How is the decline of evangelization in Europe to be explained? Strictly speaking, the answer to this question is that any decrease in Christianity has as its factor, at least in the adult portion of the population that it affects, a lack of cooperation with God’s action. Indeed, grace is never lacking; if evangelization is not accomplished, it is therefore because man, for whom it is destined, presents an obstacle to it. Dechristianization occurs when, in a human group, an increasing proportion of souls are no longer won over to the Faith or, while remaining Catholic, slacken in their progress towards God or even abandon the Faith (or the Christian life). During the Enlightenment, the philosopher Julien de la Mettrie (1709-1751) was just such a case; he was born into a Catholic family in Brittany, and his father thought he might become a priest. He preferred to turn to medical studies, and they led him to materialism, atheism and libertinism; he spread these convictions through his writings and went down in history as a sorry example of secularization. Those responsible for dechristianization are therefore men like him and others who refuse more or less, for themselves and for those under their care as the case may be, the demands of Christ’s kingship.
This explanation lays the responsibility at a multitude of doors and therefore does not provide many specifics. For this reason, many often prefer to explain this dechristianization not by its true factors that are to be found within souls but by that which incites souls to stray from Christ. Some of these causes began their action on Pentecost: the devil and the world. Other causes are more closely connected to specific circumstances, and it is these causes that interest us: which of them led to the secularization of Europe?
A reality as complex as dechristianization and accomplished throughout an entire continent over the course of several centuries is necessarily a result of diverse causes: the uprooting due to industrialization, the subversion of intellectual societies, the ecclesiastical support of slavery, the headway made by hedonism, etc. And some factors worked to promote other factors. However, the general consensus is that the principal cause of this dechristianization is modernity. Beginning with the Renaissance, Europe thought it was rediscovering the grandeur of human nature that medieval theocentrism had supposedly concealed. There was doubt as to whether the human race was really afflicted with original sin and whether man really needed to beat his breast. Then, with the momentum of the Protestant Reformation, any religious authority seemed dangerous for freedom; following Rousseau and then Kant, Europe divinized man’s autonomy. Just as Descartes during the 17th century refused arguments that appeal to authority in philosophy, the modern thinkers questioned dogma; they no longer shared the Faith of Villon’s mother. In the end, political upheavals such as those of 1789 challenged the institutions. Free expression of thought was demanded. The alliance between the throne and the altar was denounced. Priests were suspected of greed and the yoke of morality was thrown off; Voltaire’s hatred spread. Religious diversity, even simply between Catholics and Protestants, became a pretext to do away with the priestly tutelage; there were so many religions on earth… how did the fact that Catholicism was the religion of our fathers make it more believable than the others?
Human rights were pitted against the “intolerance” of the past, reason against belief, independence against law. These modern ideas encouraged souls and institutions to stray from the traditional religion. The result is that today, as Danièle Hervieu-Léger writes, “Christianity, which was the social, political and cultural matrix of the Western world, is now, even in the very areas where it develops its civilizing power, increasingly pushed back to the outskirts of the social life. It is the private business of fewer and fewer individuals; it no longer deeply molds behaviors and consciences.”
Modernity is not the only thing; dechristianization has also been attributed to scientific and technological progress. Is this justified? It is true that in the 16th and 17th centuries, man’s knowledge of nature progressed; many discoveries were made in astronomy, mechanics, and geography; men ceased to attribute to spiritual beings phenomena that science was now able to explain. Athenagoras and St. Thomas had, for example, attributed the movement of the stars to the action of the angels, but now universal gravitation explained this movement and seemed to discredit theology. At the same time, the printing press and optical instruments and later on the steam engine increased humanity’s mastery of nature. Living conditions improved, placing the hope of an eternal life in parentheses. Medical science would soon be able to protect men from the plague; did they really need to pray? First transportation and then communication became quicker and led to encounters with other civilizations, which put our religion into a different perspective. In short, scientific and technological progress not only went along with modern thought, they helped it to flourish. Nonetheless, they were no more than a favorable opportunity for dechristianization, and not it’s true cause; for science is not opposed to religion in itself. Besides, even if modern thought had been kept from flourishing for one reason or another, scientific and technological progress would still have been accomplished, just as in the Christian Middle Ages. The dechristianization of Europe had no other principal cause than the growth of modernity.
What was the Church’s attitude towards it? She first deplored it. The edifice of Christian Europe was cracking, its walls were falling, it threatened to collapse; for the Mystical Body of Christ, it was a traumatism against the backdrop of supernatural faith. St. Thomas More’s destiny was emblematic of this time. Chancellor to the King of England, he refused the new law passed by the Crown that separated the country from unity with the Church. He was therefore imprisoned in the Tower of London until his trial; he would later be decapitated, just like Cosmas, Damian and Cecilia centuries earlier. In 1535, during these tribulations, he wrote a book in which he contemplated The Sadness of Christ in the Garden of Olives. And his meditations also express his own sadness in the face of death. One can even see in them the sadness of the Church in the face of the dechristianization of Europe, a dechristianization in which the schism taking form on the other side of the Channel was a step that would lead England to Anglicanism. But the Church did not simply bewail her lot. She acted, and the history of her action is composed of two major phases. From the Reformation until Vatican II, the Church opposed modernity. After the Council, she chose a new attitude. We shall now consider these two phases.
Until the middle of the 20th century, the Church’s apprehension in the face of secularization was expressed above all in the documents of the Magisterium. They reveal that between 1517 and 1965, the Holy See’s judgment on modernity was severe. From the 19th century on, most of these documents are encyclicals. They are all composed based on a fairly similar architecture, of which Pius IX’s Quanta Cura is a good illustration. In this text written in 1864, the pope described the birth of a new idea of the role of religion in society; he deplored the naturalism of this idea and responded to it with the traditional teachings on the public rights of the Church. Pius IX based his encyclical on two presuppositions:
Some will object that there were inflections in this uniform confrontation between the Church and modernity. For example, Leo XIII asked French Catholics to rally to the Republic; Pius XI condemned the Action Française; Pius XII gave modern radio messages; other concessions could be mentioned as well… This remark is justified; nonetheless, from Leo X to Pius XII, the Church’s conduct was constant overall.
At the beginning of John XXIII’s pontificate, this dechristianization was still a cause for worry. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre entered the conciliar amphitheater in 1962 wondering how it could be checked. For his time as bishop in Tulle had opened the former missionary to Africa’s eyes to the condition of Europe: deserted seminaries, discouraged clergy, churches with scarcely any faithful. The perseverance of the youth was particularly preoccupying for parish priests. Already in 1938, François Mauriac had written, “A child’s First Communion is the official and admitted sign that he is going to abandon Christ and the Church.”
What was to be done? This question preoccupied the Fathers of Vatican II and a text on the Church’s relation with the world was prepared. It led to the constitution Gaudium et Spes: in it, the Council published a turning point in the Church’s conduct. According to certain Council Fathers, the opposition between the Church and the world not only had not bridged the gap between men and religion but had widened it. The Church had lost the support of the civil power, and she now needed to find a new balance; she had lost the trust of the people and she needed to become more attractive. In a word, the Church needed to adapt to the situation. Benedict XVI related this endeavor: “Christianity, which had built and fashioned the Western world, seemed to be increasingly losing its effective strength. It seemed worn out and the future seemed destined to be ruled by other spiritual powers. The perception of this loss of the present on the part of Christianity and of the task it implied was well expressed in the term aggiornamento. Christianity needed to be in the present in order to be able to form the future.” The popes of the Council essentially pointed out the path to be followed. In the inaugural speech in 1962, John XXIII insisted that the past was not as wonderful as they had thought, nor were present times as bad as they thought, paradoxically uniting an awareness of the secularization with an underlying optimism; he concluded with the promise that henceforth the Church would be more merciful. In the closing speech in 1965, Paul VI praised what he believed the Church had in common with contemporary humanism: the cult of man. These speeches, along with the texts of the Council, defined the new attitude. The two former presuppositions were abandoned and replaced by two contrary presuppositions:
Based on these presuppositions, the Church’s new attitude would affect the three ecclesiastical powers:
Not everything was to be found in the Council, but everything was expressed or experienced in its wake. A portion of parochial activities was henceforth oriented towards the creation of a fairer world. Alongside the other religions and governments, the Church intended to fight against financial inequality, work for peace and promote human rights. The theology of Pope Wojtyla provided this program with an intellectual density. As totalitarian regimes were inflicting great misfortunes on nations, John Paul II explained that the human person was the alpha and omega of all government. His personalism was seen as a way to escape collectivism.
As a token of this friendship with modernity, the concept of Christendom was abandoned. This choice was no coincidence. Indeed, the alliance between altar and throne had been a priceless strength in opposing modern ideas, but these ideas were no longer demonized. And Catholicism as an official religion of State was not in keeping with the freedom and sovereignty of the people.
Christ was therefore wholeheartedly uncrowned. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, the mission received from Him applied to man in the three dimensions God had given him at his creation: as individual, as member of a family, and as citizen. The liberal Fathers denied the third dimension. They proclaimed religious freedom (Dignitatis Humanae); Vatican II did not go any further than that, it did not support the religious neutrality of the State. But the pope and the bishops finished the job afterwards. They agreed to the dechristianization of governments that had already been imposed upon the Church here and there. She had been wrong, they claimed, to get involved in politics. Theodosius was tried and condemned, so to speak. The historian Jean Delumeau claimed that Christendom had been harmful for the Faith, for the religion of our ancestors was fragile and their fidelity to the commandments rare! Christendom had failed; in fact, it was responsible for this failure: “The present dechristianization is to a large extent the price to pay for this enormous aberration that lasted a millennium and a half.”
Delumeau was only following the turn indicated by the authorities of the Church. This turn was as it were a slap in the face inflicted by Paul VI upon Pius IX and his other predecessors. But this turn did not just happen on its own. For up until 1965, if religion caused an opposition, it was an opposition between the Church and the world. But with 1965, a new opposition was born, an opposition between those who adhere to the Church’s entire past—and Archbishop Lefebvre was among their rank—and those who no longer do so.