Passions of Pope Victor

John L. Allen, Jr., The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday Religion, 2009), 480 pp., $28.00.

FORCASTING THE future of religion has a long and tainted history. Too often, futurology merely consists of watching the current trajectory of lines on a graph, and extending them until they reach some sensational conclusion. This was the process that led Mark Twain, a century ago, to predict that the world’s largest religions by 2000 AD would be Roman Catholicism—and Christian Science. But no less troublesome is the enduring belief that religion is simply going to fade away and thus we need give it no account. That comforting construct generally endures until some vast explosion, literal or figurative, reminds us not just that many millions of people around the world take religion very seriously, but that they also do not draw sharp lines between the spiritual and political dimensions of life. As Western governments discovered in September 2001, we do indeed have a choice. We either pay serious attention to the patterns shaping religious belief and practice worldwide, or else we find ourselves very suddenly scrambling to play catch-up on that which we have failed to notice.

And thus we come to John Allen’s dazzling study of Roman Catholicism in The Future Church. Of course, this is not to suggest that the West will face an armed onslaught from fanatical Roman Catholics anytime soon. Or that this is an ideology we need to comprehend and then confront. But Allen’s book does an excellent job of identifying the broad trends—cultural, social, demographic, technological—that are going to have a major impact on all strands of Christianity. And to differing degrees, they will also reshape all the world’s religious systems. We can argue about particular phenomena that Allen notes; I would leave out some and add others—but he has provided a singular service in beginning what should be a continuing debate. The Future Church is a deeply valuable book, and it demands to be very widely read.

IF PREDICTION guru John Naisbitt had not coined and cornered the term in the 1980s, Allen would probably be talking about “megatrends,” those deep underlying movements that are transforming the Catholic world and the Church. Quoting Arnold Toynbee, Allen is careful to distinguish those profound currents from the passing trivia:

And this leads Allen to omit various phenomena that, in his view, fall short of the categorical mark. Most startling for Americans, perhaps, is the clergy-abuse affair that has so occupied the headlines over the past fifteen years or so. Yet, as Allen says, this “crisis” has little resonance outside North America and Western Europe, and chiefly needs to be understood in light of specifically American circumstances. It is not, therefore, a trend in anything like the same sense as, say, the massive expansion of Christianity in the global South. Among other “trends that aren’t,” Allen lists the “return to orthodoxy,” “homosexuals” and—daringly—“feminism.” He is laudably anxious to avoid falling into the Mark Twain trap of extrapolating current trends ad infinitum. Let it be said, though, that of these supposed nontrends, feminism may be the one most likely to confound even as restrained a prophet as Allen.

What Allen does identify are ten key phenomena: “A World Church,” “Evangelical Catholicism,” “Islam,” “The New Demography,” “Expanding Lay Roles,” “The Biotech Revolution,” “Globalization,” “Ecology,” “Multipolarism” and “Pentecostalism.”

Though they overlap considerably, each of these developments poses problems for the Catholic Church, which formed its institutional structure and its belief system in an older and radically different world. For example:

Obviously, what many Westerners see as the reactionary, benighted Catholic Church is anything but unique in being slow to come to terms with this emerging world, or in failing to resolve its relationship to postmodernity. But that certainly does not mean that Church authorities fail to understand the gravity of the issues they face. In fact, we could argue that the Catholic Church was the very first global institution in history. After so many “world empires” that were strictly confined to Eurasia, the Church was the first to span the globe. If you are looking for a convenient date for the birth of globalization, what about 1579, when the diocese of Manila was created as a suffragan see of Mexico City, in a stunning transoceanic leap? Today, debates about the role of a traditionally Western-oriented church in the New World are probably more intense among Catholic leaders than those of any other faith tradition.

THE FUTURE Church is so hard to summarize because its content is so astonishingly rich. Through his journalistic career, Allen himself has met every significant player in the realm he describes, and visited every theater of transformation in the Catholic world. Frequently, he will throw out an anecdote or a case study in a paragraph or a page that any other author would have developed into a full-length book. (To take one example, somewhere in these pages there lurks an excellent future tome on Christianity in India).

But to approach The Future Church through the one trend that spills over into multiple sections, we find ourselves confronted with “The New Demography.” Put simply, people around the world are having far fewer children than they used to. In order to sustain a stable population, a society needs a birthrate of 2.1 children per woman. If the rate rises above that, populations grow; if the rate falls below 2.1, they shrink. A high fertility rate means a large surplus of teenagers and young adults, while a low one opens the possibility of a sharply older population. Not long ago, very low fertility rates were seen as a particularly European phenomenon, even as a continental crisis, but today, much of the world is experiencing what the Economist recently termed “a staggering fertility decline.”

The economically advanced regions that led this drop in progeny production have seen a dramatic fall in their share of world population. If we combine the figures for Europe, North America and the lands of the former Soviet Union, in 1950, these global North regions accounted for 29 percent of the global populace. By 1970 the share had fallen to 25 percent, and to around 18 percent by 2000. By 2050 the figure should be around 10 or 12 percent. Africa and Latin America combined made up only 13 percent of the world’s people in 1900, but that figure grew to 21 percent by 2000, and should reach 29 percent by 2050. In 1900 Northerners outnumbered Southerners by about 2.5 to 1; by 2050 the proportion will be almost exactly reversed.

Those crude figures underlie the shift in the Catholic Church, which as recently as sixty years ago was heavily focused in Europe. During the twentieth century however, Catholics—like most Christian denominations—made huge strides in both Africa and Asia. Between 1900 and 2000, about half the population of Africa converted from primal religions to either Christianity (40 percent) or Islam (10 percent). This mass conversion would have been important enough in its own right, but it coincided with the southward demographic shift. Not just were there far more Africans, then, but a massively larger proportion of them were Christian. During the twentieth century, Africa’s Catholic population grew from 1.9 million to 130 million—an increase of 6,708 percent. And it continues to swell. According to the Catholic Church’s Statistical Yearbook, just in the five year period 2001–2006:

Putting these trends together, we can project what the Catholic world will look like in the near future. By 2025, almost three-quarters of Catholics will live in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and that figure does not even count people of the global South living in the North—for instance, the 60 or 70 million U.S. residents who will then claim Latino origin. By 2050, the nations with the largest Catholic populations will be (in descending order): Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, the United States, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, France, Italy, Nigeria and Argentina. All these projections have a sizable margin of error. The inclusion of France, for instance, is dubious when recent surveys show less than half of French people accept even a notional Catholic label. Surely, baptism alone does not make a Catholic for life? But the broad picture is beyond question. By 2050, the Catholic Church will be, overwhelmingly, a Southern institution. The Vatican, arguably, is located two thousand miles too far north.

Allen explores the implications of this shift. It means that the Church will soon have to accommodate those legions of Southern believers within its power structure. “Southerners” will increasingly dominate the ranks of the cardinals, and inevitably, will supply the popes. Because, for all the attention paid to new African or Latin American cardinals, the fact remains that at present the Southern Catholic world is massively underrepresented at the highest levels of the hierarchy:

THE FUTURE Church, in fact, imagines the Vatican in 2050 under the auspices of the genial Nigerian-born Victor IV. And drawing together Allen’s other themes, the imaginary pope personifies other aspects of globalization. Victor the African is a fierce critic of capitalism and economic liberalism, but is at the same time a staunch moral conservative, who condemns abortion and homosexuality. He thus violates traditional notions of Left and Right, while at the same time drawing on other religious beliefs that are hard to categorize today: Victor, for instance, takes very seriously the belief in witchcraft and spiritual warfare, of exorcism and spiritual healing. A church whose members are so heavily drawn from so near the equator has no option but to take such matters very seriously indeed.

And this is how we come, in part, to the “Pentecostalism” trend that Allen often stresses. Pentecostalism can indicate a highly enthusiastic and emotional worship style, but it also implies a holistic attitude to faith, and to salvation. Above all, it means accepting the charismatic element of faith, the notion of the gifts (charisma) of the Holy Spirit, as are described in the New Testament book of Acts. Among others, these gifts include healing in mind and body, and access to prophecy and visions.

Unless we appreciate the central role of healing, we can hardly understand the shape of modern religion globally, whether that be within the Catholic Church or outside of it. The emphasis on health and healing is not going to go away anytime soon given the pervasive character of sickness in developing societies. Worse, hospital facilities there are so crowded and unhygienic as to deter many from seeking formal medical assistance, however bad their situation. This puts a premium on institutions that provide healing through spiritual means; a mission that is absolutely central to the fastest-growing churches of Africa, Latin America and the Pacific Rim communities. Such churches offer a culture of spectacle through great healing missions, revivals and miracle crusades. Other institutions win supporters by dispensing medical services through volunteer doctors and paramedics, a ministry undertaken by Christian missionaries and by fundamentalist mosques. In order to be valid, a faith has to serve the soul, but also the mind, the body and society at large—hence the otherwise puzzling package of radical politics and highly traditional spirituality exemplified by “Pope Victor.”

Notions of healing and exorcism are anything but new in the Catholic context: witness two thousand years of saints’ lives and tales of miraculous shrines. But in the past half century, these ideas have returned to the forefront of Christian expansion as broadly Charismatic and Pentecostal churches have experienced the most explosive growth worldwide. And instead of being confined to inspiring stories of holy heroes in ages past, healing is now the expectation of ordinary believers in every tin-roofed Pentecostal church. In order to compete in this spiritual marketplace, Catholics have to provide similar services, and they are doing their very best, but much of these efforts offend rationally minded Euro-Americans. While the Church has always regarded itself as “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic,” Allen sees the coming Southward-weighted institution as “Global, Uncompromising, Pentecostal, and Extroverted.” In fact, the intense competition between the Catholic Church and Pentecostal denominations is going to be so important that I personally would have listed this as a separate megatrend in its own right.

COMMON TO many religious systems—not just the Catholic Church—is a crisis of traditional authority, in a world in which the laity now has access to literacy and information on a scale that would have been undreamed of just a century ago. Clergy no longer have monopolies on information and culture; the laity has been transformed by education, mobility and rising wealth, generating far higher expectations and self-confidence. In this new world, individuals are often no longer content to accept the faith common to their nation or community, but will seek new options, especially if these are as democratic and open to lay participation as is Pentecostalism.

Like regular businesses, religious institutions have to cope with the emergence of a market in which women play a potent role, so they have somehow to accommodate tectonic shifts in assumptions about issues of gender, family and sexuality. In many global South nations, laymen and laywomen become avid shoppers and consumers for religious styles and leaders. In turn, religious bodies know that millions of consumers are out there, but that a vast number of concerns offer to serve these “shoppers,” who can easily redirect their business to any one of a number of competitors. Religion thus becomes the ultimate buyers’ market.

Religious consumerism can take many forms, including the drift away from traditionally dominant religions. It is, for instance, impossible to understand contemporary Latin America except in the context of the crisis of traditional Catholic social and political power in such key lands as Brazil, Peru and Chile, and the rise of a parallel Pentecostal universe. Perhaps the Pentecostal denominations will win out in the long term, perhaps the Catholics—but in order to survive, the Catholics will have to become indistinguishable from the Pentecostals in their worship style, and their openness to lay participation. These changes reverberate through politics, law and society, as well as the religious economy.

When traditional clerical authority declines or collapses, it is not replaced by a vacuum. Instead, the old religious regime is succeeded by a new religious order, in which leaders draw their authority not from an institution grounded in a particular tradition but from charisma. Across the Christian spectrum, we are currently seeing the emergence of whole new patterns of authority and leadership across the global South, in the form of autonomous ministers and religious entrepreneurs, whose activities reap vast status and wealth. Think of Matthew Ashimolowo or Sunday Adelaja, both African evangelists running international media empires from European bases. Or Muslim televangelist Amr Khaled, whose website is the third-most-popular Arabic website in the world, under Al Jazeera and the discussion forum Al-Saha.

Before 2025, some evangelists and megachurch preachers will probably emerge to seek the leadership of nations, especially if those countries have been economically devastated during a global downturn. Some will be Pentecostal pastors, others Catholic priests and bishops. Such religious activists, after all, have the populist message prepackaged, they have the infrastructure, and they have the potential to create enduring machines that would leave Chicago’s pols gasping with envy, for in these cases, people do not belong to religious institutions because of family roots but rather because of personal choice. Reams of scholarly literature tell us how much more fervent and passionate is the religion of such voluntarily selected groups (sects) in comparison to the more staid bodies into which one is born (churches).

We could perhaps see the emergence of such leadership in Peru, Chile and Colombia, South Korea and almost any sub-Saharan African state. Charismatic and independent churches are the main candidates for such politicization, but already, former–Catholic Bishop Fernando Lugo is president of Paraguay. We can debate whether such religious actors would behave very differently from secular counterparts, but at least understanding this religious context helps us appreciate their rhetoric and values, and the nature of their core constituencies.

That a Southern-rooted Catholic Church will be Charismatic or Pentecostal seems almost inevitable. Whether it can be Pentecostal enough to retain the loyalty of its members—sufficiently flexible to admit the power of religious gifts outside the traditional hierarchical structures—is an open question. As Allen writes:

OF COURSE, the Catholic Church does not only face a crisis of identity in those areas where populations are rising but also in those in which populations are staying steady or at worst falling. Just as the Church must adapt to a changing religious marketplace in the South, so too in the North. Here we see an increasing secularization of society through shifting gender roles, lower birth rates and the fundamental change in family structure inherent to these transformations. As so often in other matters, Europe will be the first laboratory in which these emerging models will be tested. Already, the demographic profiles of nations like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan look very European, with perilously low fertility rates, and China, Vietnam and Thailand are all heading rapidly in that direction. At some point, Latin America will follow.

Allen does a superb job of thinking through the religious implications of demographic change. Traditionally oriented Catholic societies experience far-reaching and even revolutionary changes when women enter the workforce in large numbers. Accompanying such a change, we commonly find a shift in views of the family, with a steep decline in the number of children a woman will expect to bear during her lifetime. In just a decade or two, fertility rates sink well below the replacement figure of 2.1 children per woman. This shift occurred between about 1975 and 1995 in Italy, Spain and Ireland, in what had been the most solidly and most conservatively Catholic nations. Today, as German sociologist Ulrich Beck notes, “In western Europe, there is a rough rule of thumb according to which the closer one gets to the Pope, the fewer children one has.”

Only by taking children out of the picture, in fact, can we appreciate how much of the institutional life of any religion revolves around passing traditions down to the young, through first-communion classes—or in other faiths, through Koranic training, or bar and bat mitzvahs. With these rituals—the cement of religious experience for many people—happening less frequently, one’s ties to church or mosque weaken. With fewer children, families have less need to participate in organized religion as a means of socializing the young, and of maintaining community solidarity.

There is a corollary to this decay in traditional values. Living in a country where one can expect to have only a few children at most (and where having no children is a viable option), perceptions of marriage change. Instead of viewing marriage mainly as a means to give birth to and raise socially functional children, you come to define it by other criteria, like companionship. And, as marriage becomes more about companionship than about children (more about maintaining this generation than about propagating the next), society can become more accepting of people who seek options outside of traditional marriage. In terms of hard data, between 1975 and 1990 alone, the number of Catholic baptisms in Europe fell a staggering 34 percent; the number of weddings dropped by 41 percent.

Smaller family size undermines religious affiliations. Living in a nation where you are much less likely to have many children or grandchildren, and where many people will have none, people find themselves losing the sense of continuity and tradition that makes religion work. Church attendance rates have plummeted across Catholic Western Europe since the 1960s, as has the number of vocations to the priesthood or the religious life. Italy and Spain have been among the hardest-hit countries. Today, around a third of Italian Catholics claim to attend mass weekly, though other estimates suggest a rate closer to half this. In Spain, attendance rests at roughly 18 percent, a number only slightly higher than that found in long-secularized France or Germany.

Putting these trends together, we find societies more reluctant to accept clerical authority in moral matters. Liberal attitudes to abortion, contraception, divorce and homosexuality all spread rapidly in Ireland, Italy and Spain, and to such an extent that in sexual matters, Spain now has one of the world’s most radical and progressive regimes. Since the early 1990s, divorce rates have grown sharply. Between 1995 and 2004, the divorce rate grew by 89 percent in Portugal, 62 percent in Italy, and 59 percent in Spain. While Irish rates are much lower, the country finally legislated the possibility of divorce in 1997, following a contentious referendum in which the yea-sayers gained a paper-thin margin of 50.28 percent.

This transformed cultural environment leads to a steep decline in adherence to traditional structures and beliefs and also suggests a preference for cafeteria styles of build-your-own spiritualities. A religious institution that fails to accommodate new lay demands is doomed to endemic crisis.

But just as it illustrates the collapse of traditional assumptions, so the European case also demonstrates the potential of new structures, if not a restoration of the Church as it existed fifty years ago. Allen is particularly good on the religious and cultural implications of a rapidly aging society, where the isolated elderly will usually not be able to rely on multigenerational support networks. This situation offers huge opportunities for religious institutions that are prepared to deal with the crisis creatively, by recognizing that Europe is no longer a society of close-knit families living in communities where Catholicism is part of the cultural air one breathes every day. Churches have to see the problem in terms of wholesale reevangelization, by reintroducing a forgotten faith that has become strange and almost foreign. The Church has invested heavily in new religious orders with a heavy lay component, groups of highly committed believers who would act as a “creative minority” within a secularized continent. Apart from the controversial Opus Dei, these groups include Focolare, the Emmanuel Community, Communion and Liberation, the Neocatechumenate, and the Sant’Egidio Community.

According to the vision of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, these groups will act like yeast in the bread, the small quantity giving life to the whole. They are lay missionaries to a predominantly secular society. Ideally, these new traditions would appeal much as the Pentecostal churches of the global South, drawing committed believers into smaller and more intimate communities with a strong role for lay leadership. It is an astonishingly ambitious vision, but it will be decades before we can realistically test its likelihood of success.

AS BIRTHRATES in Europe plummet and secularism rises, the Continent faces a newfound religious complication. Europe can only keep operating by importing new people to do the work and pay the taxes. And because of geography and imperial tradition, those migrants have tended to come from Muslim lands—which is incidentally quite different from being Muslim in any religious sense. Algeria and Turkey, like Ireland or Italy, produce plenty of freethinkers and secularists who have no sympathy for the prevailing faith, not to mention people who are quite indifferent to religious matters. But for the sake of argument, let us accept the official view that around 4.5 percent of Europeans today are Muslim, a figure that could theoretically rise to 15 percent by 2050. As Allen says, this is clearly a trend of massive significance:

The substantial presence of Islam within Europe promises to change Christian thought and belief in many ways. For two centuries, many of the intellectual debates within European Christianity have been shaped by the encounter with secularism and skepticism, as Christians attempted to make their faith credible and relevant in the face of modernity. But what happens when the main interlocutors in religious debate operate from assumptions quite different from those of secular critics, when the rivals assume as a given the existence and power of a personal God who intervenes directly in human affairs, and seek rather to clarify the nature of His revelation? Reinforcing this issue, of course, is the fact that hundreds of millions of African and Asian Christians must on a daily basis find ways of relating to their Muslim neighbors.

Critical theological questions abound. Most fundamentally, is Islam a separate religion, as distinct from Christianity as Shinto or Hinduism, or are the two religions sisters separated at birth and raised in different family settings? Is Islam the offspring of the devil? Or is it a Christian heresy that could somehow be brought back into the fold? And the Koran: Is it legitimately a prophetic scripture, revealed by God? Multiculturalism might demand accepting such a position, but if you go so far, what prevents you from going all the way, and becoming a Muslim? At what point must a desire to coexist with another world religion give way to the urgent necessity to draw and enforce lines of orthodoxy?

And what about Christian evangelism toward Muslims, even assuming that this is ever a practical possibility? Are Muslims members of a distinct religion, in need of receiving the Christian revelation, or do they already possess the truth in sufficient measure to make such efforts unnecessary and undesirable? Many Christian churches in Europe and North America, especially of liberal inclination, have already decided against the propriety of evangelizing Jews, since to do so would be to condemn the Jewish Covenant as invalid and obsolete. But do Muslims too have a valid path to God?

Moreover, as Christians and Muslims explore their new relationship, do both sides have a duty to right historical wrongs? Apologizing for the Crusades is one thing, but Muslims can easily point out other problems they would like to see rectified, for instance by having Catholics return the former mosques that have subsequently become cathedrals across southern Spain and Italy—at Toledo and Córdoba, Seville and Palermo. Catholics are duly anxious to quash any such ideas, responding that they are not about to demand the return of former churches in Syria, Algeria or Egypt. But Christians and Muslims do have a history of long and often bloody interactions, and any attempts to pursue interfaith truth and reconciliation are going to be very messy. Any attempts to resolve them demand some intense rethinking by both sides—in particular, some searching reexaminations by Catholics of some deeply rooted theological assumptions.

For Catholics, then, the easiest way to build bridges to Muslims is to take their political grievances seriously, and high on that list would be the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Europe, Jewish-Christian relations, while cordial, have been subject to periodic strains, particularly over Middle Eastern politics. Globally too, the growing Catholic communities tend to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a straight colonial issue, in which it is easy to sympathize with the occupied and dispossessed. Presently, Western Europe has perhaps a million Jews, compared to fifteen million Muslims, and that disparity will steadily increase. As the Jewish presence diminishes while Muslims grow in number, tensions will rise. If only in terms of realpolitik, the Church of a future “Pope Victor” would likely be very cool to the state of Israel, however dubious American Catholics would be about such a development.

IF MARK Twain was not always a reliable prophet, he did have sensible comments about the problems of predicting the future:

John Allen makes it clear that, far from dying, the Catholic Church will continue to grow and flourish, and as it has so often done in the past, it will do so by adapting to a changing world. Along the way, the Church will undoubtedly make many blunders, but at least Catholics now have a sound guide to the questions they will have to answer. As they face their own dilemmas, readers of all faiths and none will find able guidance in The Future Church.

....In terms of hard data, between 1975 and 1990 alone, the number of Catholic baptisms in Europe fell a staggering 34 percent; the number of weddings dropped by 41 percent.

“The Vatican, arguably, is located two thousand miles too far north....”

When South America was converted did stupid people say the Vatican was located 3,000 miles too far East? Or is it such stupid people today say things like that?

The Vatican may in the future unite with Orthodoxy...which is in the north.

I have no problem with African and Asian and south American Christians...

God works in the least likely places to start a revival of his word.

No, thank God. We are north of Manila and the volcano is south of Manila.

Parts of our town was flooded in the typhoon, but our land and house was on high ground, so we were okay. Thank you for your concern.

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A Church dominated in the twentieth century by the global North, meaning Europe and North America, today finds two thirds of its members living in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Catholic leadership will come from all over the world in this century to a degree never before experienced. . . .

A Church whose diplomacy has always relied on the Great Catholic Power of the day is now moving in a multipolar world, in which most of the poles that matter aren’t Catholic, and some aren’t even Christian.

The Catholic population in Africa increased 16.7 percent, with a 19.4 percent increase in priests and a 9.4 percent increase in graduate- or theologate-level seminarians. In Asia, the Catholic population increased 9.5 percent.

A Church whose primary interreligious relationship for the last forty years has been with Judaism now finds itself struggling to come to terms with a newly assertive Islam, not just in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, but in its own European backyard.

In this world we have seen the Roman Catholic power dying… for many centuries. Many a time we have gotten all ready for the funeral and found it postponed again, on account of the weather or something. . . . Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.