A Future Religious Awakening?

This optimistic scenario is not the fruit of an isolated thought, because it can be found, with some nuances, in the pens of various Catholic writers and columnists who are popular in the United States. Among them is, Ross Douthat, a columnist at the New York Times.

Incidentally, one might be surprised to see a conservative like Ross Douthat writing in the columns of the NYT, a daily newspaper classified as liberal to left wing. 

In a column published last Christmas, Ross Douthat writes of his family vacations in the St. Benedict on the Mountain Abbey in Nursia, Italy, the cradle of the Benedictine Order, a sanctuary that was once in ruins and was restored more than 20 years ago thanks to American patrons who allowed the resumption of a Benedictine life of strict observance punctuated by services in Latin.

It is a place that, as the essayist describes it, “a peculiarly resonant place to visit in this particular moment. Christianity in Europe, even in Catholic Italy, has been declining for generations, and now in the wake of de-Christianization comes depopulation. The countryside around the monastery is emptying, with picturesque villas and ancient hill towns vacant.”

 “Yet here sits a thriving abbey with its youthful monks, drawing pilgrims while its Benedictines pray the ancient Latin of the Roman church. It’s not the fall of the Roman Empire all over again, but there is a strange rhyming quality, a similar sense of death and rebirth.”

It is called a rebirth, because this year, “Christmas seems different” according to Ross Douthat who thinks (and he is far from being the only one) that the statistics are in his favor, that the secularization has reached its limit.

There is suggestive evidence that secular liberalism has lost faith in itself, and that many people miss not just religion’s moral vision but also its metaphysical horizons, [and] that the arguments for religious belief might be getting a new hearing. Notre Dame de Paris has been rebuilt from its ashes.” 

However, the comparison with Notre-Dame stops there, because the religious revival glimpsed would not necessarily signify a pure and simple return to the religious situation of a few decades ago: “Catholic Poland, one of Europe’s last hubs of intense national religion, seems to be following the same de-Christianizing as Ireland and Quebec and Italy.”

"The American Protestant movement is not about to leap up from its sickbed, nor is an all but expired Anglicanism in Britain. Likewise, groups such as the Southern Baptists and the Mormons, fast growing a few decades ago and struggling today, aren’t going to automatically rebound or boom again," the columnist believes.

For the latter, the renaissance will be observed above all in groups that do not necessarily benefit from the “consideration” - or the esteem - of the religious institutions, and which constitute what may be called "subcultural."

“Any growth is likely to be nondenominational, subcultural (think Latin Mass Catholics or converts to Eastern Orthodoxy or communally oriented Protestants), mystical and sui generis, with notable flowerings in places where traditional faith has rarely grown before (like in the tech industry, say).”

Incidentally, and to go along with the essayist, the latest autobiography that Pope Francis has just published is very stingy in consideration and esteem for Catholics who have been faithful to the Mass of all time, singled out with a surprising lack of amenity on the part of a pontiff who has made inclusion one of the priorities of his pontificate.

Thus, Douthat states, “As part of my larger bet-on-America theory of the future, I expect any renewed religious vitality to spread from the United States back to the older Christendom of Europe.”  A conservative revolution that Donald Trump’s second term could inaugurate. The abbey in Norcia is a case study: Its founding Benedictines were a group of entrepreneurial Americans whose community has since added European brothers, as well.