The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 1945-2000 (review)

How are you supposed to respond when the soccer team you have been brought up to support but about which you have always had mixed feelings abruptly changes its manager and starts to play the open imaginative style of soccer you have always urged it to adopt but as a consequence begins to lose all of its matches and ends up being relegated from the league?

That, broadly speaking, is the problem confronted by many of the contributors to this volume. The product of a conference held at Leuven in 2002, it brings together a team of historians, sociologists, and political scientists predominantly sympathetic to the progressive Catholicism that appeared to have triumphed at the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, but that, little more than a generation later, had led to the profound marginalization of Catholicism in late-twentieth-century Europe. The reality of that decline is conveyed graphically in the statistical presentation by Karel Dobbelaere and Jaak Billiet (pp. 114-20), in which they trace the remorseless falls in levels of church attendance, baptisms, and marriages that have occurred every single year in Belgium since the 1960s. Why should that have been so? Of course, one might conclude somewhat heretically that the change of direction had been the wrong move. Some, notably Wilhelm Damberg and Patrick Pasture, flirt with this argument, suggesting (as has been proposed by Denis Pelletier) that Catholicism simply lost its appeal (one should perhaps say, in deference to contemporary market language, brand distinctiveness) when it diminished its "otherness" in favor of a soft-focus ethical set of values, thereby opening the way in recent years to the more militant Protestant sects or to the do-it-yourself religious syncretism well described here, with almost a straight face, by Liliane Voyé.

Most, of the contributors, however, are inclined, and not without good reason, to argue that matters were not that simple. For a start, the change of direction that occurred within Catholicism in the 1960s was neither as radical nor as abrupt as the architects of the Second Vatican Council, and their many retrospective defenders, have tended to suggest. The reassertion of a Catholic confessional culture in Europe after 1945 was indeed remarkable and probably owed less to hierarchical repression than is suggested here by Gerd-Rainer Horn in his eloquent evocation of the defeat of the Left Catholics of the immediate postwar years. But the dividing lines between innovation and tradition were never clear-cut. This is a point well made in a splendidly subversive essay by Étienne Fouilloux, in which he enjoys demonstrating that the ideas of a nouvelle chrétienté advocated by many soi-disant progressive Catholic intellectuals since the 1930s were always characterized by an "ambiguïté congénitale" (p. 48). For all of the rhetorical rejection engaged in by figures such as Jacques Maritain of a somewhat parodic ghetto Catholicism, their ideas always retained space for the dream of a rechristianization of society, which owed much to the militant Catholicism of the inter-war years. The formulations of intellectuals have, however, perhaps occupied too prominent a position in accounts of Catholic change. In an important article, Lodewijk Winkeler pays due attention to the dogmatic relativism that he identifies as having developed almost clandestinely among Dutch theologians long before the Second Vatican Council, but rightly places this change in the context of a much broader change in the mentality of the professionals of Dutch Catholicism: seminary teachers, medical and welfare bureaucrats, mental health and youth workers, and, indeed, priests. As Winkeler's contribution strongly conveys, a remorseless process of change gathered pace in a semi-visible form among these professionals from the 1940s onward, as they rejected a specifically Catholic worldview in favor of a more neutral definition of their responsibilities...