True story: a Berlin priest gets a phone call one afternoon from a panicked parishioner. She’s just discovered the church was left unlocked.
The priest, nonplussed, asks: “And, what happened?”
“Someone,” the parishioner says, catching her breath, “lit a candle.”
In Germany’s licentious capital, where fewer than one in five belong to the main Christian denominations, this is a deeply subversive – and utterly human – act.
When Catholics say a final farewell to Pope Francis today, the Church he leaves behind has 10 per cent more members than 12 years ago, when he took over.
Yet in Europe, after centuries of dominance, Christianity appears to be in retreat. In Germany and England, mainstream Christian church members now comprise minorities of just 45 and 46 per cent of their respective populations.
In the Republic, 69 per cent in the 2022 census identified as Roman Catholic, down from 84 per cent a decade earlier. In the same period, the numbers ticking the “no religion” box jumped by 187 per cent and make up 14 per cent of the population.
Unthinkable a century ago for Irish Free State officials who prostrated themselves in Rome in “grateful appreciation of the gracious consideration of his Holiness” Pope Pius XI.
Yet the census mirrors the chilly welcome Ireland gave Pope Francis in 2018. After two decades of clerical sexual abuse revelations and cover-up, and months after Ireland introduced abortion, Francis heard from Ireland’s first gay taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, how the Catholic Church had contributed to Ireland’s “legacy of pain and suffering”.
The papal visit concluded a great reset of church-state relations and Ireland’s entry to the western European secular mainstream. But did Ireland arrive just as the wind was changing?
Just two months after Pope Francis visited Ireland, a fellow Jesuit, Arturo Sosa, father general of the religious order, argued in a Vatican conference that secularism was not the end of history.
Indifference towards religion and faith matters, he suggested, could eventually “move into an investigation of the phenomenon of religion” where curious young people could approach faith communities “to see what they can discover and learn”.
Look around and there are signs that this investigation and re-evaluation is well under way. In Ireland, many of the generations educated out of religion – thanks, somewhat ironically, to free education in Catholic schools by teachers who were nuns and priests – maintained a pilot light of cultural Catholicism.
Their children – many of whom last saw a church while wearing their first communion clothes − make up Ireland’s smallest age cohort of Catholics.
Raised in a secular Ireland of second cars, property bubbles and mental health crises, some of these are the people starting to reassess the position of faith in modern society.
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On the fiction shelves, Marxist Sally Rooney has seeded her best-selling novels with religious observations, revelations and plot twists.
First Things, a US religious and intellectual journal, predicted confidently that Rooney’s “future novels will contain more theology, more families, and more turning to Christ”.
She is not alone. London-based writer Lamorna Ash spent two years interviewing believers for a new book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, only to feel herself attracted, too, to the idea of belief.
For the 31-year-old and her peers, reared between the poles of prosperity, diversity and insecurity, there is an “increased tolerance and openness to religious frames of mind”.
Ash sees another catalyst in social media’s inherent contradiction of connection and isolation, leaving many younger people “craving the kind of physical community we might have once gotten through the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the church”.
Of course a few writers don’t make a religious revival. Many of their readers, raised far from the concept, may struggle with faith as a frame for their lives, let alone as a source of content or contentment.
Recent years have seen other trends come and go: crystals; angels; mind-body-spirit; stoicism. Some will latch on to religious faith as a life hack, much like the trend towards abandoning smartphones.
Yet two decades after atheist Richard Dawkins published his sceptic’s bible, The God Delusion, many younger writers and thinkers appear to question traditional binary assumptions of faith-unfaith. Put in Irish terms: maybe attending/boycotting Mass is not the last word in spiritual self-discovery or self-denial. There is a world of Christian faith, thought and practice beyond what many Irish view as irredeemably flawed institutional Catholicism.
As traditional parish life withers, spiritual offerings that are broader yet more specialist, appear to reflect new priorities, from traditional Catholic Tridentine (Latin) services to the Church of Ireland’s Pioneer Ministry.
Rev Rob Jones told The Irish Times late last year his services at the newly pew-free Holy Trinity church in Dublin’s Rathmines were proving attractive to a generation “more interested in spirituality as opposed to organised religion”.
“I think we’re kind of in that time again, of tapping into the spirituality which is so important in the life of our island,” he said.
Census figures from 2022 show that, in Northern Ireland, 45.7 per cent of people are either Catholic or from a Catholic background, compared to 43.5 per cent who are Protestant or from other Christian denominations.
A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey of 15 western European states, including Ireland, showed the continent’s largest groups of Christians were the cultural, non-practising kind. Of them, 51 per cent said they believed in another, non-specified higher power.
Put another way: every second lapsed Catholic in Europe is open to – or longing for – something bigger than themselves but may lack the language to describe what they feel they are missing – or seeking.
In some ways they are continuing the languid longing of the late Leonard Cohen, the singer-songwriter dubbed a “secular saint” by this newspaper in 2012.
His entire creative life was an exploration of his secular Jewish roots, the Catholic faith he picked up as a child from his Irish nanny in Montreal and further wisdom during a spell as a Zen Buddhist monk.
After his death in 2016, the US Jesuit magazine America said that “Cohen’s problem was not a crisis of faith – he never ceased believing in God – but the scandal that God makes it so hard for us to live by our beliefs”.
From Bono and Sinéad O’Connor to Nick Cave, modern music is filled with spiritual seekers. The latter wrote of his spiritual rediscovery, after his son’s death a decade ago, a “considerable surprise”.
“I have found some of my truths,” he wrote, “in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird and thoroughly human institution of the [Anglican] Church.”
Cave’s spiritual return came just as German theologian Jörg Lauster began arguing that, despite rumours of its demise, the search for transcendence was alive and well in western Europe.
In his best-selling 2014 short history of Christianity, Die Verzauberung der Welt (Enchanting the World), he argues that debates about church decline and the departure of some believers say little about those who remain – or return – to seek out thoughts, places and people they perceive as holy.
“Encountering the holy teaches us to be humble, to recognise that there is something that defies my comprehension,” he told Germany’s Zeitzeichen magazine in December, “which stands fundamentally opposed to the modern credos of ‘you are master of your own life’.”
As a professor of theology in Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, the 59-year-old describes his challenge as “demonstrating to people what they are actually losing when they submit uncritically to this modern hubris”.
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Half a century ago the German constitutional court judge Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde reflected on this as a core dilemma of the modern, liberal secularised state.
Unlike an absolute monarchy basing its legitimacy on the divine right of kings, for instance, the modern secular liberal state “live[s] from prerequisites which it cannot itself guarantee”.
“It can endure only if the freedom it bestows on its citizens takes some regulation from the interior,” he wrote, “both from a moral substance of the individuals and a certain homogeneity of society at large.”
This so-called Böckenförde dictum has been hotly debated – and misunderstood – ever since. In 2010, the now retired judge clarified his remarks to argue that any liberal order, to survive in modern Europe, requires a unifying ethos drawing on a common culture. This, in turn, draws on sources “such as Christianity, the Enlightenment and humanism. But not automatically any religion”.
Tapping multiple sources of insight and tradition creates an overall equilibrium while failing to recognise all, he warned, set a society on a road to unrest, totalitarianism and a modern variant of confessional civil war.
English historian Tom Holland made similar arguments in his 2019 book Dominion, that even a secular Europe of empty churches and dusty pews “remains firmly moored to its Christian past”.
Core western values we may regard as universal and self-evident – love thy neighbour, protect the weak, even those omnipresent “be kind” tattoos – are anything but.
Our European air is permeated with invisible, omnipresent ethical-faith particles and principles, Prof Holland argues, “so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye ... breathed in equally by everyone”.
Europe’s secular liberals may, in many cases, be standing on the shoulders of the very Christians they mock or even despise. The tensions only arise, he adds, when this historical fact is forgotten – or denied.
Many builders of European modernity, in an admittedly very different world, had no worries about maintaining an equilibrium that included Judeo-Christian values and faith.
For liberal philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, Christianity offered “the complete spirit of the ethics of utility”.
Albert Einstein, raised by what he called “entirely irreligious” Jewish parents in Munich, and his theories of space and time may have contributed to the blueprint for a secular modernity. But he embraced what he called the “God of Spinoza”, the Portuguese-Jewish philosopher.
It would be very surprising if this religion had now revealed all its secrets
— Oxford religion professor Diarmaid MacCulloch
Religiosity was, for the Nobel prizewinner, about remaining open to a feeling that “what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms”.
That chimes with US philosopher Richard Dworkin in his final book, Religion Without God, from 2013. The roots that modern, secularist humanism share with mainstream theist religions are two-fold, he writes: the idea that our universe is a thing of sublime beauty and wonder and that human life has objective meaning, creating ethical and moral responsibilities for oneself and others.
“Not just if we happen to think this is important,” Dworkin adds, “but because it is in itself important whether we think so or not.”
For instance religious attitudes insist that its “real and fundamental values” are “as real as trees or pain”, so that “our felt conviction that cruelty is wrong is a conviction that cruelty is really wrong”.
Like Böckenförde and Holland, Dworkin argues that liberal, secular societies are weak not when they admit their Judeo-Christian roots – but when they deny them.
This encourages a spiritual illiteracy that leaves an opening for another group which hardcore liberal secularists despise even more than “the Jesus people”: the reactionary far-right.
Over the last decade, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has presented itself as defending the country’s “Judeo-Christian cultural roots”. I have yet to meet an AfD politician who could explain to me what these roots actually are.
In 2015, as the AfD began to grow, Angela Merkel was asked if she saw Islamisation as a threat to European identity. The former chancellor said she was less worried by that than Germany’s cultural Christians – and defenders of its heritage – who couldn’t even explain Pentecost.
As the refugee crisis began to build, she added: “I would like to see more people who have the courage to say ‘I am a Christian believer’ and more people who have the courage to enter into a dialogue.”
A decade on, however, it seems that those most likely to come out as believers are those least interested in dialogue.
The late Pope Francis’s final state guest, hours before he died on Monday, was US vice-president JD Vance. Six years after becoming a Catholic, Vance has embraced his new faith with a convert’s zeal.
Last February he presented what looked like the first outline of an America First Christianity, telling Fox News: “You love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.”
Vance said this thinking informed Trump administration migration policy and was in line with the teaching of ordo amoris – the order of love – of St Thomas Aquinas.
Pope Francis delivered a swift reply days later, telling US bishops in a letter there was no Catholic impediment to policy that regulates orderly and legal migration.
“However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others,” he wrote. “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
It’s unlikely the two reached an accord in their brief conversation on Easter Sunday. The photograph of their meeting – a grinning, poised Vance opposite an exhausted, sagging Francis – may well become historic: a collision of two very different understandings of Catholic Christianity’s power and potential.
From Hindu nationalism and political Islam to China’s recent accord with the Holy See, religion and faith have always been key ingredients of power politics. It’s just in western Europe, after decades in abeyance, that this is once again becoming more obvious.
On matters of faith and power, Europe is facing into a new reality of Trump-branded bibles and neo-Catholic peddlers of theological half-truths. In their pitch to believers, self-interested faith and nationalism – not liberalism and co-operation – are guarantees for security and prosperity.
The Trump camp’s latest, unlikely poster boy in this struggle is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi Lutheran Pastor and theologian, executed 80 years ago.
The Trump camp’s Project 2025 document flips Bonhoeffer’s attacks on un-Christian fascist hypocrisy into an attack of “open-borders activism” that promotes “one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience”.
Horrified descendants of the pastor have hit back in an open letter, warning that Trump activists “who invoke Dietrich Bonhoeffer to justify anti-democratic, xenophobic aspirations are either misinformed or malicious”.
As Europe struggles with the disintegrating postwar consensus on trade, security and the rules-based order, writer John Gray suggested the time has come to dust off Judeo-Christian teachings. Not just their tenets of justice, fairness and individual rights, but timely wisdom of “how to live with insoluble dilemmas”.
“Unless the sense of reality preserved in these traditions can somehow be retrieved,” wrote Gray earlier this month in the New Statesman, “the West is destined to stumble from one fantasy to another until, perhaps with relief, it surrenders to barbarism”.
Not everyone’s view is that bleak. Oxford religion professor Diarmaid MacCulloch sees European secularism, and an emerging post-secular age, as a chance. Like a single candle burning in an empty church, modern Europe has an opportunity to re-engage and “remake religion for a society which has decided to do without it”.
At the conclusion of his 1,200-page opus Christianity, Prof MacCulloch remarks: “It would be very surprising if this religion had now revealed all its secrets.”
Derek Scally’s book, The Best Catholics in the World, is published by Penguin
