Is the Catholic Church a beleaguered underdog, fighting for a voice in secular Europe, or a still-mighty power, wielding its influence on European law through friendly center-right governments? That question, which has been building momentum throughout Pope Benedict XVI’s three-year-old papacy, came mightily to the fore in his recent trip to France.
Yet even as the pope calls for more animated discussion of church and state and more interreligious dialogue, no one, probably not even at the Vatican, expects Europe to become newly devout any time soon. Mass attendance is at record lows, as is the number of priests.
Nor does anyone expect France to overturn its dearly held tenet of “laïcité,” a strict separation of church and state, in spite of the pope’s admonition that secularism leads to nihilism and President Nicolas Sarkozy’s calls for a more “positive laïcité.”
But Benedict’s insistence that religion and politics be “open” to each other — coupled with his strong renewal while in Lourdes of the church’s opposition to same-sex couples, communion for the divorced and euthanasia — sends a direct message: the church doesn’t want European law to be at odds with church teaching, and he wants Catholics to make some noise about it.
This pope is looking to reconquer Europe, if not in numbers, then at the political table.
“Let’s not make mistakes, there are laws in Europe that the Vatican would like to change,” said John L. Allen Jr., a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. Benedict’s remarks in France were “not an apolitical reflection,” he said.
The Vatican, Mr. Allen added, is concerned about “a progressive secularization of European institutions” that is “heavily influenced by the French model.”
For one, European Union legislation forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In an ongoing clash in Britain, Catholic orphanages have said they will have to shut down or break ties with the church if they are required to place children with same-sex couples. Spain legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, following the Netherlands and Belgium.
Some say the pope’s visit might encourage Catholics to speak up in opposition.
For its part, the Vatican seemed pleased with Benedict’s trip. The pope’s reception in France was “encouraging,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said in an interview this week. The climate in France, he said, indicated that “the church has a contribution to make and it’s accepted and respected as a cultural and moral force, a force of moral commitment.”
Benedict ostensibly traveled to France for the 150th anniversary of the year a 14-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, said she had visions of the Virgin Mary in a Lourdes grotto that this year is expected to draw a record eight million pilgrims.
Lourdes always has epitomized “a kind of Catholic counterculture” and “the power of faith over science,” said Ruth Harris, an Oxford professor and the author of “Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age.” Over the years, she said, the city’s popularity “gets strengthened in these periods where the republic is seen as persecuting the church.”
That may be the case today, when some devout European Catholics see themselves as a persecuted minority facing a secular hegemony.
Sociologically, “I think papal trips perform the same function as gay pride parades,” Mr. Allen said. “It’s about a group that perceives itself as a minority that has been in their view closeted for too long and wants to take it to the streets and proclaim that ‘We’re here.’ ”
In Paris, an estimated quarter-million people turned out to hear the pope celebrate Mass at the Esplanade des Invalides, more than greeted Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, in his visit to Berlin in July. And thousands of young people waited for hours to hear the pope’s address in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
In today’s Europe, many Catholics “feel the need for public manifestations of who they are because they can’t rely on the institutions of the culture to transmit it,” Mr. Allen said.
But that strategy has not convinced critics. Claiming victim status “is a classic move, a deft rhetorical move,” said Paolo Flores d’Arcais, the editor of the left-wing Italian journal MicroMega, who argued for atheism in a public debate against Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in 2000.
Some see the church as not unlike the American right, which continues to depict itself as an outside force fighting a dominant liberal culture even after eight years of Republican rule.
France, Germany and Italy are now governed by church-friendly center-right coalitions. Last spring, the right made unprecedented challenges to Italy’s 30-year-old law legalizing abortion. In 2005, Italy passed a law restricting artificial insemination.
“So how can you say that you’re an oppressed minority?” Mr. Flores asked. “That’s madness.”
Today, Europe is defined largely in economic, not cultural, terms. It is uncertain about its identity, its shared values, its future. Will the pope’s visit change the conversation?
“I don’t think it’ll change because the pope spoke,” said Mario Marazziti, a spokesman for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic group. But Benedict clearly has his sights on Europe. “It’s interesting,” Mr. Marazziti said. “The two don’t understand each other, but they talk to one another.”
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(Source: NYT)