George Weigel has contributed an essay to the IDEAS section in the Sunday Avvenire - I have searched online for an English original, but to no avail. So this is a re-translation to English from an Italian translation...
Is there a Christian revival in Europe?
by George Weigel
Translated from
October 10, 2010
In mid-May, Pope Benedict XVI made an apostolic pilgrimage to Portugal: half a million faithful took part in the Pope's open-air Mass in Fatima.
When the Pope returned to Rome, 200,000 pilgrims came to St. Peter's Square to take part in the Sunday 'Regina caeli' led by the Pope, and to demonstrate their support for a Pope who had been beseieged for months by crrticisms over priests who abused minors as well as their irresponsible bishops.
A week later saw the end of a 44-day exposition of the Holy Shroud of Turin in its chapel adjoining the Cathedral of this northern Italian capital. In six weeks, at least two milion faithful waited hours in long lines to be able to spend a few moments in front of what many believe to have been the funerary shroud of Jesus.
Then there was the Pope's recent trip to the United Kingdom...
A message to the various detractors of the Church and the Pope: As Mark Twain might have said, are the verdicts on the death of Christianity in Europe too exaggerated?
It is a simple question, and since I have been one of those who have rung an alarm bell over the European crisis as a moral civilization in my book
The Cube and the Cathedral [the 'cube' refers to the Qaaba, the holy object of every Muslim's pilgrimage to Mecca, and the book is partly about the ascendancy of Islam in Europe], I feel obliged to seek an answer. Which is this: it's too early to tell.
The great affluence of pilgrims to Fatima for the Pope's visit or the extraordinary number of those who came to see the Shroud - these are indeed encouraging signs. Just as the intense popular piety that continues to be evident in Poland, particularly in recent months, after the tragic death of their President and other leaders in an airplane crash in Russia last April.
Equally encouraging, in a paradoxical way, are the virulent attacks on the Church and the Pope in the past months. No one would otherwise spend so much time and effort to denigrate an instutition that they really think to be moribund, nor an 83-year-old man if they really thought he was irrelevant.
These very attacks are evidence that the Christian faith - and the Catholic church - continue to be relevant factors in European culture and public life.
Moreover, if the next World Youth Day, which takes place in Madrid in August next year, ends up hosting at least a millionn young pilgrims as expected, that would be a direct challenge to the hyper-secular Spanish government of Jose Luis Zapatero and to the European sons of the 1968 counterculture - for them to accept, though they find it decidedly bizarre, that Christianity is still a personal choice of 'lifestyle' for many, despite the insistence of these anti-Christian detractors that European society in the 21st century must be liberated from any and every moral argument that is religiously inspired.
But the decisive element in all this is whether these public demonstrations of Christian belief and piety can become a transformative element of the culture, in a way that can exert some influence in the public sphere. It's not easy to see how this can happen in Europe.
European Catholicism does not have the kund of infrastructure set up in the past few decades in the United States for such a culture war.
Let me make an example: In Europe, there is nothing similar to the Catholic journal
First Things and its stable of writers whose essays and articles are read by public officials, university professors, the mass media and other opinion makers.
To be able to exert such a cultural influence requires hard work and resources. But above all, it requires a critical mass of disciples who are radically Christian, who have gone through moments such as those experienced by Fr. Robert Barron, a Chicago priest who lives in Turin.
He wrote recently:
"I must admit that this [the Shroud exposition] was one of the most extraordinary religious experiences in my life. The clearly visible marks on the Shroud means that the the brutal reality of the Passion of Christ is clearly visible.
"Looking at the Shroud truly brought me back to that squalid little hill just outside the walls of Jerusalem in the third decade of the Christian era when a young man was tortured to death. The face of that figure comes to me: peaceful, noble, strange, magnetizing, which reveals at the same time the profundity of human misery and the fullness of divine mercy.
"The face of the crucified God reveals the entire drama and all the poetry of the Christian faith, the Answer that is anything but easy, the Word that surpasses the word of any philosopher..."
[I have yet to search online for Barron's original words, but the above is also obviously a retranslation to English from Italian.]