Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong

By FRANK BRUNI

ROME, Oct. 12 Like many Italians in decades and childhoods past, Giampaolo
Servadio used to go to Roman Catholic Mass every week. He even served as an
altar boy.

But last Sunday morning, as church bells tolled around this city of storied
cathedrals, he followed a different ritual: he went running. It struck him
as a more relevant use of time.

"The church seems really out of step," said Mr. Servadio, 39, mentioning
issues like birth control and questioning the very utility of prayer. "I
don't see how something like a confession and a few repetitions of the
`Hail Mary' are going to solve any problems."

He wondered if he should call himself Catholic: "When you realize that for
20 years you don't do this you don't even go to church what kind of
Catholic are you?"

A fairly typical one, at least in Italy and much of Europe, where the ties
of Christianity no longer bind the way they once did and often seem not to
bind at all.

This week Pope John Paul II is to celebrate his 25th anniversary as the
head of the Roman Catholic Church, which is both Europe's and
Christianity's largest denomination.

It has been a quarter century of enormous changes, and few have been more
significant, for his church and mainstream Protestant denominations, than
the withering of the Christian faith in Europe and the shift in its center
of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere.

Christianity has boomed in the developing world, competing successfully
with Islam, deepening its influence and possibly finding its future there.
But Europe already seems more and more like a series of tourist-trod
monuments to Christianity's past. Hardly a month goes by when the pope does
not publicly bemoan that fact, beseeching Europeans to rediscover the faith.

Their estrangement has deep implications, including the prospect of schisms
in intercontinental churches and political frictions within and between
countries.

The secularization of Europe, according to some political analysts, is one
of the forces pushing it apart from the United States, where religion plays
a potent role in politics and society, shaping many Americans' views of the
world.

Americans are widely regarded as more comfortable with notions of good and
evil, right and wrong, than Europeans, who often see such views as reckless.

In France, which is predominantly Catholic but emphatically secular, about
one in 20 people attends a religious service every week, compared with
about one in three in the United States.

"What's interesting isn't that there are fewer people in church," said the
Rev. Jean François Bordarier of Lille, in northern France, "but that there
are any at all."

Debates Over Gays and God

While France is an extreme case, its drift from Christian institutions and
disparity with the United States hold true throughout much of Europe, where
faithful attendance at Christian services, be they Catholic, Protestant or
Orthodox, is the province of a small minority of people.

They show up to mark crucial milestones in their and their loved ones'
lives. But they pay minimal heed, between those visits, to their churches'
exhortations and admonitions.

The tension between contemporary attitudes and traditional church teachings
has forced an emergency meeting this week of the leaders of the worldwide
Anglican Communion.

They are expected to debate the acceptability of openly gay bishops in
their church. Representatives from congregations in the developing world
have threatened to break the church in two if their Western peers head in a
permissive direction.

The preamble of a new, unfinished constitution for the European Union omits
any mention of Christianity or even God among the cultural forces that
shaped Europe, although the pope and other Christian leaders raised
vehement objections.

"My own view is that there is a form of secular intolerance in Europe that
is every bit as strong as religious intolerance was in the past," said John
Bruton, a former Irish prime minister who was involved in the drafting of
the document. He lobbied for God's inclusion.

Mr. Bruton's vantage point is Western Europe, but many Eastern European
countries with a few exceptions, like the pope's native Poland are no more
demonstrably devout. Having gone through religious outbursts after their
emergence from Communism, they too seem poised to pivot in a secular direction.

Christianity's greatest hope in Europe may in fact be immigrants from the
developing world, who in many cases learned the religion from European
missionaries, adapted it to their own needs and tastes, then toted it back
to the Continent.

In cities like Paris, Amsterdam and especially London, there are many
thriving independent black churches, packed with newcomers from Nigeria,
Sierra Leone and other African countries.

A recent report by Christian Research, a British group, determined that
blacks and, to a lesser extent, Asians represent more than half the
churchgoers in central London on a given Sunday, though they represent less
than a quarter of the area's population.

By some estimates, more than 25 million people in England identify the
Church of England as their denomination. Only 1.2 million actually go to
one of the church's services every week.

Other Protestant denominations are in the same shape.

"In Western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails," wrote the Rev.
David Cornick, the general secretary of the United Reformed Church in
Britain, in the June-July edition of Inside Out, a religious journal. "The
fact is that Europe is no longer Christian."

Believing vs. Attending

That is something of an overstatement. Despite a recent influx of Muslim
immigrants and the rise of mosques in countries like Britain, France and
Germany, an overwhelming majority of Europeans who profess religious
devotion consider themselves Christian. But for most, Christianity has
evolved into an amorphous spiritual inclination rather than an exacting creed.

Stéphanie Vercamer, a 31-year-old florist in Lille, wears a gold cross
around her neck and said it saved her from injury in a car crash several
years ago. "There is a God," Ms. Vercamer said. "I wouldn't be here today
if there wasn't."

But she said that she almost never sets foot in a church and that while she
wanted to arrange a Roman Catholic baptism for her daughter, who was born
out wedlock, she had not been able to yet. The little girl is 3 years old.

At the Saint Sacrement church in Lille, attendance at Mass often drops
below 50 but rose above 125 on a recent weekend. The Rev. Émile Reyns, a
priest there, gladly reported that he had recently done prenuptial
counseling for six couples: proof, he said, that young adults still wanted
Catholic weddings.

But he sadly conceded that all the couples had been living together for a
while.

"They say it without blushing," said Father Reyns, 66, who added that he
did not expect to see the couples much once they moved on to their
honeymoons. At Saint Sacrement, like many other congregations, the regulars
tend to be much older.

"In terms of religion, Europe is very complicated," said the Rev. Andrew M.
Greeley, the author of "Religion in Europe at the End of the Second
Millennium," which was published this year.

Sizable majorities of people in most European countries believe in God, and
sizable majorities believe as well that some kind of religious service is
important when a person dies, according to the European Values Study, a
sweeping survey conducted in 1999 and 2000 and published this summer.

But they are less familiar with, or tethered to, the specific rituals and
roots of Christian worship. "If you ask the average European the basic
credo or statements of the Christian church, most of them don't know," said
Grace Davie, a sociologist at the University of Exeter and the author of
several books about religious trends in Britain and Europe.

That assessment is supported by the caretakers of the faith themselves.

Last month Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, the archbishop of Milan, said at a
news conference, "The parishes tell me that there are children who don't
know how to make the sign of the cross."

"At the elementary schools, they don't know who Jesus is," added the
cardinal, who is widely considered to be a strong candidate for the papacy.

According to the European Values Study, only about 21 percent of all
Europeans said religion was "very important" to them. Although the
methodology was not precisely comparable, a Gallup Poll this year showed
that 58 percent of Americans defined religion that way.

Even in Italy, where 33 percent of respondents described religion as "very
important," the percentage of Italians who go to church every week is as
low as 15 and no higher than 33, according to various polls.

Most Italians seem not to listen to the Vatican, even though about 85
percent identify themselves as Roman Catholic and the pope resides smack in
the middle of their country.

John Paul has exhorted them to be fruitful and multiply, forbidding
artificial birth control. But Italians have had one of the world's lowest
fertility rates for a quarter century now.

In a 1981 referendum, Italians defied an aggressive campaign by John Paul
and other Roman Catholic leaders and voted by a margin of two to one in
favor of legal abortion. Abortion is now readily available and commonplace
in most European countries, as it is in the United States.

Europeans are moving well ahead of Americans and more aggressively
challenging traditional Christian teachings by providing civil recognition
for same-sex couples. Despite stern opposition from the Vatican, the
French, Belgian, Dutch and German governments have granted same-sex couples
legal entitlements and protections, and Britain is considering it, too.

But the diminished sway of Christianity is evident in more than low
fertility rates and bold new legislation.

Public schools throughout Western Europe have removed crosses from walls.
Many congregations have been forced to close or combine operations, to make
do with part-time ministers or to import pastors from the developing world.

On this continent, ministry has lost much of its luster.

"In Western Europe," said Archbishop Giuseppe Pittau, the secretary of the
Vatican congregation in charge of seminaries, "it's been almost a tragedy.
A diocese that once had 10 priests ordained every year might have two, or
one, or less."

The desperation is evident. In September, when a group of Catholics in a
rural town near Rome heard that the local monastery would be closed and the
monk would be sent away, they kept him there for several days by bricking
up and barricading the entrances.

Urban Stresses, Wider Choices

There are many suggested reasons for Europe's drift, which happened
gradually, over decades, as the continent grew wealthier and better educated.

One is a modern European cynicism about big institutions, grand ideologies
and unfettered allegiances, manifest not only in partly empty churches but
also in weakened support for labor unions and political parties.

"It's an overarching thing, a diminishing trust," said Rüdiger Noll,
director of the Brussels-based Church and Society Commission of the
Conference of European Churches, an interdenominational group.

The process of urbanization moved Europeans from quiet places where the
church was at the center of life to chaotic bazaars where it got lost in
the din.

The Rev. Enzo Bianchi, a Catholic theologian in Italy, said that in today's
heterogeneous and often hedonistic European capitals, "there are more and
more morals and ethics on the market."

"There's Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age spiritualism, consumerism," Father
Bianchi said. "With all these competitors, it's harder for the church to sell."

But in the United States, to name one country, many of the same dynamics
have not prompted a similarly pronounced estrangement. Some experts say
that in Europe, suspicion of major denominations may run higher because
religious leaders directly wielded political power in the past. Others say
the unchallenged supremacy of state-blessed faiths in Europe like the
Lutherans in Scandinavia and Anglicans in Britain perhaps turned out to be
a curse.

"Monopolies damage religion," said Massimo Introvigne, the director of the
Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin and a proponent of the
relatively new theory of religious economy. "In a free market, people get
more interested in the product. It is true for religion just as it is true
for cars."

It also has reverberations well beyond the pews.

"I've been struck by the way in which religion now serves to underpin the
divergence between Europe and the United States, and where I particularly
saw that over the last year or two was in attitudes about the Middle East,"
said Philip Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins is a British scholar who teaches history
and religious studies in the United States and wrote "The Next Christendom"
(2002), about changing patterns of Christian worship around the world.

"Americans still take biblical and religious arguments very seriously, and
therefore give a credence to the Zionist project that Europeans don't," Dr.
Jenkins said.

He said that for many Americans, the frequency with which President Bush
invoked morality and religion in talking about the fight against terrorism
was neither striking nor discomfiting. "But in Europe," he added, "they
think he must be a religious nut."

( web editor's note. Now comes the US media's obligiatory kowtowing to Religion)

The president's brand of certainty and fervor is not easily found here. But
it exists, if one knows where to look for it.

`Hallelujahs' and Pragmatism

At least 3,000 people, some clapping, singing and swaying from the moment
they left their cars, turned out on a recent Sunday at the Kingsway
International Christian Center in East London.

That was just for the first of three scheduled services.

Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo could not welcome each of the worshipers
personally, but his face beamed from screens and monitors scattered
throughout the gargantuan assembly hall. His voice thundered over loudspeakers.

His message was a blend of Corinthians and Hallmark, gospel truth and pop
psychology, rendered in the style of a convention center motivational speech.

"If you don't change your thinking from stinking thinking, your life will
stink," he told the parishioners, who shouted and "Amen!"

"Turn the dream machine on," he said.

Pastor Ashimolowo, a Nigerian immigrant, started Kingsway 11 years ago, and
it now claims about 10,000 members in East London, along with thousands
more elsewhere. Many are from Africa, or their parents were.

They belong to a stream of European newcomers who were already Christian
when they arrived in Britain or France or Switzerland or Holland but did
not find in the Protestant and Catholic churches of Western Europe what
they remembered and relished from home.

They wanted excitement, spontaneity and a kind of inspiration that spoke
directly to them. Throughout many European cities, independent Pentecostal
churches that are unaffiliated with traditional denominations sprung up to
deliver that.

London today is full of them. Some are gigantic, like Kingsway. Others
inhabit narrow, indistinct storefronts in working-class neighborhoods.

Worshipers often speak in tongues and take part in faith healings,
practices that have begun to crop up as well in more traditional settings,
like a United Reformed congregation in East London.

A decade ago, that congregation had dwindled to fewer than 10 members, some
white and some black. Then the Rev. John Macauley from Sierra Leone took
over. He gambled that the future of the parish was in a more ebullient
style of worship.

"I was the only one clapping my hands back then, like I was from Planet
Cuckoo," he said.

But that sound and sensibility, which soon led to a drum kit and baptismal
pool on the altar, tugged new congregants into his orbit. His church now
has more than 250 members.

Both it and Kingsway deliver more than an adrenaline rush. They strive to
be practical, and they market themselves that way.

At Kingsway, glossy brochures for a new religious seminar promise advice on
"how to be entrepreneurs," "mastering your finances" and "managing your
relationships."

There is emerging evidence that the promise of a tightly knit community and
a certain intensity of experience can lure more affluent, established
Europeans into church as well, especially if those Europeans are young.

Some sociologists say new data suggest a possible reawakening of Christian
interest in people under 30, and Christian movements throughout Europe are
reaching out aggressively to them.

The Emmanuel Community in France has wooed hundreds to gatherings like one
in Paris on a recent Saturday night, where scores of well-dressed
professionals nibbled quiche and sipped wine in a courtyard under the
moonlight.

Then, around 10 p.m., they hurried across the street to a centuries-old
cathedral where they titled their heads backward, lifted their palms
heavenward and rocked back and forth, in thrall to a religious ardor that
most of Europe has lost.