Convert those cathedrals into hotels, boys!
Writing in today's Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash is in melancholy mood: "Christian Europe RIP", he intones in a piece subtitled, "The new Pope will hasten the decline of the old continent's formative faith". Here's his thesis:
"Atheists should welcome the election of Pope Benedict XVI. For this aged, scholarly, conservative, uncharismatic Bavarian theologian will surely hasten precisely the de-Christianisation of Europe that he aims to reverse. At the end of his papacy, Europe may again be as un-Christian as it was when St Benedict, one of the patron saints of Europe, founded his pioneering monastic order, the Benedictines, 15 centuries ago. Christian Europe: from Benedict to Benedict. RIP."
WHILE ADMITTING that the Catholic church is not a political party, "trimming to pick up votes," and acknowledging that "The strength of a rock is that it is not sand," Garton Ash thinks the corpse-to-be would look rosier with "a couple of important adjustments". These changes could be made "without threatening the central core of Catholic dogma" he asserts. All that the Pope has to do is "allow the exceptional use of condoms to prevent babies being born with HIV/Aids" and "allow Catholic priests to marry."
Hmmn. Is that what the atheists really want from Benedict XVI? Lemuel Kolkava, who blogs from Bratislava, is a nonbeliever, but upon hearing of Benedict's election he wrote: "And though I am an atheist I am very glad to see a 'traditionalist' getting elected — someone who understands that truth, faith and morals aren't relative and should not and can not be altered by and subjected to certain crazy fads of the day."
WHAT GARTON ASH does not say is that the places where Christianity is growing are also places where the population levels are rising quickly. Not Europe, in other words. The centre of gravity of the Catholic world has moved to the Southern Hemisphere and it will never shift back. So when Garton Ash writes about the necessity of Euro-centric Catholic reforms, he does so without fully realizing that his views on the subject are increasingly irrelevant, because the future of the Church lies elsewhere. If Christian Europe opts for demographic suicide, we can get on with the job of converting the cathedrals into hotels, but a look beyond Europe's borders shows that boom times for basilica builders are coming.
TAKE AFRICA. In 1900 Africa had just 10 million Christians out of a continental population of 107 million — about nine percent. In 2002, the Christian total stood at 360 million out of 784 million, or 46 percent. And that percentage is likely to continue growing, because Christian African countries have some of the world's fastest rates of population growth. Within the next 25 years the population of the world's Christians is expected to grow to 2.6 billion (making Christianity by far the world's largest faith). By 2025, 50 percent of the Christian population will be in Africa and Latin America, and another 17 percent will be in Asia. By 2050 the United States will still have the largest single group of Christians, but all the other leading nations will be southern: Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and the Philippines.
THE POPULATION SHIFT is even more dramatic in the Catholic world, where Euro-Americans are now in the minority. Africa had about 16 million Catholics in the early 1950s; it has 120 million today, and is expected to have 228 million by 2025. The World Christian Encyclopedia suggests that by 2025 almost three quarters of all Catholics will be found in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
IN LIGHT OF these astonishing numbers, Timothy Garton Ash's commentary comes across as a provincial lamentation. If anything, Europe's dismissal of St Benedict's legacy at a time when Christianity is re-emerging as a major international force appears more like another petty rejection of globalization than the bold declaration of modernity its proponents would have us believe.
