What Makes the Church Grow? | Bishop Robert Barron | The Dispatch at CWR
While Catholicism is withering on the vine in many European countries, the center of gravity for Catholicism has shifted dramatically to the south, especially to the African continent
Just recently on the website maintained by the episcopal conference of Germany there appeared an editorial concerning Pope Francis's apostolic visit to Africa. As many have pointed out, the piece was breathtaking in its arrogance and cultural condescension. The author's take on the surprisingly rapid pace of Christianity's growth on the "dark continent" (his words)? Well, the level of education in Africa is so low that the people accept easy answers to complex questions. His assessment of the explosion in vocations across Africa? Well, the poor things don't have many other avenues of social advancement; so they naturally gravitate toward the priesthood.
What made this analysis especially dispiriting is that it came, not from a secularist or professionally anti-religious source, but precisely from the editor of the official webpage of the Catholic Church in Germany. It is no accident, of course, that the article appeared immediately in the wake of a very pointed oration of Pope Francis to the hierarchy of Germany, in which the Holy Father indicated the obvious, namely, that the once vibrant German Catholic Church is in severe crisis: its people leaving in droves, doctrine and moral teaching regularly ignored, vocations disappearing, etc. Thus it might be construed as a not so subtle shot across the Papal bow.
But it was born too, I think, of an instinct that is at least a couple of hundred years old that northern Europe -- and Germany in particular -- naturally assumes the role of teacher and intellectual leader within the Catholic Church. In the nineteenth century, so many of the great theologians were Germans: Drey, Döllinger, Mohler, Scheeben, Franzelin, etc. And in the twentieth century, especially in the years just prior to Vatican II, the intellectual heavy-weights were almost exclusively from northern Europe: Maritain, Gilson, Congar, de Lubac, Schillebeeckx, Bouyer, Rahner, von Balthasar, Ratzinger, Küng, etc. Without these monumental figures, the rich teaching of Vatican II would never have emerged.
But something of crucial importance has happened in the years since the Council. The churches that once supported and gave rise to those intellectual leaders have largely fallen into desuetude.
Comments