This week, a Jesuit from Belgium puts the Catholic statistics for England and Wales into a European context. He follows his diagnosis with some suggestions for therapy. Fr Kerkhofs inspired the European Values Study, which will produce further analyses in 2000. His book Europe Without Priests? is published by SCM. THE scary statistics on the Catholic Church in England and Wales compiled by Gordon Heald, and published in The Tablet for 19 June, are a local eye-opener. The trends they reveal are characteristic, with few exceptions, throughout Europe and in all the main European Churches.

In most countries, the drift from a Christian position towards a vague agnosticism began earlier and developed faster among Anglicans and Protestants than among Catholics. According to the survey organised by the European Values Study foundation in 1990, differences between Protestants and Catholics are far more marked in religious practice than in the domain of ethics. Catholics traditionally go to church more often than Protestants, score higher for religious belief, and have a greater trust in the Church. But both among Catholics and Protestants this trust decreased between 1981 and 1990, while in all European countries the percentage of those who say they do not belong to a Christian confession is increasing. The slow shift towards agnosticism evident during the period before the Second World War has accelerated after it.

In the Netherlands in 1900, according to the census taken in that year, only one per cent of the population said they did not belong to a Christian confession. By 1958 the figure had risen to 24 per cent, by 1970 to 39 per cent, and by 1991 to 58 per cent (in the 21?30 age group, it was no less than 72 per cent). Between 1992 and 1996 Catholic baptisms in the Netherlands decreased from 36 per cent of all newly born children to 24 per cent. According to the forecasts of the state planning bureau, only a quarter of the Dutch will be Christian by the year 2020.

Germany is traditionally a mixed Christian country with Protestants just outnumbering Catholics (28.2 million compared with 27.7 million in 1994?95). Regular Sunday observance by Catholics in West Germany decreased from 51 per cent in 1950 to 43 per cent in 1965 and to 22 per cent in 1989. For Germany as a whole, after the country was reunited, this level went down to 18 per cent in 1996. In 1998 about 30 per cent of the population in the western part of Germany and about 78 per cent in the eastern part did not belong to any confession. Candidates entering the German major seminaries decreased from 744 in 1979 to 279 in 1995. In 1995 186,000 Catholics and 297,000 Protestants left their Churches, which means that over the period 1991?95 two million Christians left, compared with one million over the period 1986?90. According to a 1998 survey, only 12 per cent of Catholic women agreed with official church teaching on sexuality.

Switzerland is another mixed Christian country with about the same number of Catholics as Protestants. According to a Swiss study published last year, in 1900 only 0.2 per cent of the total population said they did not belong to a Christian confession. This figure was still only one per cent in 1960, but rose to 4 per cent in 1980 and to more than 7 per cent in 1990. In urban areas the slippage was much faster: in the Basle city canton it went from 2 per cent in 1960 to 35 per cent in 1990, in Geneva from 2 per cent to 19 per cent. Regional differences remain important: in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, 5 per cent belong to no confession, in the German-speaking cantons 7 per cent, and in the French-speaking ones 11 per cent. Again the figures are higher for Protestants than for Catholics and, as usual, for men than for women.

Traditionally, Belgium was a Catholic country. In 1950 about half the population went to church on Sunday. This decreased to 43 per cent in 1967, 26 per cent in 1980 and 13 per cent in 1995 (15 per cent in Flanders, 11 per cent in Wallonia, 7 per cent in Brussels). We see the same downward trend in the figures for so-called rites of passage: baptisms dropped from 93 per cent of newborn children in 1967 to 68 per cent in 1996 (27 per cent in Brussels): 86 per cent of the population were married in church in 1967, falling to 50 per cent in 1996: church funerals accounted for 84 per cent of the total in 1967, falling to 78 per cent in 1996. It is estimated that today one out of every two people under the age of 25 in Belgium no longer belongs to a Church.

According to several surveys, the church affiliation of Italian Catholics is the most stable of all the Latin countries. About 88 per cent say they belong to the Catholic Church, compared to about 9 per cent who say they have no religion. Regular Sunday practice in 1981 stood at 36 per cent, in 1990 at 40 per cent, in 1995 at 31 per cent ? 42 per cent went at least once a month (but not all the Italian surveys are trustworthy). Italy in 1995 still had one priest for every 980 Catholics (compared with one for every 1,426 in Poland), but the total number of priests is declining: from 61,784 in 1976 to 56,752 in 1995, whereas the population has increased by several million.

In Spain, whereas only 2 per cent of the population professed unbelief in 1970, by 1990 almost a quarter did so, while regular religious practice fell from 87 per cent to 53 per cent (and only 15 per cent among the younger generation). Fewer candidates for the priesthood, whether secular or religious, are likely, seeing that in Spain as in Italy the average birthrate for women under 45 is now only just over one child.

In France, the percentage of those who say they do not belong to any religion has steadily increased in all age groups (especially for those between 15 and 25: from 33 per cent in 1987 to 40 per cent in 1996). Sunday practice seems to have stabilised on a low level (8 per cent) for the younger age groups, increasing slowly for those above 60. About 60 per cent of children are still baptised, and 50 per cent of weddings, and 80 per cent of funerals, take place in church.

The situation in Central Europe is even more complex. According to a survey by M. Tomka and P. Zulehner published last year, most people are Catholics in Poland (89 per cent), Croatia (83 per cent), Lithuania (67 per cent), Slovenia (62 per cent) and Slovakia (58 per cent). In other countries, those without a religion are the majority or an important minority: they number 73 per cent in the Czech Republic, 72 per cent in the eastern part of Germany, 68 per cent in Ukraine, and 40 per cent in Hungary. The 1990 European Values Study gives additional information for Estonia (87 per cent), Latvia (63 per cent) and Russia (63 per cent). Comparisons between 1990 and 1998 show that in most of these countries the younger generation is increasingly alienated from the Churches. Everywhere this seems linked with a greater permissiveness in moral matters. Notwithstanding this downward trend, the majority of those interviewed by Tomka and Zulehner in the 1998 survey said they expected a religious revival in the future (for what reasons is not clear).

If we look at the number of Catholic priests and religious and vocations, the situation has become dramatic in more than one country. The secular and religious clergy in Europe have decreased from 241,379 in 1976 to 217,275 in 1995, while between 1980 and 1995 the number of sisters dropped from 527,707 to 406,065. Meanwhile, the average age of priests in many countries has climbed to 65-70 years. As a consequence, in 1995 there were 46,879 parishes which had no resident priest, as against 39,242 in 1976. In many dioceses by the year 2000, between 30 and 50 per cent of parishes will have no resident priest. Almost all the provinces of the religious orders have a reversed age pyramid, even in Ireland and in Switzerland, and since 1987 all kinds of vocations have been decreasing in Poland.

The overall picture shows how the priesthood is losing numbers:

Why is this happening? It looks as though some sort of mutation, probably much deeper than after the Renaissance, is accelerating in the depths of Europe?s collective conscience.

Most of the data reveal a break between the generations born before the Second World War and those born afterwards.

The gap between great-grandparents and grandparents, on the one hand, and parents and children on the other hand, is widening, in ethical matters as in religious practice and belief. Nevertheless, children still accept many values transmitted by their predecessors, and parents and grandparents integrate in their lives new values and attitudes accepted by their children and grandchildren. As a net result, all move steadily towards a post-modern and post-Christian mentality.

Some sociologists, mainly in the United States, explain the crisis as the result of publication of the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, reaffirming the ban on contraception, and of too slow an application of the letter and spirit of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council. But already before 1940 the decrease in vocations to the sisterhood had started in many countries, and before the council there had been a decrease in vocations to the Catholic priesthood. As to contraceptives, their use by practising Catholics was already widespread before Humanae Vitae was published, as the low birth rates show. Moreover, the religious behaviour of European Protestants has not been affected very much by the Second Vatican Council and certainly not by the ban on contraception, yet with the exception of some Churches in the Netherlands, the crisis of decline hit them harder than the Catholics and much earlier, as the examples of Sweden and Denmark illustrate. There is some truth in the remark made by J.-P.Willaime, a Protestant professor in Strasbourg, that there is some Protestantising of Catholics going on, while Protestants tend to a vague agnosticism.

Interpreting the material of the European Values Study surveys, K. Dobbelaere and W. Jagodzinski, two outstanding sociologists of religion, concluded that the decline of religious practice was primarily caused by two processes: Western rationalism and the loss of traditional understandings of life and the world. In my opinion, wide access to secondary and university education, especially for girls, before and particularly after the Second World War, had an enormous impact, coupled with the democratic supply of information through the greatly expanded mass media. Meanwhile, the new approach to the Scriptures by Protestant exegetes following Bultmann?s lead, caused many to doubt core elements of the Christian faith. The number of true believers was small, for a much greater number were those who used the churches for rites of passage ? baptisms, marriages, funerals ? seeking a ceremonial setting which neither the state nor non-Christian ideologies could offer. A popular religiosity thus hid the true state of affairs.

The great question for all the Churches has been how to react to modernity. On the eve of the French revolution, very few theologians had given consideration to this. In the nineteenth century there was a renewal of priestly and religious life, and in the twentieth century the development of an active laity, with Christian organisations that were often strong. But the agnostic world kept growing, spurred on by the negative reaction of the Churches and their intellectual class after the publication of Darwin?s Origin of Species, and the very slow growth of Christian understanding of the ethical elements in the Marxist and socialist revolt against the exploitation of the working class. Notwithstanding the democratic processes in political and economic society, Catholics had to wait for the Second Vatican Council before a cautious participation of priests and laity in church government began, and women are still on the sidelines. As often in history, the bill is presented many decades later.

After this cool diagnosis, I would need another article to develop a kind of therapy. All I can do here is to sum up some of the remedies. First, a more realistic, dynamic and prophetic leadership is urgently needed. For too long, the direction of the Churches has been in the hands of pious but very cautious people. In recent years, their selection in Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland has occasioned serious distrust. Realistic solutions to the shortage of priests are postponed again and again.

SECONDLY, there needs to be more synodal-style collaboration in the Catholic Church. Theologians, intellectuals, women and the young have to be involved in an effective dialogue. Too many members of the existing structures for participation (synods of bishops, senates of priests, regional and diocesan pastoral councils) have become discouraged, complaining that what they propose is seldom implemented.

Much deeper still is the need to foster a solid spirituality based on core Gospel statements, for Christians challenged by a mainly indifferent environment. Here the spread of many kinds of base groups and networking is a sign of hope, as also are the many encounters in abbeys and retreat centres and in the homes of believers. Parishes with a synodal style also give hope.

There is evidence all around ? in modern culture, in daily experience in homes and schools ? of the need to find meaning in life, and of the hunger for celebrations which open up deep dimensions of existence. But at all levels the fear of division has too often blocked creative answers for radically new situations. We must never forget that the first Jesus movement of two millennia ago was revolutionary, surviving internal and external conflicts. Perhaps the second synod of bishops on Europe, due to be held in Rome this October, may give some encouraging signals, more realistic and more daring than the conclusions of the first such synod in 1991.

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