EASY ENOUGH TO OUTLAST THEM:

Catholic Church withers in Europe (Charles M. Sennott, May 2, 2005, Boston Globe)

The cavernous, cinderblock construction of the Church of the Most Precious Blood, built in 1954 in a solidly working-class neighborhood here, reflects an era when Ireland's priests could marshal one of the world's most devout Roman Catholic flocks for Mass each Sunday and on other days of obligation.

A half-century later, the massive church was nearly empty during Mass on a recent Sunday -- its cold, cement walls echoing with the thin coughs of elderly women, who seem to make up the majority of parishioners in many Irish parishes.

Here and across Europe, Catholicism is withering after decades of steady erosion from the forces of secularism, consumer culture, and the fallout from priest sex abuse scandals.

In some of Catholic Europe's largest dioceses in Germany, France, Italy, and Ireland, the percentage of Catholics who attend Mass regularly has slipped to as low as 20 percent, and in a few cities, like Paris, has reached as low as the single digits, according to figures compiled by the church.

The new pope, Benedict XVI, who hails from Germany, has said that the erosion of the church in Europe is one of the greatest challenges facing his papacy. He has called on Catholics to resist ''a dictatorship of relativism" in the modern, secular West that he believes has damaged the Christian foundation of Europe.

In his just-published book, ''Values in Times of Upheaval," the pope, who was then still known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ruminated on the besieged soul of Christian Europe. ''In order to survive, Europe needs a critical acceptance of its Christian culture. Europe seems, in the very moment of its greatest success, to have become empty from the inside. Crippled, as it were," he writes.

How to heal the church looms over the next papacy, and those who know and work with Benedict say he is intent not so much on reaching out to the wayward many, but on turning inward and strengthening the core of the faithful few. [...]

To stem the tide will require a deeply spiritual and creative response, say priests and parishioners alike, and the church in Ireland is trying its best to come up with the formula.

Last month, on the fourth Sunday of Easter, which is also known as vocation Sunday, news that the Archdiocese of Dublin would not graduate a single priest from one of its seminaries rippled through the congregations.

At Our Lady Help of Christians on the Navan Road, a middle-class section of Dublin, the new archbishop, Diarmuid Martin, conceded in his homily that ''the relationship between the community and its parish has changed."

Last month, on the fourth Sunday of Easter, at a gospel Mass at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Dublin, young men and women belted out rocking renditions of gospel arrangements such as ''Something So Wonderful" and ''Shackles." The church, which holds 1,000, was packed; hundreds stood in the back and along the aisles, swaying and clapping to the music.

The Rev. Brendan McManus, who presided over the Mass, said the gospel service was established to bring young people back to the church.

''We're trying to bring the message in a different way, through music, through a creative, dynamic liturgy, and through participation," he said after the service. ''This is the direction the church will have to take in Europe if it is going to address the problem.

''In the wake of the Celtic Tiger [economy], people are searching for something meaningful," he said. ''Many people realize that there is still a void there, even with all of the affluence and the consumer culture."

The Celtic Tiger phenomenon is tied to the endurance of Christian values in Ireland, so they're wise to try avoiding the fate of the Continent.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2005 7:42 AM