Escape from Religion that counts decline and minority

 

 

Paolo Cugini

Abandoned churches strike me. I have passed by some churches in small towns and have seen the obvious decay of church structures—parish halls, cinemas, and churches—due to abandonment. I stopped in front of some of these buildings and, besides taking a few pictures, I reflected and wondered about the reasons for this abandonment, which takes on the sad aspect of decline. These now-abandoned spaces were undoubtedly once filled with children and adults in the usual course of parish life. How many priests worked enthusiastically in those now-abandoned rooms; how many catechists and adults worked hard to organize catechism, parties with children, group events and prayers. Why does everything seem abandoned now? What happened?

The first answer that comes to mind as I pass in front of the also-abandoned parish house is that now there is no longer a priest. Italian parishes depend on the presence of the priest; without him, everything fades away. If there is no priest, there is no Sunday Mass. As I observed this sad sight, I thought of the small base communities I accompanied for many years in Brazil. On Sundays, people gather in the chapel or at someone’s house to celebrate the Lord’s Day, because their faith does not depend on the priest. They have become used to organizing the community’s life themselves, organizing catechism for their children, forming youth groups where numbers allow, celebrating novenas of their saints, Marian devotions, and gathering once a week to read and reflect on the Word of God. The priest, in these contexts, passes through the communities from time to time to celebrate the Eucharist, and, above all, is concerned with the formation of laypeople by organizing courses for catechists and ministers of the Word and the Eucharist. And so, when the priest isn’t there, the communities suffer, but they don’t die: this is what I saw in Brazil.

Abandoned churches and parishes are also clear signs of an undeniable fact: the unstoppable decline of the Catholic Church, or at least the Church as it has imposed itself in the Western world. This is what historians and philosophers call the end of Christendom. Churches closed not only in the countryside but also in cities, churches given to other religious groups, or churches used for art exhibitions, are increasingly signs of this unstoppable decline of a way of being present in the world that has characterized the Catholic Church until now. We are retreating because we no longer have the numbers or the strength to maintain the structure that characterized our way of being Church. Until a while ago, the end of Christendom was not taken very seriously because it seemed just the analysis of some isolated philosopher; now it is an increasingly evident fact—it is a fact that everyone can see.

How to live faith in a time of the end of Christendom? Put more simply: how to live faith in a context of marginality, of being a minority? We count less and less, not only numerically, but also socially, politically, and culturally. Increasingly, people live and organize themselves independently of religious proposals. We were used to living our faith in a context where everything revolved around the church tower, and those who did not live that way were frowned upon, and themselves felt bad. Now, many people live well and are well, even better, without attending parish buildings.

It is not enough to become aware of this historic and epochal transition, but something must be done. The general impression is that we are slowly letting ourselves be buried by history. It's as if we don’t want to see or hear the crumbling of the building that is coming down, and so we risk dying under the rubble. This seems to me the tendency of the nostalgic: not to accept reality and so to restore the forms of the past, to live as if nothing were happening. Priests are fewer and older, and they are expected to maintain the services of the past. If a priest does not visit homes to bless them, he is looked down upon by parishioners. At the same time, even today, laypeople in our parishes count for almost nothing—or rather, they count only to the extent they can carry out the tasks the parish priest assigns. Even though we are facing an evident epochal transition, which would require significant pastoral choices, we are living in the same system as before: ecclesiastical hierarchy lined up on one side and the people of God on the other. We are destroying ourselves.

For those, instead, who let themselves be guided by the Holy Spirit, the end of Christendom can become a great opportunity to rediscover our origins. In the Gospel, Christians are never called to count for something in society but to be leaven in the dough, the salt of the earth. At the Last Supper, Jesus warns his disciples that they will be hated by the world, that they will be persecuted, and that they will have to learn to rejoice in that. Christianity is born as a small mustard seed, as a hidden treasure. There is an entire spirituality of concealment that permeates the pages of the Gospel, which we can recover in this new phase of history. By giving up places of command, the Church can increasingly live on the knowledge of its Lord, letting itself be guided by the Holy Spirit to create the community of brothers and sisters. And so, instead of organizing crusades to force peoples to convert, what happened at the beginning of the Christian era may happen: seeing how Christians loved each other and how they shared, many people drew near, asking to join the community.

The end of Christendom can represent for us, disciples of the Lord, a great opportunity to fulfill Isaiah's prophecy: “In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it” (Is 2, 2). What history is offering us is the possibility of fleeing from religion that wants to count, from the religion of power, from religion made of privilege, of those who always want to be on the side of those who are well off, from religion that is the contradiction of the Gospel. From this religion of appearances, we can finally free ourselves once and for all, to see if the life the Gospel offers us is authentic and possible. Because this is what the religion of power has called into question—it is precisely what the religion of those who want to be on high, paying the very high price of inconsistency and scandal, has cast doubt on: the possibility that the Gospel is authentic, and not just a grand fraud. The postmodern era, then, as a time of the decline of the religion of the strong and the powerful, so that we can live in the minority the style proposed by Jesus, who never needed the squares to demonstrate his truthfulness and authenticity.