SECULARIZATION ON THE RISE?

A couple of headlines drew my attention recently. One was “In Europe, Islam rises, Christianity falls” in the Detroit Free Press and “Pope Visits Spain, Flash Point for Church-State Tensions” in the New York Times.

I have been reading more and more about how secular Europe has become. We have to specify Western Europe because on my many visits to Poland, I saw that the country was actually Catholic to an extreme where the Church WAS the government.

Anyway, what intrigues me is that Europeans are becoming more secular and the Americans are becoming more religious – what gives?

In Spain, the secular premier declined to attend a papal mass during Pope Benedict XVI’s visit; even Castro attended a mass during the late Pope’s visit to Cuba.

Spain has always been VERY Catholic. Today 80% of Spaniards call themselves Catholic yet only 18% attend mass regularly – probably old ladies.

Spain just passed a gay marriage law and has loosened laws governing divorce.

In France the statistics are even worst. Eighty eight (88%) percent of the French call themselves Catholic but only 5% attend mass on a regular basis – those darn old ladies I presume.

In the United States, religion seems on the rise, or does it only seem that way to me because the fundamentalists are always in the news.

Polls show that the U.S. is also heading more to the secular side but a lot more slowly. 14% claim no religious affiliation, up from 8% in 1990. 23% of men and 18% of women under the age of 35 claim they do not follow any organized religion. 43% of the unaffiliated were former Catholics.

The survey also found that 19% of baptized Catholics leave the church compared to 16% of Americans of other faiths. 28% of Catholics who leave the church do not join another religion.

Pope Benedict XVI is concerned about his religion. It appears Catholicism is doing OK in the poorer regions of Latin America and Africa but is losing big time in Europe where it used to be on top. Is that the problem; the Church was too dominant in the past and people rebelled and are rebelling? Why are we going in the opposite direction; have we not learned from history or our Founding Fathers?

What about the prediction that Europe will be mostly Muslim by the end of the century – more on this later.

Janusz