After the death of popular Pope Francis, what now for Christianity?

Irish Times26-04-2025

True story: a Berlin priest gets a phone call one afternoon from a panicked parishioner. She's just discovered the church was left unlocked.
The priest, nonplussed, asks: 'And, what happened?'
'Someone,' the parishioner says, catching her breath, 'lit a candle.'
In Germany's licentious capital, where fewer than one in five belong to the main Christian denominations, this is a deeply subversive – and utterly human – act.
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When Catholics say a
final farewell to Pope Francis
today, the Church he leaves behind has 10 per cent more members than 12 years ago, when he took over.
Yet in Europe, after centuries of dominance, Christianity appears to be in retreat. In Germany and England, mainstream Christian church members now comprise minorities of just 45 and 46 per cent of their respective populations.
In the Republic, 69 per cent in the 2022 census identified as Roman Catholic, down from 84 per cent a decade earlier. In the same period, the numbers ticking the 'no religion' box jumped by 187 per cent and make up 14 per cent of the population.
Unthinkable a century ago for Irish Free State officials who prostrated themselves in Rome in 'grateful appreciation of the gracious consideration of his Holiness' Pope Pius XI.
Yet the census mirrors the chilly welcome Ireland gave Pope Francis in 2018. After two decades of clerical sexual abuse revelations and cover-up, and months after Ireland introduced abortion, Francis heard from Ireland's first gay taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, how the
Catholic Church had contributed to Ireland's 'legacy of pain and suffering'
.
In Germany and England, mainstream Christian church members now comprise minorities of just 45 and 46 per cent of their respective populations. Photograph:The papal visit concluded a great reset of church-state relations and Ireland's entry to the western European secular mainstream. But did Ireland arrive just as the wind was changing?
Just two months after Pope Francis visited Ireland, a fellow Jesuit, Arturo Sosa, father general of the religious order, argued in a Vatican conference that secularism was not the end of history.
Indifference towards religion and faith matters, he suggested, could eventually 'move into an investigation of the phenomenon of religion' where curious young people could approach faith communities 'to see what they can discover and learn'.
Look around and there are signs that this investigation and re-evaluation is well under way. In Ireland, many of the generations educated out of religion – thanks, somewhat ironically, to free education in Catholic schools by teachers who were nuns and priests – maintained a pilot light of cultural Catholicism.
Their children – many of whom last saw a church while wearing their first communion clothes − make up Ireland's smallest age cohort of Catholics.
Raised in a secular Ireland of second cars, property bubbles and mental health crises, some of these are the people starting to reassess the position of faith in modern society.
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On the fiction shelves, Marxist
Sally Rooney
has seeded her best-selling novels with religious observations, revelations and plot twists.
First Things, a US religious and intellectual journal, predicted confidently that Rooney's 'future novels will contain more theology, more families, and more turning to Christ'.
She is not alone. London-based writer Lamorna Ash spent two years interviewing believers for a new book, Don't Forget We're Here Forever, only to feel herself attracted, too, to the idea of belief.
For the 31-year-old and her peers, reared between the poles of prosperity, diversity and insecurity, there is an 'increased tolerance and openness to religious frames of mind'.
Ash sees another catalyst in social media's inherent contradiction of connection and isolation, leaving many younger people 'craving the kind of physical community we might have once gotten through the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the church'.
Of course a few writers don't make a religious revival. Many of their readers, raised far from the concept, may struggle with faith as a frame for their lives, let alone as a source of content or contentment.
Recent years have seen other trends come and go: crystals; angels; mind-body-spirit; stoicism. Some will latch on to religious faith as a life hack, much like the trend towards abandoning smartphones.
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Bishops 'have got to be fired': The Maga Catholics trying to take back control of the church
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Yet two decades after atheist
Richard Dawkins
published his sceptic's bible, The God Delusion, many younger writers and thinkers appear to question traditional binary assumptions of faith-unfaith. Put in Irish terms: maybe attending/boycotting Mass is not the last word in spiritual self-discovery or self-denial. There is a world of Christian faith, thought and practice beyond what many Irish view as irredeemably flawed institutional Catholicism.
As traditional parish life withers, spiritual offerings that are broader yet more specialist, appear to reflect new priorities, from traditional Catholic Tridentine (Latin) services to the Church of Ireland's Pioneer Ministry.
Rev Rob Jones
told The Irish Times late last year his services at the newly pew-free Holy Trinity church in Dublin's Rathmines
were proving attractive to a generation 'more interested in spirituality as opposed to organised religion'.
'I think we're kind of in that time again, of tapping into the spirituality which is so important in the life of our island,' he said.
Census figures from 2022 show that, in Northern Ireland, 45.7 per cent of people are either Catholic or from a Catholic background, compared to 43.5 per cent who are Protestant or from other Christian denominations.
A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey of 15 western European states, including Ireland, showed the continent's largest groups of Christians were the cultural, non-practising kind. Of them, 51 per cent said they believed in another, non-specified higher power.
Put another way: every second lapsed Catholic in Europe is open to – or longing for – something bigger than themselves but may lack the language to describe what they feel they are missing – or seeking.
Leonard Cohen: The singer-songwriter's creative life centred on an exploration of faith and spirituality
In some ways they are continuing the languid longing of the late
Leonard Cohen
, the singer-songwriter dubbed a 'secular saint' by this newspaper in 2012.
His entire creative life was an exploration of his secular Jewish roots, the Catholic faith he picked up as a child from his Irish nanny in Montreal and further wisdom during a spell as a Zen Buddhist monk.
After his death in 2016, the US Jesuit magazine America said that 'Cohen's problem was not a crisis of faith – he never ceased believing in God – but the scandal that God makes it so hard for us to live by our beliefs'.
From Bono and Sinéad O'Connor to
Nick Cave
, modern music is filled with spiritual seekers. The latter wrote of his spiritual rediscovery, after his son's death a decade ago, a 'considerable surprise'.
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'I have found some of my truths,' he wrote, 'in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird and thoroughly human institution of the [Anglican] Church.'
Cave's spiritual return came just as German theologian Jörg Lauster began arguing that, despite rumours of its demise, the search for transcendence was alive and well in western Europe.
In his best-selling 2014 short history of Christianity, Die Verzauberung der Welt (Enchanting the World), he argues that debates about church decline and the departure of some believers say little about those who remain – or return – to seek out thoughts, places and people they perceive as holy.
'Encountering the holy teaches us to be humble, to recognise that there is something that defies my comprehension,' he told Germany's Zeitzeichen magazine in December, 'which stands fundamentally opposed to the modern credos of 'you are master of your own life'.'
As a professor of theology in Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, the 59-year-old describes his challenge as 'demonstrating to people what they are actually losing when they submit uncritically to this modern hubris'.
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Half a century ago the German constitutional court judge Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde reflected on this as a core dilemma of the modern, liberal secularised state.
Unlike an absolute monarchy basing its legitimacy on the divine right of kings, for instance, the modern secular liberal state 'live[s] from prerequisites which it cannot itself guarantee'.
'It can endure only if the freedom it bestows on its citizens takes some regulation from the interior,' he wrote, 'both from a moral substance of the individuals and a certain homogeneity of society at large.'
This so-called Böckenförde dictum has been hotly debated – and misunderstood – ever since. In 2010, the now retired judge clarified his remarks to argue that any liberal order, to survive in modern Europe, requires a unifying ethos drawing on a common culture. This, in turn, draws on sources 'such as Christianity, the Enlightenment and humanism. But not automatically any religion'.
Tapping multiple sources of insight and tradition creates an overall equilibrium while failing to recognise all, he warned, set a society on a road to unrest, totalitarianism and a modern variant of confessional civil war.
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English historian Tom Holland made similar arguments in his 2019 book Dominion, that even a secular Europe of empty churches and dusty pews 'remains firmly moored to its Christian past'.
Core western values we may regard as universal and self-evident – love thy neighbour, protect the weak, even those omnipresent 'be kind' tattoos – are anything but.
Our European air is permeated with invisible, omnipresent ethical-faith particles and principles, Prof Holland argues, 'so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye ... breathed in equally by everyone'.
Europe's secular liberals may, in many cases, be standing on the shoulders of the very Christians they mock or even despise. The tensions only arise, he adds, when this historical fact is forgotten – or denied.
Many builders of European modernity, in an admittedly very different world, had no worries about maintaining an equilibrium that included Judeo-Christian values and faith.
For liberal philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, Christianity offered 'the complete spirit of the ethics of utility'.
Albert Einstein, raised by what he called 'entirely irreligious' Jewish parents in Munich, and his theories of space and time may have contributed to the blueprint for a secular modernity. But he embraced what he called the 'God of Spinoza', the Portuguese-Jewish philosopher.
It would be very surprising if this religion had now revealed all its secrets
—
Oxford religion professor Diarmaid MacCulloch
Religiosity was, for the Nobel prizewinner, about remaining open to a feeling that 'what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms'.
That chimes with US philosopher Richard Dworkin in his final book, Religion Without God, from 2013. The roots that modern, secularist humanism share with mainstream theist religions are two-fold, he writes: the idea that our universe is a thing of sublime beauty and wonder and that human life has objective meaning, creating ethical and moral responsibilities for oneself and others.
'Not just if we happen to think this is important,' Dworkin adds, 'but because it is in itself important whether we think so or not.'
For instance religious attitudes insist that its 'real and fundamental values' are 'as real as trees or pain', so that 'our felt conviction that cruelty is wrong is a conviction that cruelty is really wrong'.
Like Böckenförde and Holland, Dworkin argues that liberal, secular societies are weak not when they admit their Judeo-Christian roots – but when they deny them.
This encourages a spiritual illiteracy that leaves an opening for another group which hardcore liberal secularists despise even more than 'the Jesus people': the reactionary far-right.
Over the last decade, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has presented itself as defending the country's 'Judeo-Christian cultural roots'. I have yet to meet an AfD politician who could explain to me what these roots actually are.
In 2015, as the AfD began to grow, Angela Merkel was asked if she saw Islamisation as a threat to European identity. The former chancellor said she was less worried by that than Germany's cultural Christians – and defenders of its heritage – who couldn't even explain Pentecost.
As the refugee crisis began to build, she added: 'I would like to see more people who have the courage to say 'I am a Christian believer' and more people who have the courage to enter into a dialogue.'
Pope Francis meets US vice-president JD Vance. Photograph: Vatican Media/AQP
A decade on, however, it seems that those most likely to come out as believers are those least interested in dialogue.
The late
Pope Francis's final state guest, hours before he died on Monday, was US vice-president JD Vance
. Six years after becoming a Catholic, Vance has embraced his new faith with a convert's zeal.
Last February he presented what looked like the first outline of an America First Christianity, telling Fox News: 'You love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.'
Vance said this thinking informed
Trump administration migration policy
and was in line with the teaching of ordo amoris – the order of love – of St Thomas Aquinas.
Pope Francis delivered a swift reply days later, telling US bishops in a letter there was no Catholic impediment to policy that regulates orderly and legal migration.
'However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others,' he wrote. 'What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.'
It's unlikely the two reached an accord in their brief conversation on Easter Sunday. The photograph of their meeting – a grinning, poised Vance opposite an exhausted, sagging Francis – may well become historic: a collision of two very different understandings of Catholic Christianity's power and potential.
From Hindu nationalism and political Islam to China's recent accord with the Holy See, religion and faith have always been key ingredients of power politics. It's just in western Europe, after decades in abeyance, that this is once again becoming more obvious.
On matters of faith and power, Europe is facing into a new reality of Trump-branded bibles and neo-Catholic peddlers of theological half-truths. In their pitch to believers, self-interested faith and nationalism – not liberalism and co-operation – are guarantees for security and prosperity.
The Trump camp's latest, unlikely poster boy in this struggle is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi Lutheran Pastor and theologian, executed 80 years ago.
The Trump camp's
Project 2025
document flips Bonhoeffer's attacks on un-Christian fascist hypocrisy into an attack of 'open-borders activism' that promotes 'one's own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience'.
Horrified descendants of the pastor have hit back in an open letter, warning that Trump activists 'who invoke Dietrich Bonhoeffer to justify anti-democratic, xenophobic aspirations are either misinformed or malicious'.
As Europe struggles with the disintegrating postwar consensus on trade, security and the rules-based order, writer John Gray suggested the time has come to dust off Judeo-Christian teachings. Not just their tenets of justice, fairness and individual rights, but timely wisdom of 'how to live with insoluble dilemmas'.
'Unless the sense of reality preserved in these traditions can somehow be retrieved,' wrote Gray earlier this month in the New Statesman, 'the West is destined to stumble from one fantasy to another until, perhaps with relief, it surrenders to barbarism'.
Not everyone's view is that bleak. Oxford religion professor Diarmaid MacCulloch sees European secularism, and an emerging post-secular age, as a chance. Like a single candle burning in an empty church, modern Europe has an opportunity to re-engage and 'remake religion for a society which has decided to do without it'.
At the conclusion of his 1,200-page opus Christianity, Prof MacCulloch remarks: 'It would be very surprising if this religion had now revealed all its secrets.'
Derek Scally's book, The Best Catholics in the World, is published by Penguin
What kind of Pope will the Church pick next?
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Shankill Butcher's cousin leads far-right protests in Dublin and Limerick

Sunday World

4 hours ago

Sunday World

Shankill Butcher's cousin leads far-right protests in Dublin and Limerick

Cousin of notorious Shankill Butcher seen at front of anti-immigration rallies in Dublin and Limerick A loyalist ex-prisoner and cousin of a notorious Shankill Butchers cut-throat killer is leading Irish far-right protests, the Sunday World can reveal. Convicted armed robber Mark Sinclair – a one-time UVF thug from the hardline loyalist Shankill area of Belfast – has been seen recently leading anti-immigrant protest rallies in Dublin and Limerick. But the Sunday World can reveal that Sinclair is a diehard loyalist who served 17 years in prison. He is also the cousin of Billy Moore, the feared knife-killer deputy to Shankill Butchers boss Lenny Murphy, whose gang roamed the city for years, picking up innocent Catholics before mutilating and murdering them. Mark Sinclair on the march Sinclair used his YouTube channel 'Freedom Dad' to voice strong support for the protests in the Republic and, by his own admission, he was welcomed with 'open arms' by the 'Limerick Says No' campaign last week. And by way of reassuring his concerned loyalist mates back in Belfast, Sinclair later said of his new-found friends: 'Not every one of them wants a united Ireland. I very rarely hear it.' But last night, Malachy Steenson – organiser of the Dublin protest – distanced himself from the former UVF man. He told the Sunday World: 'I have no connection to Sinclair. And I only learned he was at the protest, when I was told by the media. Now, you have to wonder how some of the southern journos even recognised him?' At anti-immigration protest in Limerick last weekend, the former UVF man told viewers on his YouTube channel: 'Times have changed. You don't hear so much about it these days. As you know, we're not giving anything up. The six counties belong to us. 'I don't know how long it's going to belong to Britain, but it will always belong to us, the Ulstermen and women in Northern Ireland. 'I'm trying to come across as honest and transparent. I'm not coming down here pretending to be this or that. I'm an Ulsterman and I'm proud to be an Ulsterman. 'But I like the Irish. I think it's an amazing part of the world. And not all of them want an all-Ireland. I very rarely hear it. Even 'Tiocfaidh ár lá – it's just Irish for 'our day will come'. Loyalist Mark Sinclair making a live YouTube broadcast at an anti-immigrant protest in Limerick last week . 'It's like 'slán go fóill a chara' – see you later my friend – it's just a foreign language. And I know some people won't like that. 'But it's just like France or Spanish. I wouldn't get too hung up on it,' said Sinclair. But he devoted most of his vitriol to immigrants and refugees who have come to Ireland. Said Sinclair. 'I'm going to talk with some friends to see how we can stop these men coming from Ireland into Northern Ireland. 'We need to stand up as men and women, Protestants and Catholics. We need to stop these men coming in from Ireland or England,' he said. He added: 'I'm Freedom Dad and God bless every single one of you.' But what Sinclair failed to disclose as he mingled with activists during his whistle-stop trip south of the border, was that he once shared a house with his close relative, the notorious Shankill Butcher Billy Moore. And it was from Moore's flat on the outskirts of Edinburgh that Sinclair was scooped by Scottish cops over a series of armed bank robberies on the west coast. Police confirmed a dozen people had been arrested during the raid on suspicion of assault, kidnap and extortion. Sinclair told the High Court in Ayr that he had been hired by the British Secret Service to spy on loyalist terrorists in Scotland. And he also said he was paid £50,000 each time he met his handler. Despite his claims, the trial judge sentenced him to 17 years in jail. Sinclair led a gang of Belfast-born desperadoes behind a spate of bank robberies on the west coast of Scotland, while the were based in Moore's flat on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Soon the flat became known to police as a 24 hours-a-day drugs and drink den. A victim of the Shankill Butchers Sinclair – who was in his mid-20s – established himself as the leader of an armed robbery outfit. And in an effort to throw the cops off their scent, Sinclair's robbery squad targeted Clydsdale Banks on the west coast, because rural banking halls had less security than normal. Sinclair wore a mask to cover his face and he brandished a hand gun during robberies at three banks, putting staff into a state of sheer panic. But after armed Scottish detectives raided Moore's flat, Sinclair was arrested along with two associates and charged with several bank robberies. Cutthroat killer William Moore And in October 2003 at the High Court in Ayr, he was found guilty of robbing banks in Troon and Stewarton in Ayrshire and Dalbeattie in Dumfries and Galloway. He was also found not guilty of robbing another two banks in Ayrshire. In the mid-1970s, the names Lenny Murphy and Billy Moore struck fear into the hearts of Catholics in north and west Belfast. When Murphy was jailed on other charges, Moore succeeded him as the main cut-throat killer in the UVF murder gang. At that time, the Shankill Butchers stalked the near empty streets of inner city Belfast, looking for victims. But despite being the leader, Lenny Murphy never stood trial for the Butchers Gang crimes. During a major criminal trial he was simply referred to as 'Mr. X' . But on November 16 1982 – shortly after his release from prison on arms charges – Murphy was ambushed and machine-gunned to death by IRA serial killer, Gerard 'Hucker' Moyna as he pulled up in a car outside his girlfriend's house in Glencairn. The IRA had received inside information on Murphy's movements from leading UDA extortionist Jimmy Craig, as part of an insurance policy to prevent the IRA from killing him. On May 17, 2009, Billy Moore died aged 60 of a suspected heart attack at his home in the loyalist Mount Vernon estate, off Belfast's Shore Road. A short time before, Moore had appeared in court charged with stealing scrap metal from the Belfast Harbour estate. But after Moore pleaded guilty to carrying out 11 of the 19 Shankill Butchers murders, Mr Justice Turlough O'Donnell told him: 'You Moore, pleaded guilty to 11 murders carried out in a manner so cruel and revolting, as to be beyond the comprehension of any normal human being.' And he pointedly added: 'I am satisfied that without you, many of the murders would not have been committed.' Addressing Moore and Robert 'Basher' Bates – another member of the Butcher gang who was involved in 14 murders – Judge O'Donnell told them: 'I see no reason whatever – apart from terminal illness – why either of you should ever be released.' During police interrogation, Moore collapsed in floods of tears and he asked detectives: 'Did I really do these things?' He received 11 life sentences, but as he was led from the dock he smiled and waved to supporters in the public gallery. Loyalist Mark Sinclair making a live YouTube broadcast at an anti-immigrant protest in Limerick last week News in 90 Seconds - June 22nd But Moore's swagger belied the fact that two years before, following his arrest, the knife killer had begged the police to get him a deal to serve his sentence outside Northern Ireland, in return for him telling them everything they needed to know about the Shankill Butchers gang. Moore confessed to committing 11 murders and involvement in another seven. And he also named all of his accomplices. But under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, Moore was released after spending 18 years behind bars.

Loyalist cousin of Shankill Butcher leading far-right protests in Dublin and Limerick

Sunday World

7 hours ago

Sunday World

Loyalist cousin of Shankill Butcher leading far-right protests in Dublin and Limerick

Pope Leo flags AI's impact on children's intellectual and spiritual development

Irish Examiner

2 days ago

Irish Examiner

Pope Leo flags AI's impact on children's intellectual and spiritual development

Pope Leo XIV has warned that artificial intelligence could negatively impact the intellectual, neurological and spiritual development of young people as he pressed one of the priorities of his young pontificate. History's first American pope sent a message to a conference of AI and ethics, part of which was taking place in the Vatican in a sign of the Holy See's concern for the new technologies and what they mean for humanity. In the message, Leo said any further development of AI must be evaluated according to the 'superior ethical criterion' of the need to safeguard the dignity of each human being, while respecting the diversity of the world's population. He warned specifically that new generations are most at risk, given they have never had such quick access to information. 'All of us, I am sure, are concerned for children and young people and the possible consequences of the use of AI on their intellectual and neurological development,' he said in the message. 'Society's wellbeing depends upon their being given the ability to develop their God-given gifts and capabilities' and not allow them to confuse mere access to data with intelligence. 'In the end, authentic wisdom has more to do with recognising the true meaning of life, than with the availability of data,' he said. Leo, who was elected in May after the death of Pope Francis, has identified AI as one of the most critical matters facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to defending human dignity, justice and labour. He has explained his concern for AI by invoking his namesake, Pope Leo XIII. That Leo was pope during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and made the plight of workers, and the need to guarantee their rights and dignity, a key priority. Towards the end of his pontificate, Francis became increasingly vocal about the threats to humanity posed by AI and called for an international treaty to regulate it. Francis said politicians must take the lead in making sure AI remains human-centric, so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less-lethal tools always remain made by humans and not machines.