BARCELONA, July 13 — Another blow to the embattled Catholic Church’s already much endangered status in Europe came this week when the entire management team of the Vatican’s bank was replaced amid allegations of corruption.
It comes at a time when the religious composition of Europe is under severe threat, with old traditions being threatened by a new world order.
Historically, Europe has been dominated by Christianity as a long-term consequence of the Roman Empire’s massive expansion from its base in Rome as far afield as Great Britain and the Slavic states.
Although Islam made an incursion into Spain for several centuries until “the Moors” were expelled from the continent in 1492’s “Reconquista”, Christianity’s position of dominance was never seriously threatened and even survived the bitter split of the church following the foundation of Protestantism in the sixteenth century.
However, over the last few decades that position of privilege and power has started to undergo perhaps its most serious threat due to the combined effects of modern scientific theories, the liberalisation of society and a radical change to Europe’s demographic composition.
For starters, scientific advances have placed great strain upon Christianity, with traditional beliefs in God creating earth in seven days before forging Eve from Adam’s rib increasingly difficult to reconcile with laboratory-tested theories such as the theory of evolution and the discovery of DNA.
The Church has also lost much of its power since the widespread implementation throughout European societies of democratic measures such as the right to vote and greater social mobility, which have served to strip the holy orders of much of the political influence it was able to wield in the past.
And financially, the Church has also lost its previous lustre with the general repeal — although there are some exceptions — of its abilities to tax the general population.
Whereas in centuries gone by, every member of European society was obliged to pay a substantial portion of their earnings to the Church (it’s no coincidence that the most spectacular buildings from the Middle Ages are places of worship — no other organisation was rich enough to afford such grand edifices) now it is forced to largely rely on private donations for revenue.
With many educated people now finding it difficult to believe the teachings of the Bible, the numbers of professed Christians has steadily dwindled throughout Europe for many years. Whereas attending worship on Sunday morning used to be a common ritual throughout society, now it has become the preserve of just a relatively small numbers of committed believers — nowadays, many people only go to church if they are attending weddings,
funerals or christenings, which have remained commonplace despite the overall dwindling of faith.
Increasingly, European society is led by secular principles, with little opportunity for religion to become involved in politics, culture or any other aspects of mainstream society as it had done for so many centuries in the past.
A contrary development, however, has been the massive growth of other religions — notably Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism — as a result of immigration from former colonies in Asia and Africa.
Many densely populated areas of previously Christian-only cities now possess a sizeable Muslim minority, to the extent that a recent proposal to convert Barcelona’s old bull ring into Europe’s largest mosque with a capacity for 40,000 worshippers wasn’t even particularly surprising.
This development, needless to say, is not going down well with traditionalists, many of whom are increasingly concerned about the supposed “Islamisation” of Europe and are more than happy to support the pleas of cynical politicians who are prepared to follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps by wildly exaggerating the terrorist threat of religious extremism whenever they want to introduce a controversial policy.
British Prime Minister David Cameron did exactly that on Thursday, justifying his determination to push through new laws allowing government to collect data on the creative grounds that “we face real and credible threats to our security from serious and organised crime, from the activity of paedophiles, from the collapse of Syria, the growth of Isis in Iraq and al Shabab in East Africa,” despite the fact that only three people (two of whom were Muslim) have died in terrorist attacks in the UK since 2005.
On the whole, though, the growth of Islam is a minor trend compared to the growth of secularism, and the likelihood is that the number of church-goers will continue to fall in the coming years.
If it wants to arrest the slide, Christianity often does little to help its own cause. That applies especially to the Catholic Church, which has been routinely beset by a series of scandals: from a shocking number of priests and bishops indulging in sexual abuse of children to this week’s drastic action at the head of its bank after allegations of money laundering and uncomfortably close links with the Sicilian mafia, the Vatican has done little to inspire confidence that it is an organisation to be trusted.
Having faith does not necessarily require respecting the organisation which administers it, of course, and plenty of Catholics have retained their religious ardour despite the scandals by which the Vatican has been beset.
For the waverers, however, developments such as this week’s in Rome are just another reason not to believe, and there has to be a genuine possibility that over the coming decades the Catholic Church, an institution nearly two thousand years old, will implode completely and cease to be relevant.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
