European Churches Attempt To “Get With The Times” To Stop Losing Believers

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The EU’s Catholic Church appears to be, for all intents and purposes, into a sort of crisis, and that is quite evident. The Catholic church, for example, appears to be losing its faithful. In 2019, 272,771 people left the Catholic Church, which is 26.2% more than in 2018 (216,078 people).

For example, in 2015, just upwards of 181,000 people left the Catholic Church in Germany.

To reverse the trend, Catholic bishops are going to undertake some inclusive actions to make the Catholic faith “more attractive” with the help of very extraordinary methods, for example –  “through the introduction of the female priesthood (ordination to the deacon), weakening celibacy and the revision of Catholic sexual morality.”

This was stated by the head of the Episcopal Conference of Germany, Georg Boetzing.

This tendency of losing believers is also evident in the US.

In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade.

Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.

The current mainstream narrative is such, that the Church, as a generally conservative “institution” is usually behind the times, and the times are moving quite quick past the year 2000.

Inclusiveness is all the rage now, and currently, it is evidently not being as inclusive. With the media pressure from every direction, those who attend church and are believers are viewed as “old-timey” and “close-minded.”

Naturally, this would lead to people wanting to be part of what’s “popular” and mostly what’s “profitable” now – what leads to the greatest benefit. And it is being part of the mainstream.

This, however, fails to provide such a sense of community, since the mainstream narrative has no unshakeable foundations, it appears to be a house entirely built out of cards, and attempts to replace some of the cards are commonplace, but they sometimes lead to parts of the house falling apart.

And this is what leads to fraud such as white individuals pretending to be black, others pretending to be trans, or other kinds of fraud that seeks to be part of the mainstream and benefit from the status quo.

The church is also increasingly being used in political games, examples such as these are visible in Ukraine, Montenegro, Belarus and more.

The church can also obviously be bought – this is evident in Ecumenial Patriarch Bartholomew’s silence on Turkey turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque – his silence being bought by the full reopening of the Sumela Monastery for tourists and faithful alike. Bartholomew not only failed to mention Hagia Sophia at all, but he even thanked Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for all his support and assistance.

Therefore, there is no surprise that religious organizations that turned to be loyal followers of the current neo-liberal mainstream and turned themselves into tools of the Euro-Atlantic establishment’s games have been losing their popularity. And it does not seem that the further open support of neo-liberal trends will help them to restore their positions among conservative parts of European societies. Instead, every such step makes these churches closer to pseudo-church organizations that the Euro-Atlantic establishment is promoting in Eastern Europe (like the ‘independent’ Montenegrin or Ukrainian churches that have no real support among the local population) to achieve own political goals.

MORE ON THE TOPIC:

• Foreign Media Expelled From Belarus As Propaganda Against Lukashenko Ramps Up
• The New Status Of Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia

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