Faith, hope and clarity
FIFTY years ago today, Pope John XXIII officially opened the Second Vatican Council. When a Curia Cardinal asked him what he expected the Council to achieve, he is supposed to have thrown open the window of his study and said: “I want to let a bit of fresh air into the Church”.
Half a century later, however, whatever is blowing through the Catholic Church now is more of a hurricane than a bit of fresh air. Thousands of Catholics are abandoning their religion. Mass attendance, the criterion for measuring the number of practising Catholics, has dropped to a single percentage figure. The authority of the Church as an institution has been dangerously undermined by the continuing reports of clerical child sex abuse. Secularism, materialism and atheism are spreading exponentially throughout traditional Christian countries in the Western world. With two-thirds of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics in the southern hemisphere, the word is that the Curia, in its longer-term predictions, has written off Europe as a Christian domain.
