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July 25, 2002 12:35 p.m. Saving Our Religions What may keep us praying.

hen Pope John Paul II arrived in Toronto this week for the World Youth Day Congress, he was arriving in continent that is still significantly religious — and leaving a continent that seems to have abandoned religion for agnosticism and material affluence.

It is almost 100 years since Hilaire Belloc pronounced of Catholicism: "Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe." It seems a great deal longer. In Belloc's day, Europe was the center of the Christian world from which in the previous three hundred years missionaries had ventured forth to convert the heathen. Today the Christian world is increasingly the Third World where the new Christians tilt dramatically towards evangelical and traditional forms of belief.

Christian conversions from other religions, mainly Islam, are proceeding rapidly in Africa and southeast Asia. In Latin America evangelical conversions within Christianity are transforming bad Catholics into good Protestants. As a result Christian missionary traffic has gone into reverse gear. Catholic churches in Europe rely on priests from the Philippines and India, and African bishops attend Anglican convocations to reprove their Western counterparts for liberal theology and sexual libertinism. It was a sign of this new world that the traditionalist candidate for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, defeated this week by a saintly but liberal academic theologian, hailed from Pakistan.

Missionaries are certainly needed in Western Europe. Regular church attendance there has sunk to single digits-0seven percent for most Christian denominations in Britain, even lower in France and Germany. By comparison with this gloomy picture, North America still looks moderately devout. About 40 percent of Americans and 20 percent of Canadians say they go to church regularly — and probably at least half of them are telling the truth.

If Europe is a post-Christian society, then North America is still a moderately observant one. But both exist in a world where Asia, Africa and Latin America are passionately devout.

But things may not be what they seem. Europe may simply be further along the road of modernist "disenchantment" with religion than either the U.S. and Canada. From the 1930s to the 1950s, European churchgoing imperceptibly became a matter of social respectability rather than a desire to worship God. From the 1960s when everyone suddenly realized that his neighbor would prefer to sleep in on Sunday as well, church attendance progressively collapsed. Over time society became increasingly secular in law, custom, social atmosphere — and eventually in religion too.

And this is producing a religious paradox worthy of G. K. Chesterton. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of the theology department at Vienna Catholic University, sees what is happening in Europe not as irreligion but as a frustrated religious impulse: "We are observing a boom in religious yearning and at the same time a shrinking process of the churches." Why so? Because, says Zulehner, "the churches have secularized themselves."

How true is this? The shrinking of the secularized churches is obvious enough. In Western Europe it is often hard to distinguish the local church from a social service agency; Bishops reserve their prophetic fire to denounce cuts in public spending rather than private sins; and church buildings are turned into office blocks. But where is the boom in religious yearning?

My colleague, UPI religion editor Uwe Siemon-Netto — a rare former foreign correspondent with two theology degrees — points to such events as the sale in France of over 100,000 copies of a new translation of the Bible within a month of publication, the packed theaters for performances by the Comedie Francaise of a new translation of the Psalms, the crowds in Germany attending consolatory religious services after the 11th of September, the rising numbers in opinion polls (since the 1960s) who describe themselves as religious believers, and the large congregations at non-mainstream evangelical services in churches often established by Third World immigrants.

It may be that Weberian "disenchantment" is merely a phase that the prosperous go through before arriving at a sense of religious awe at the mysteries of Creation. And not only the prosperous. Some Latin Americans left the Catholic Church because it had forgotten that the poor had souls as well as bodies and devoted too much of its teaching to their material concerns as part of its "preference for the poor."

North America may be at the early "social respectability" point on this learning curve. The signs of a decay of belief are certainly there: religious attendance declines in those areas where no one knows his neighbor; polls show that a vulgar form of moral relativism is the orthodoxy of educated young people; and in the pedophilia scandal Catholic bishops plainly placed more trust in Freud than in God.

What may save North America from this looming agnosticism is the decentralized character of its religious institutions. The U.S. in particular has always had a free market in religion. So, as older mainstream churches fall to the secularizing temptation, the result may not be the anomie and despair of post-Christian Europe but the rise of charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical and other "spiritual" movements, even inside the Catholic Church. The "age of secularization" would then be a very brief one in North America compared to Europe's 30 years.

Here the Pope may exert a vital personal influence. Even to many who dislike his theological conservatism, he appears above all else a man of deep and radiating spiritual goodness. That spiritual appeal has penetrated the hearts of the Third World poor in earlier tours. It has won over countless young people like those at Toronto this week. Will it now enlighten and uplift the dehydrated souls of post-Christian intellectuals and exhausted consumers in the post-Christian West? If so, it will be his strangest and perhaps deepest triumph.

— John O'Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review. This first appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and is reprinted with the author's permission.