Mass in Latin with Gregorian chant.
Will our western world become Muslim? That is what many of us fear. If that happens and the ruling Muslims are of the fundamentalist and intolerant kind, we would be persecuted, as would people who are not religious. As with fundamentalist Christianity, that kind of religion would never attract me any more than most of our contemporaries, baby boomers or generation X’s.
I begin to take an attitude that consists of saying that if Christianity has outstayed its welcome, then it will fade away. Perhaps it faded away centuries ago to be replaced by grotesque caricatures, and what there is left deserves to pass out of history. Perhaps my attitude changes as I get older and find it increasingly difficult to relate to the younger generations. Were not the roles inverted when I was a little boy with my grandfather born in 1901? The world has been through many near-misses for Christianity. It wasn’t doing too well in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the wake of the Terror. There was also the anti-clericalism of Emile Combes and Jean Jaurès a hundred years later that also practically wiped out a Church that had already alienated the working class. It seems that the nineteenth-century Church had learned little from that of the eighteenth. I think that had I lived in those days, I would have become an anti-clerical or a Communist!
The lady doth protest too much, methinks. This is one of Shakespeare’s most hackneyed quotations from Hamlet, but how true in the case of the Church and Christians! Only today, I read that the Pope is telling people to go along with the magisterium and stop arguing for the usual stuff (women priests, gay marriage, etc.). On one side, I can sympathise, but authority is not the way. If this continues to be the way, the Papal Court of Benedict XVI could be in a similar position to the Court of Louis XVI in 1789. There is coiled up energy waiting to be released. I neither sympathise with an agenda that would bring about the American Episcopal Church on a world scale, nor with a resurgence of the Church of Pius IX and Ultramontanism. Outside the two binary poles, very little seems to remain. What an epitaph!
The future does seem bleak and incomprehensible. I think we will lose our culture, and much of it is already lost. There will be darkness, but a darkness that will herald the coming of new light.
The Blue Flower 
I tend to think of Binham’s saints when in such a mood as this; you know the poignant, but heartwarming, vision of Christ in a pose as of benediction and bewailing His desecration at the hand of protestant reformers and their English bible. I think you can have both worlds, though, and I am trying to find a Christianity at once traditional, but with a healthy disregard for church-talk, superstition and hauteur.
Yes, the West and East both need to rediscover a vibrant monastacism that is pastorally oriented and works to bring the laity to Christ in and around their communities. Likely more lots of little places near people than a few places far away. And I don’t think hiding in caves or living on poles will do much in 21st century.
But before we wish for monks and nuns to heal us and our rotting cultures, maybe we should dig into what was behind and within the periodic revivals in the West? England’s Wesley and his “method” may be a more appropriate model? And look at the Great Awakening in USA, revivals in 18th and 19th centuries. Philip Jakob Spener’s Lutheran pietism to combat Lutheran scholasticism? The Oxford Movement to revive worship and recover history?
Islam has its own numbers problems around the world. Where people get wealthier, they get less and less religious. Don’t confuse a small minority of malevolent 11th century-oriented fundamentalists with their masses, esp. in places like the Balkans, Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and India.
Thank you for your reflection, Michael. In the 18th and 19th centuries, they didn’t have TV and other forms of mass entertainment. Today, there are TV evangelists, Billy Graham, mega churches and all sorts of things. The Oxford Movement was an affair of university intellectuals and was unconcerned with liturgy. That came many years later with Ritualism.
I think you are right about the Muslims. I know very little about Islam, but I do know that there are almost as many tendencies and schools of thought as in Christianity, from fundamentalism to the quiet, mystical and unknown Sufism. I once knew an Oxford don who had been to Tangiers and was well received by the village folk who proudly showed him their Mosque. Somehow, I can’t see most Europeans converting to Islam, and I indeed hear that increasing proportions of Muslim immigrants become interested in materialism and quickly lapse from practising their religion.
What is needed is beauty and spirituality, not control or moralising or being talked down to. That is why I suggested the presence of monks in cities. Otherwise let the Church become pure and elite, and let the masses return to paganism or the law of the jungle – or the paroxysm of world war, God forbid!
It’s been said enough times, Father, that I finally need to comment. It is simply untrue that the Oxford Movement was not concerned with liturgy. It most definitely was, and vitally so. What it was not interested in was the wholesale copying of Rome that ensued under Ritualism. (I’m not judging in my choice of words — I highly appreciate developed AngloCatholic ritual.) What they were concerned with was the faithful and reverent celebration of the liturgy that had been delivered to them, in stark contrast to the careless and sometimes theologically deficient performance then common. The issue for them was not so much what the liturgy looks like, but more as to what the liturgy means. I believe that true beauty flows from from faith, and that beauty founded upon faith will draw others to that faith. I do not believe that a well-staged and elaborate liturgical performance done for the sake of beauty alone will draw anyone beyond the surface, but that the simplest and barest liturgy done with humility and reverence and founded upon faith will do so.
If I remember rightly, I have read about Newman translating the Monastic Breviary into English. With the Romantic movement, there was enough interest in the Use of Sarum for Dickinson to publish a missal in standard Latin spelling in 1868, usable at the altar (it’s the one I use myself). I do think the Oxford Movement men were concerned for a dignified and beautiful Prayer Book service, but their primary objective was in the field of theology and apologetics.
Fr Anthony, rightfully, expressed the following thoughts about the Oxford Movement: “but their primary objective was in the field of theology and apologetics.” And I do completely agree with him that the primary purpose of the Movement was to rediscover the theolgoical catholicity of the Church of England; that catholicity, and not Erastianism which had been the primary focus of 18th century Anglicanism, was the biding spirit of the English Church, but I will also agree with Ed that this rediscovery of catholicity was also, from a very early period, concerned with liturgy; one cannot have Catholic theology without Catholic worship.
What is indeed interesting is that more than a century after the Movement, erastianism in Anglicanism seems to be stronger now than anytime in the recent past. Which is perhaps why the ordination of women especially seems to take upon itself a very secular colouring; one may notice that it is seldom framed within theological discourse, but always within a modernist, secular discourse of “equal rights.”
To quote Peter Kocan’s Cathedral Service:
Perhaps the meagre congregation shows / How all of that is drawing to a close,/ And remnants only come here to entreat / These dying flickers of the obsolete. / Yet when did this religion ever rest / On weight of numbers as the final test? / Its founder said that it was all the same / When two or three were gathered in his name.”