Nomads of God: The New Paths of Religion in Europe
The religious landscape of the Old Continent is in full movement. New faiths are coming onto the scene, the faithful are becoming pilgrims, and conversions abound. The response of the Catholic Church
by Sandro Magister
ROMA - It is a weekday in August in a Rome drenched with sunshine, but the great basilica of St. Mary Major is full of people from many nations, who have come to see the miracle once again. This takes place while the choir sings, in multiple parts, the "Gloria in excelsis": from an opening in the gold-enameled ceiling comes a snowfall of countless white rose petals, which drift down to cover in white the reliquary of the manger where the newborn Jesus lay. It is the snowfall announced by Mary who in 358 told Pope Liberius where to build the church.
But there is another miracle at work here: that, in a spiritually lazy and secularized Europe, religion has come back to life, extending itself and conquering its surroundings again. From Rome to Santiago de Compostela, there is a new vibration of faith becoming visible once more. And so it is at Lourdes, and at Loreto, where the pope is also preparing to visit again, in spite of his infirmities.
That the religious landscape of Italy and Europe is changing is a phenomenon ever more apparent to all. Half a century ago, the fashionable routes were those of Asia, and caravans of young people turned their backs on the faith of their fathers and went to bathe in the waters of the Ganges. Today it¿s the opposite.
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA
Today¿s young people choose instead the Road to Santiago (see photo), which is an immersion in Christian tradition, the retracing of a path worn by a millennia-old community, a search for transcendence marked by signs that are very much ecclesiastical: the cathedrals, the monasteries, the mass, the apostle, the saint.
The Road to Santiago is a powerful indication of the change taking place. During the 1980¿s, four hundred pilgrims a year set off walking from Roncesvalles to Compostela. In 2000, there were four hundred a day. This year, the daily average is almost seven hundred.
One walks, one travels, because the new religion is less stationary and more mobile. There has been a weakening of the territorial system of the Catholic Church: a village, a church, a bell tower, a doctrine, a custom; all stationary, transmitted from generation to generation. The preferred holy places are elsewhere; one goes there, and once there one picks and chooses. The figure of the parishioner is being supplanted by that of the pilgrim, who frequently has never set foot in his own parish. Countless studies indicate that many of the visitors to shrines are non-practicing, and many have always been far from the institutional Church.
In France, the staunchly secularist newspaper "Le Monde" has gotten wind of the news, and beginning this summer is providing every day the life of a saint for its readers. France itself is an interesting case for study. Its levels of parish participation are extremely low. But it has Lourdes, the most frequently visited Marian shrine in Europe, with six million visitors per year. It has other important shrines. It is a land of miracles and visions. It has St. Bernadette, it has St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. It has great sinners and great converts. Infant baptism is on the decline, but that of adults is on the rise: during the 1970¿s, there were less than a thousand per year; during the ¿80¿s, from two to three thousand; today there are between ten and twenty thousand. "The Pilgrim and the Convert" is how the most noted French sociologist of religion, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, entitled his latest book. The new religion is precisely like that. It is expanding even in agnostic France.
TAIZE¿
One model of this new religious typology is found in the Burgundy region, at Taizé. During the summer, thousands of young people pitch their tents on those hills. During the winter, they gather in even greater numbers in a European city that varies each year. They arrive, pray, sing, discuss, meditate, and depart. You may meet Irishmen with shaved heads and black-rimmed glasses singing amid mugs of beer: Jesus, we love you.
The man who invented Taizé as an international religious meeting place in 1940 was a Protestant monk, Roger Schutz, but the success of the formula dates from the ¿80¿s, and here there is only a slight division between Protestantism and Catholicism: at Taizé, there is room for everyone, even for those, and they are many, who belong to no particular confession. But the emotional tone of the meeting is not simply left to itself; the monks supervise and participate. They animate the liturgies with texts and chants from the most ancient Christian tradition, they dress rigorously in the monastic habit, and are the guarantors of long-term religious continuity. Those who go to Taizé know they are immersing themselves in a religious history that reaches far back, that unites heaven and earth, that is made up of believers past, present, and future.
THE WORLD YOUTH DAYS
The world youth days that characterize the second phase of the pontificate of John Paul II reproduce on a grand scale the model of Taizé. The Wojtylian youth days are a typical expression of a religion of movement: pilgrims gather around a pope who is himself a special kind of pilgrim. Because John Paul II is at the same time he who goes to meet the crowds, he upon whom the crowds converge, and he who sends forth the pilgrims, charged with a mission, into the pathways of the world.
But the pope also knows that there are increasingly fewer Christians by birth, and more according to choice. The brunt of the crowds of young people who come running to him do not come from the parishes, but from the movements: Focolare, the Neocatechumenal Way, the Charismatics. These are to a great extent made up of converts, of lukewarm Christians who have returned to a strong faith practice. In Paris, the highlight event took the form of an assembly of those called to conversion, organized like a baptismal vigil around the baptism and confirmation of eight young people from various continents.
The fact that all off this is happening in today¿s Europe seems to discredit overwhelmingly the prophecies of an inexorable decline of religiosity in direct proportion to the advance of modernity.
In effect, if the statistics of regular religious practice and declared membership in a Church are low in Europe, the numbers of those who nevertheless say they are believers remain high. Even in Iceland and the Scandinavian countries, where the Lutheran churches are deserted, those who say they are religious remain the overwhelming majority.
A NEW RELIGIOUS MARKET
Rodney Stark, of the University of Washington, the dean of the new sociological current that analyzes religious phenomena in terms of market economics, maintains that low religious practice in Europe is the result of a closed religious market: in the north, there are the Protestant or Anglican state Churches; in the south, the Catholic monopoly. If the religious alternatives were more rich, various, and competitive, as in the United States, participation would also increase. Because the demand for religion is there, and it is strong.
But the novelty in recent years has been precisely this, that the religious market in Europe has begun to move again, new alternatives have become available, and the historical Churches have seen their monopolies crumble and have been forced to intensify their missionary activity in turn.
In Italy, the effects of this watershed are already perceptible. Muslim immigration has made theirs the second-largest religion in the country, with 800,000 faithful. The Orthodox Christians who have come from Eastern Europe number almost half a million. Then there is another growing form of immigration, that of Evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries. Today the Protestant population in Italy, adding together all the different groups, is approximately 350,000, of which two thirds are Pentecostals, who are increasing massively, especially around Naples and in Sicily. Competition from them has slowed the expansion of the Jehovah¿s Witnesses, who are close to half a million.
In terms of percentage, these numbers are still modest. But being indicative of a practice of faith that is frequently intense, they have a much greater impact on the religious landscape as a whole. The result can be seen in the periodic surveys of the European Values Study, which for twenty years has shown a constant increase in Italy of the number of people who frequent a religious community each week, whether they are Catholic or not.
But there is another striking statistic: in the same span of time, the percentage of those in Italy who declare themselves to be practicing Catholics has also risen, from 33 to 38 percent. Many of these go to mass each Sunday. The others do not; there are more nomadic and harder to codify, corresponding to the new typology of the pilgrim believer, which received a new impetus in recent years, in the city of Rome too.
THE MADONNA OF DIVINE LOVE
The capital of Western Christianity has always been a place of spiritual pilgrimage. It is a goal: to it lead the Romea and Francigena roads, which lead down from Venice and the Alps, now being restored, and already traveled by the first wayfarers. It is itself a route: from one of the Seven Churches to the next, across the tombs of the first Christian martyrs. But it is also the point of departure for a modest pilgrimage beyond the gates, which leaves every Saturday at midnight from the Circus Maximus, takes the Appian Way once traveled by the apostles Peter and Paul, and arrives at dawn at a shrine in the countryside, beneath the castles: the Madonna of Divine Love.
Until a few years ago, a few hundred people each year participated in this nocturnal pilgrimage. But in 2000, on the eve of Pentecost, there were 10,000 pilgrims. And since then it has been visited very frequently. Both Catholics and non-Catholics take part, Italians and outsiders: Ethiopians, Eritreans, Filipinos, Latin Americans. They sing, pray, confess, attend mass, invoke graces, and give thanks with offerings ex voto.
Walking in the darkness toward the sanctuary of the Mother of God, their hope is to "Drive Away the Night," the title of a study of pilgrimages to the Divine Love sanctuary published this year by Carmelina Chiara Canta, a professor of the sociology of cultural processes at Roma Tre University.
The Catholic Church responds to the challenge posed by the nomadism of the new believers by offering them the appropriate spiritual resources. The pope has declared as a saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a formidable pole of attraction for men of great and of little faith, both during his life and after his death. The pope himself is going as a pilgrim to Lourdes, a sick man together with the sick. He will go again to Loreto, to the shrine that contains the house of the Holy Family of Nazareth, brought there by angels. He canonized the Mexican youth to whom appeared the Madonna of Guadalupe, regardless of doubts about his historical existence.
Against the competition of the Evangelical Protestants, who are expanding explosively, especially in the southern hemisphere, the Catholic Church sets its own faithful Charismatics. The mass gatherings around the pope themselves reproduce traits of the enthusiastic ebullience of those who are invested with the flame of the Spirit. To the pilgrim believer, the papacy responds with a Church that, itself, wants to get back onto the road.
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Three books on this topic:
Danièle Hervieu-Léger, "Il pellegrino e il convertito. La religione in movimento", il Mulino, Bologna, 2003, pp. 226, euro 18,00.
Rodney Stark, Massimo Introvigne, "Dio è tornato. Indagine sulla rivincita delle religioni in Occidente", Piemme, Casale Monferrato, 2003, pp. 160, euro 9,90.
Carmelina Chiara Canta, "Sfondare la notte. Religiosità, modernità e cultura nel pellegrinaggio notturno alla Madonna del Divino Amore", Franco Angeli, Milano, 2004, pp. 296, euro 22,00.__________
The official website of the archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela:
> Arzobispado de Santiago de CompostelaThe website of the international ecumenical community of Taizé:
> TaizéThe World Youth Days, on the Vatican website:
> World Youth DayThe website of the Madonna of Divine Love, Rome:
> Santuario della Madonna del Divino AmoreThe links for Lourdes:
> Portail des sites officiels de LourdesFor Loreto:
> Sanctuary of LoretoFor San Giovanni Rotondo:
> Official Portal of "Sant¿Angelo e Padre Pio"__________
See also on this site:
> A New Christianity Is Conquering the Developing World. But Europe Doesn¿t Know It Yet (29.6.2004)
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English translation by Matthew Sherry:
> traduttore@hotmail.comGo to the home page of
> www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english, to access the latest articles and links to other resources.
Sandro Magister¿s e-mail address is
s.magister@espressoedit.it
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13.8.2004
