Europe’s Wars of Anti-Religion

Recent attacks on religion in Europe show that the land that nursed Christianity to maturity is in desperate need of re-evangelization.

PUBLISHED ON

February 3, 2025

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Despite all the jabbering about “diversity” and “inclusivity” in the Church and world, Catholics in the United States (and especially Catholic theologians) have become somewhat insular and provincial. When I began studying theology in the 1970s and 1980s, translations of works by European theologians were commonplace and common stock of Catholic publishers. Today, they rarely appear, while most Catholic publishers trade either in gauzy spirituality pixie dust or some version of “do-it-yourself” self-improvement with a splash of holy water.

I make these observations in view of two stories I picked up from Europe recently that did not get much U.S. circulation, though they should have.

In Poland, a petition was dropped on Parliament to outlaw Confession for anybody under the age of 18. Its rationale, ostensibly, is to protect minors from sexual abuse. It calls the confessional a medieval control instrument.

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One should not forget that there is a virulent minority in Poland that is anti-Catholic. It’s the usual assortment of sexual dissenters, especially led by women ashamed that Poland is almost the last country to protect unborn human life and old Communists looking somehow to get back that “we’re in charge” feeling. It also has a few self-hating Catholics in the mix.

The Constitution requires Parliament to address petitions validly submitted to it. A similar petition was previously disqualified on a technicality.

Since even the Communists imposed on Poland by the Russians usually shied away from out-and-out confrontation with the Church, don’t expect the current secularizing Brussels sycophants around Prime Minister Donald Tusk to rush and grab this third rail. Already, they’re at least admitting that freedom of religion, guaranteed in the Polish Constitution and especially their beloved “EU Treaties,” would stand in the way. After all, if one cannot confess, one in theory cannot receive Communion or other sacraments of the living, at least in certain circumstances. 

But the fact that this effort was mounted even in (admittedly declining) Catholic Poland says several things. One, that Poland remains the “new Ireland,” the target of an elite within and without the country to separate the national culture from its Catholic roots. Second, that the failure of the Church—especially under Pope Francis—to do some “controlled burning” to clean out the brush, chaff, and weeds of predator priests stymies ecclesiastical reform and erodes overall trust. What got Rupnik and McCarrick punished was not their sexual escapades but their absolution of “accomplices” in Confession.

The Poles have at least one thing going for them: this petition came from the usual anti-Catholic suspects. That’s better than in Germany where, as I observed last April, it was a commission within the Archdiocese of Freiburg itself that wanted to forbid Confession to minors until they are of Confirmation age (in that diocese, around 15).  Ostensibly to prevent abuse, it also rekindled the old ’70s agitation that won’t go away: eliminate First Confession before First Communion.

The other European story I thought worth noting was the decision by the state Church of Sweden to close down (at least for the winter) several parishes on Gotland Island (that big island off the east coast of Sweden) because…they use fossil fuel heating and can’t be converted. One of them is Romakloster, a 13th-century Cistercian ruin among the glories of Swedish Catholicism expropriated by the state when Lutheranism was imposed by the crown.

It’s not clear to me how many of these old churches actually are places of “worship” as opposed to tourist sites or cultural venues. (Old churches have good acoustics, in-built in their day to promote preaching. Besides, they provide more aesthetically appealing backdrops than ’70s schlock.) In either case, it’s clear that, in Sweden, the real incense must be offered to the climate gods. No doubt the state would tell you (through its ministry of religion, aka the “Church of Sweden”) that the true God is no doubt pleased that people have foregone worship in order not to sully “our common home” of Mother Earth. It’s the perfect bookend to the image of Pastor Tomas Ericsson, more Swedish state employee than man of God, in Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 classic film Winter Light.

It’s just another erosion of our Genesis heritage that subsumes human exceptionalism (which includes his right and duty—“right and just”—to worship the true God) into some overall environmental fundamentalism. Less spoken is the underlying idea, evidenced in America by governors who during Covid declared worship “unessential,” that Caesar either speaks for or has no obligation to reckon with his interlocutor in dividing up the “renderings.”

Anti-religion recognizes the symbolic value to society of edifices that look like churches on the outside but have been “repurposed”—temporarily or permanently—to entertainment centers, theaters or concert halls, discos, and restaurants.  “Temporary sacrality” makes as much sense as “somewhat pregnant.” But it does send the message—a very anti-Christian, anti-Incarnational message—that the Eternal has no abiding place here in our temporal immanence. That thought ought to be considered by all our “responsible steward” bishops engaged in self-congratulation over the numbers of churches they “consolidated” or closed. Anti-religion recognizes the symbolic value to society of edifices that look like churches on the outside but have been “repurposed”—temporarily or permanently—to entertainment centers, theaters or concert halls, discos, and restaurants.Tweet This

If anybody has any doubts where this is headed (since anti-Catholicism is more advanced and often more overt in Europe than here), consider the great observation Cardinal Gerhard Müller made in his book True and False Reform. Müller notes that our day may very well see the heresy of apocatastasis (universal salvation) fulfilled when the Antichrist receives his doctorate of theology honoris causa from the Catholic theology faculty at the University of Tübingen.  

Author

  • John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views expressed herein are his own.

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