By JOHN HOOPER, RIAZAT BUTT, RORY CARROLL AND XAN RICE - OBSERVER
Added: Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:18:12 UTC

Five years after Benedict's election, the state of the church in Europe is no longer a problem for the Catholic leadership; it is a nightmare. Successive scandals over the molestation and, in some cases, the rape by priests of children and adolescents in their care have led thousands of European Catholics to question, or abandon, their faith.

The impact is most clearly visible in the pope's native Germany where religious affiliation is officially registered so that the members of each denomination can pay for its upkeep. Figures published by the daily Die Welt in April showed that, in most dioceses, more than twice as many Catholics had left their church in the previous month than a year earlier.

But then the long-delayed revelations of priestly sex abuse have merely accentuated an existing trend. The German church had been dwindling for years: between 1990 and 2008, the number of registered Catholics fell by 11%.

Though the decline in other countries cannot be measured as precisely, it can be adduced from the visible evidence of poorly-attended services, half-empty seminaries and de-consecrated churches.Priests like Paul McCartney's Father McKenzie "writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear" can be found in sacristies from Galway to Graz. The only mitigating factor has been the growth of immigrant populations that, in many parts of Europe, are disproportionately Catholic. In Britain particularly, an influx of eastern Europeans, South Americans and West Africans has filled the pews, and even led to claims that Catholicism has overtaken Anglicanism as the leading national religion.

But evidence from Switzerland suggests the "immigration bonus" will be temporary. A study by the Schweizerisches Pastoralsoziologisches Institut three years ago found that, whereas in 1970 four-fifths of immigrants were Catholic, by 2000 the proportion had dropped to 44%. That was partly because a growing number of Switzerland's newcomers were from non-Catholic countries. But it also reflected a tendency identified in other countries for immigrants of all religions to give up their faith as they integrate into the increasingly secular societies of western Europe.

This extract is from the middle of a long article

TAGGED: RELIGION, VATICAN/ROMAN CATHOLICISM