Concluding Document of the Plenary Assembly
Where is Your God?
Responding to the Challenge of Unbelief and Religious Indifference Today
Introduction
1. The Christian Faith at the dawn of the new millennium is faced with the challenge of unbelief and religious indifference. The Second Vatican Council, already forty years ago, delivered this observation: "Many of our contemporaries have never recognized the intimate and vital link with God, or have even explicitly rejected it. Atheism must therefore be counted among the most serious problems of our time and must be submitted to closer examination" (Gaudium et Spes , n.19).
To this end, Pope Paul VI created in 1965 the Secretariat for Non-believers and entrusted it to the direction of Cardinal Franz König. In 1980 Pope John Paul II called on me to succeed Cardinal König and also asked me to create the Pontifical Council for Culture, which he would unite to the Secretariat in 1993, after it had become the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Non-believers. His motivation, given in the Apostolic Letter motu proprio, Inde a Pontificatus, is clear: "to promote the meeting of the saving message of the Gospel with the cultures of our times, often marked by unbelief and religious indifference" (art. 1) and to promote at the same time "the study of the problem of unbelief and of religious indifference found in various forms in different cultural milieus, enquiring into the causes and the consequences for the Christian Faith" (art. 2).
To carry out this mission, the Pontifical Council for Culture gathered information from competent authorities across the globe in broad ranging enquiry. More than 300 replies came from five continents and the results were put before the members of the Pontifical Council for Culture during its Plenary Assembly of March 2004, along two main axes: how to welcome the "joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties" of the people of our times, which he have called the "anchor points for the handing on of the faith"; and which are the best pathways to follow in bringing the good news of the Gospel of Christ to non-believers, to misbelievers and the indifference of our times, how to raise their interest, how to make them question themselves on the meaning of their existence, and how to help the Church transmit to them her message of faith and love at the heart of cultures, novo millennio ineunte.
To do this, it is necessary to respond to these questions: Who are the non-believers? What is their culture? What are they saying to us? What can we say to them? What dialogue can we establish with them? What can we do to shake up their interest, stir up their questions, nourish their reflections, and hand on the faith to new generations, often victims of the religious indifference mobilized by the dominant culture?
Such questions are dear to the pastors of the Church and express one of the most worrying challenges of "our both momentous and fascinating times" (Redemptoris Missio, n. 38): the challenge of a culture of unbelief and of religious indifference that, from the West in prey to secularization, spreads across the megalopolises of all the continents.
In fact, in the vast cultural areas where the majority do belong to the Church, there is a rupture in the handing on the faith, intimately linked to the process of abandonment of a popular culture long attached to and impregnated by Christianity. It is important to take into consideration the factors that condition this process of distancing, of weakening, and of obscuring the faith in the transforming cultural milieus where Christians dwell, in order to present some concrete pastoral propositions to respond to the challenges of the new evangelization. For the cultural habitat, where one lives, influences one's ways of thinking and of behaving, one's values and criteria of judgment, and it also raises questions at once difficult and decisive.
Since the fall of the atheist regimes, secularism, tied to the phenomenon of globalization, has spread as a post-Christian cultural model. "When secularization transforms itself into secularism (Evangelii Nuntiandi , n. 55), there is a serious cultural and spiritual crisis, one sign of which is the loss of respect for the person and the spread of a kind of anthropological nihilism which reduces human beings to their instincts and tendencies" (Towards a Pastoral Approach to Culture , n. 23) [1].
For many, the waning of the dominant ideologies gave way to a lack of hope. The dreams of a better future for humanity, characteristics of scientism, of the enlightenment, of Marxism, and of the social revolutions of the 1960s have disappeared and their place has been taken by a pragmatic and disenchanted world. The end of the cold war and the risk of total destruction of the planet has given way to other threats and perils for humanity: world-wide terrorism, new hot spots for war, pollution of the planet, reduction of hydro resources, climate change provoked by egoistic behavior, experimentation on the embryo, legal recognition of abortion and euthanasia, cloning, etc. Many people's hopes of a better future have disappeared and they have fallen into disenchantment in the seemingly somber present, fearing an even more uncertain future. The speed and the depth of the cultural transformations which have occurred over the last few decades are the backdrop for the enormous upheaval of many of the cultures of our times. Such is the cultural context for the Church's enormous challenge of unbelief and religious indifference: how to open up new ways for dialogue with so many people who, at first sight, are hardly interested, much less see the necessity for it, even though the thirst for God can never be completely extinguished in the heart of man, where the religious dimension is deeply anchored.
The aggressive attitude towards the Church, without completely disappearing, has given way, sometimes, to derision and resentment in certain quarters and often, to a widespread stance of relativism, practical atheism and indifference. It is the time of what I would call - after homo faber, homo sapiens and homo religiosus - homo indifferens, even among the believers, who are in the prey of secularization. The individual and egoistic search for well-being, as well as the pressure of a culture without spiritual anchorage, eclipse the sense of that which is truly good for man, and reduce his desire for the transcendent to a vague search for spirituality which satisfies itself in a new religiosity without reference to the personal God, without adherence to a body of doctrine, and without belonging to a community of faith nourished by the celebration of the revealed mysteries.
2. The spiritual drama that the Second Vatican Council considered as one of the most serious problems of our times (Gaudium et Spes , n.19), sees a silent distancing of entire populations from religious practice and even from any reference to the faith. The Church today is confronted more by indifference and practical unbelief than with atheism. Atheism is in decline throughout the world, but indifference and unbelief develop in cultural milieus marked by secularism. It is no longer a question of a public affirmation of atheism, with the exception of a few countries, but of a diffuse presence, almost omnipresent, in the culture. Less visible, it is more perilous, for the dominant culture spreads it in a subtle manner in the subconscious of believers, from Western to Eastern Europe, but also in the megalopolises of Africa, America and Asia. It is a veritable sickness of the soul which induces to live "as though God did not exist", a neo-paganism that idolizes material goods, the achievements of work, and the fruits of power.
At the same time, we witness what some people call the "return of the sacred". It is actually the rise of a new religiosity. Rather than a return to traditional religious practices, it is a search for new ways of living and expressing the religious dimension inherent in paganism. This "spiritual awakening" is marked by the complete refusal to belong, and the search for an experience which is entirely individual, autonomous and guided by one's own subjectivity. This instinctive religiosity is more emotive than doctrinal and expresses itself without any reference to a personal God. The "God Yes, Church No" of the 1960s has become "religion yes, God no" or even, "the religiosity yes, God no" of this beginning of the millennium: believers yes, but without adhering to the message handed on by the Church! At the very heart of that which we call religious indifference, spiritual desire is again making itself felt. This resurgence, far from coinciding with a return to faith or religious practice, is a veritable challenge for Christianity.
In fact, the new forms of unbelief and the diffusion of this "new religiosity" are intimately linked. Unbelief and bad-belief often come as a pair. In their deepest roots, they show at the same time both the symptom and the erroneous response of a crisis in values and in the dominant culture. The desire for autonomy, incapable of suppressing the thirst for the fullness and eternity which God wrote into the heart of man, seeks palliatives in the gargantuan supermarkets where all sorts of gurus offer recipes for an illusory happiness. Nevertheless, in this spiritual thirst an anchor point can be found for the proclamation of the Gospel, through the "evangelization of desire” [2].
Sociological studies based on censuses, opinion polls, and inquests have multiplied in the last years offering interesting but often differing statistics. Some are based on attendance at Sunday Mass, others on the number of baptisms, others on religious preference, still others on the contents of the faith. The results, complex as they are, should not be interpreted out of context, as the great diversity of terms employed to express the important variety of possible attitudes towards the faith shows: there are atheists, non-believers, unbelievers, misbelievers or bad-believers, agnostics, non-practicing, indifferent, without religion, etc. Indeed, some of those who attend Sunday mass do not feel as though they are in tune with the Catholic Church's doctrine and morals, and among those who claim not to belong to any religion or religious confession, the search for God and an inquisitiveness after the eternal life are not totally absent, nor indeed, sometimes some sort of prayer.
To understand these phenomena, their causes and consequences, to discern methods to resolve them with the grace of God, is doubtless one of the most important tasks for the Church today. This publication of the Pontifical Council for Culture would like to offer its specific contribution by presenting this new study of unbelief, of religious indifference, and of the new forms of religiosity that emerge and spread presenting themselves as alternatives to the traditional religions.
3. The responses that the Pontifical Council for Culture received to its inquiry paint a picture that is complex, changing and in continuous evolution, with diversified characteristics. Nevertheless some meaningful things can be drawn out:
Globally, unbelief is not increasing in the world. It is a phenomenon seen primarily in the Western world. The cultural model it inspires spreads through globalization, and exerts an influence on the different cultures of the world, and erodes popular religiosity from them.
Militant atheism recedes and no longer has a determining influence on public life, except in those regimes where an atheistic political system is still in power. Contrarily, a certain cultural hostility is being spread against religions, especially Christianity and Catholicism in particular, notably through the means of social communication, and is promoted by Masonic sources active in different organizations.
Atheism and unbelief, phenomena that once seemed to have something rather masculine and urban about them and that were found particularly among those with an above-average culture, have changed their profile. Today the phenomena seem to be connected more to lifestyle, and the distinction between men and women is no longer significant. In fact, unbelief increases among women who work outside the home, and even reaches more or less the same level of that among men.
Religious indifference or practical atheism is growing rapidly. And agnosticism remains. A large part of secularized societies lives with no reference to religious authority or values. For homo indifferens, "Perhaps God does not exist, it doesn't matter anyway we don't miss him". Well-being and the culture of secularization provoke in consciences an eclipse of need and desire for all that is not immediate. They reduce aspiration towards the transcendent to a simple subjective need for spirituality, and happiness to material well-being and the gratification of sexual impulses.
A dwindling number of regular church-goers can be seen in those societies marked by secularization. But this undeniably worrying fact does not, however, mean that unbelief is on the increase. Rather, it points to a degraded form of believing: believing without belonging. It is a phenomenon of "deconfessionalization" of homo religiosus, who, refusing to belong to any binding confession, jumps into and out of an endless confusion of heterogeneous movements. A number of those who declare they belong to no religion or religious confession, nevertheless declare themselves to be religious. The silent exodus of many Catholics heads for the sects and new religious movements [3], especially in Latin America and Subsaharan Africa.
In the West, where science and modern technology have neither suppressed religious meaning nor satisfied it, a new quest that is more spiritual than religious is developing, but it is not a return to traditional religious practices. It is the search for new ways of living and expressing the need for religiosity inherent in the heart of man. Often, this spiritual awakening develops in an autonomous fashion and without any links to the contents of faith and morals handed on by the church.
Finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, a disaffection is occurring both in terms of militant atheism and in terms of traditional faith. It is a disaffection in secularized western cultures prey to the refusal or simple abandonment of traditional beliefs, and affects both religious practice and adherence to the doctrinal and moral contents of the faith. But the man whom we call homo indifferens never ceases to be a homo religiosus; he is just seeking a new and ever-changing religiosity. The analysis of this phenomenon reveals a kaleidoscopic situation where anything and its opposite can occur: on the one hand, those who believe without belonging, and on the other, those who belong without believing in the entire content of the faith and who, above all, do not feel obliged to respect the ethical dimension of the faith. In truth, only God knows what is at the bottom of our hearts, where His Grace works secretly. And the Church never ceases to walk new pathways to share with all the message of Love of which She is guardian.
This document has two main parts. The first presents a summary analysis of unbelief and religious indifference, their causes, and a presentation of the new forms of religiosity in comparison with the faith. The second offers a series of concrete proposals for the dialogue with non-believers and for the evangelization of cultures marked by unbelief and indifference. In doing this, the Pontifical Council for Culture does not pretend to propose miraculous recipes, for it knows that faith is always a Grace, a mysterious meeting between God and the freedom of man. It desires merely to suggest some privileged ways for the new evangelization, to which we have been called by John Paul II, new in its expression, its methods and its ardor, to meet the non-believers and the misbelievers and above all to reach the indifferent: how to meet them in the depth of themselves, beyond the shell that imprisons them. This route is part of the "new stage of the Church's journey" that Pope John Paul II invites all the Church to travel "to take up her evangelizing mission with fresh enthusiasm", "stressing that it is not a case of imposing on non-believers a vision based on faith", "with the respect due to the different paths of different people and with sensitivity to the diversity of cultures in which the Christian message must be planted" (Novo Millennio Ineunte , n. 1, 2, 51 and 40).
I. New Forms of Unbelief and Religiosity
1. A Cultural Phenomenon
In traditionally Christian countries, a relatively widespread culture gives unbelief, on its platform of religious indifference, a practical and no longer theoretical aspect. It has become a cultural phenomenon, in the sense that often one becomes a non-believer not through choice at the end of a long inner struggle, but it just happens de facto, because "that's what everybody else does". This is the result of the lack of effective evangelization, the growing levels of ignorance of religious tradition and Christian culture, and the lack of offers of formative spiritual experiences capable of raising marvel and determining belonging. This is how the Holy Father describes it: "Often knowledge of Christianity is taken for granted, whereas in truth the bible is rarely read and scarcely studied, catechesis is often shallow, and the sacraments hardly received. Therefore, instead of an authentic faith a vague religious sentiment is spread, which easily turns into agnosticism and practical atheism" [4].
2. New and Old Causes of Unbelief
It would be naïve to blame the spread of unbelief and the new forms of religiosity on a single cause, all the more so since this cultural phenomenon is more tied to group behavior than individual choice. Some affirm that the problem of unbelief is more a question of negligence than malice. Others are firmly convinced that, behind this phenomenon, there are organized movements, associations, and deliberately orchestrated campaigns.
In any event, it is good to examine, as requested by the Second Vatican Council, the causes which incite people to distance themselves from the faith. The Church "strives to detect in the atheistic mind the hidden causes for the denial of God. Conscious of how weighty are the questions which atheism raises, and motivated by love for all men, she believes these questions ought to be examined seriously and more profoundly" (Gaudium et Spes , n. 21). Why do some people not believe in God? Why do they distance themselves from the Church? What can we make of their reasoning? What can we do in response?
The same constitution, Gaudium et Spes (nn. 19-21), identifies some causes of contemporary atheism. The diagnosis made then remains accurate today and is at the core of the following analysis of the new causes of unbelief and of the religious indifference of our times.
2.1. The All-encompassing Presumptions of Modern Science
Among the causes of atheism, the Council mentions scientism. This vision of the world without any reference to God, pretends to reject His existence on the basis of scientific principles, and has become widespread and commonplace, thanks to its widespread diffusion in the Mass Media. Some recent cosmological and evolutionary theories, abundantly repeated by publications and popular television programs, and the development of neuroscience, contribute to the rejection of a transcendent personal being, retained as a "useless hypothesis", as they pretend that "there is only the unknown and not the unknowable".
While it remains a problematic, today the faith-science relationship has changed significantly. A certain defiance vis à vis science, a fall in prestige and the reappraisal of its role contribute to a greater openness to the religious dimension of the human situation and are accompanied by the return of a somewhat irrational and esoteric religiosity. Programs and courses teaching the complementary relationship of science and religion help to remedy this aspect.
2.2. The Absolutization of Man as the Centre of the Universe
Even if they neither said so nor named them, the Council Fathers had in mind the Marxist-Leninist atheist regimes and their attempts to construct a society without God. Today in Europe these regimes have fallen, but the underlying anthropological model has not disappeared, indeed it has become stronger taking on the philosophical inherited from the enlightenment. Speaking of the European situation, but with a clarity that can be applied to all of the western world, the Holy Father affirms that there is underway an "attempt to promote a vision of man apart from God and apart from Christ". This sort of thinking has led to man being considered as "the absolute centre of reality, a view which makes him occupy – falsely – the place of God and which forgets that it is not man who creates God, but rather God who creates man. Forgetfulness of God led to the abandonment of man". It is therefore "no wonder that in this context a vast field has opened for the unrestrained development of nihilism in philosophy, of relativism in values and morality, and of pragmatism – and even a cynical hedonism – in daily life" (Ecclesia in Europa , n. 9).
Perhaps the most characteristic element of the dominant culture of the secularized West is the diffusion of a form of subjectivism. A type of "profession of faith" in the absolute subjectivity of the individual, disguised as humanism, it is actually self-centered, egoistic, narcissistic, whose only centre is the individual.
This exaltation of the individual as unique reference point and the concomitant crisis of authority mean that the Church is no longer accepted as a doctrinal and moral authority. Her "pretence" to guide the life of the people by moral doctrine is rejected as it is considered the denial of personal freedom. This phenomenon of the weakening of the power of institutions does not pertain only to the Church, but touches the traditional organs of State, the Courts, Parliament and Armed Forces, and all of hierarchically structured society.
The exaltation of the "self" leads to a relativism that extends across the specters: from the political practice of voting in democracy, for example, derives a criteria according to which every individual opinion has the same value as the next, with the result that there is no objective truths or values of higher or lower worth, nor values or truths which are universally valid by reason of nature for every person in every culture at all times.
2.3. The Problem of Evil
The problem of evil and the suffering of innocents has always been used to justify unbelief and the rejection of a good and personal God. This rebellion comes from the non-acceptance of the sense of the freedom of man, who is capable of doing both good and evil. The mystery of evil has been and always will be a scandal for to intelligent man, and only the light of Christ crucified and glorified can fully reveal and express it. "In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear" (Gaudium et Spes , n. 22).
But if the scandal of evil has never ceased to motivate atheism and unbelief in individuals, today they have a new aspect in the diffusion, amplification and presentation of evil through the mass media, which causes evil to echo ever louder, be it manifest in war, accidents, natural catastrophes, conflicts among individuals or countries, economic or social injustices. Unbelief is more or less tied into this pervasive and subversive aspect of evil, and consequently the rejection and denial of God feed on the continual diffusion of this inhumane spectacle, daily beamed around the world.
2.4. The Historical Limits of Christians and the Church in the World
The vast majority of non-believers and the indifferent are not so for ideological or political reasons, but come from the pews of Christianity and describe themselves as deluded or unsatisfied. They express "debelief" or a disaffection towards belief and its practice and perceive it as meaningless, dull and irrelevant. The cause is often tied to a negative or unpleasant event experienced in the Church, often during adolescence; the protest or rebellion of a moment transforms itself over the course of time into a general rejection and finally indifference. This does not mean total closure, for often a desire to retain a good relationship with God remains. On this note, it is good to focus on the "restarters", i.e. those Christians who, after a period of distancing from the faith and religious practice, return to Church.
Among the causes internal to the life of the Church which push people away, what is most obvious is the apparent absence of a spiritual life in some priests and religious. Whenever some of these lead an immoral lifestyle, many people feel disturbed. Among the causes of scandal, by far the worst due to its objective moral gravity, is sexual abuse of minors. Also scandalous are the superficiality of spiritual life and the exaggerated search for material wellbeing and financial gain, especially in areas where the population is subject to extreme poverty. As many Christians identify the faith with its moral principles, it follows that, faced with certain scandalous behaviour - particularly those in which the protagonists are members of the clergy, many of the faithful suffer a deep crisis in their spiritual journey.
Deeds of this kind, orchestrated and amplified, are used by the mass media to damage the reputation of all the clergy of a country, and to confirm the suspicions exacerbated by the dominant culture.
2.5. New Factors
A Rupture in the Process of Handing on the Faith
One consequence of the process of secularization is the growing difficulty faced in handing on the faith through catechesis, through the school, the family and the homily. [5] These traditional channels for the handing on of the faith struggle to fulfill their fundamental role.
The Family. There is a real problem in the handing on of the faith within traditionally Christian families, especially in the cities. The causes are manifold: the rhythm and pace of work, the fact that both parents often work long hours away from the home, the secularization of the social fabric, and the influence of television. The transformation of living and working conditions and the meager size of apartments has led to separation of the nuclear family from grandparents, who are now often excluded from the important processes of handing on both faith and culture. Moreover, in many countries children spend little time in the family home as they spend long hours at school and in extra curricular activities such as sport, music, and various associations; at home they are often immersed in and isolated by the computer, by video-games, and by the television leaving little space for constructive dialogue with their parents. In traditionally Catholic countries, the growing instability of family life, the rise in the number of so-called "civil marriages" and the increasingly prevalent so-called "common law marriage" accelerate and amplify this process. This does not of course mean that parents have become non-believers, for often they ask for the baptism of their children and wish for them to make their First Holy Communion, but beyond these sacred rites of passage the faith does not seem to have any role in the family setting, hence the question: if the parents have no living faith, what will they hand over to their children in an environment that has become indifferent to the Gospel values and, as it were, deaf to the proclamation of the saving message?
In other countries, for example in Africa and parts of Latin America some of the content of the faith and a certain religious sentiment is handed on, but the lived-experience of the faith which requires a personal and living relationship with Jesus Christ is often faulty. Christian rites are followed, but are perceived only as cultural expressions.
Catholic Schools. In various countries some Catholic schools have had to close as a result of a lack of resources and personnel, while a weakening, or a rupture in the handing on of the faith in some schools and even Catholic universities, results from a growing number of teachers void of commitment and a solid formation. Too often teaching in these schools has little to do with the faith and Christian morality. The phenomenon of migration also destabilizes schools when the large non-Christian presence is used as an excuse to justify abandoning an explicit teaching of the faith, rather than to seize on this opportunity to propose the faith, as has long been the tradition of Church's missionary activity.
The Globalization of Behavior
"Modern civilization often complicates the approach to God, not for any essential reason, but because it is excessively engrossed in earthly affairs" (Gaudium et Spes, n. 19). Western materialism has projected a lifestyle characterized by success, money, unrestricted competition, individual pleasure, etc., creating many practical atheists and leaving neither time nor desire for something deeper than the immediate satisfaction of every craving. In many countries there are no theoretical factors in favor of unbelief, but rather purely practical ones marked by social patterns where little time is available for the human community and for space to experience the transcendent. It is the conceit of a full-up society. This religious atony is far more dangerous for the faith than the ideological materialism of the Marxist-Leninist atheistic countries. The improvement of the level of life and economic development necessarily imply a wholesale cultural transformation which often provokes a loss of faith if it is not matched by adequate pastoral activity.
The fires of indifference, practical materialism, moral and religious relativism are stoked by globalization and the so-called opulent society. The ideals and models of life proposed by the mass media, through advertisements and by the protagonists of the public, political and cultural society are often vectors of a consumerism which is radically anti-evangelical. The culture of globalization considers men and women an object to be evaluated according to exclusively material, economic and hedonistic criteria.
This domain provokes in many people, by way of compensation, an interest in things irrational. The need for spiritual experience, to live or return to living an inner dimension of life, as well as the psychological and relationship difficulties often caused by the frenetic and obsessive rhythms of life, push many self-confessed believers to seek other alternative experiences and head for "alternative religions" which offer a strong dose of "affective" and "emotional" participation, without any moral or social responsibility. Hence there are many "do-it-yourself religions" on offer, a sort of spiritual supermarket in which one is left free to pick and choose from day to day according to one's own transforming tastes and pleasures.
The Mass Media
The Mass Media, by nature ambivalent, can serve both good and bad alike. Unfortunately, often they amplify unbelief and favor indifference, by relativizing the religious factor and sometimes ignoring or even deforming its proper nature. Even from countries where Christians are in the majority, certain parts of the Mass Media, newspapers, magazines, news and current affairs programs, documentaries and films zoom around the world offering often flawed, distorted or partial visions of the Church. Only rarely are they met with a pertinent and convincing response. A negative perception of the Church results, impeding her credibility to transmit her message of faith. Alongside this lies the Internet, in which information claiming to offer truth about religious matters circulates. "Internet Infidels" are present alongside sites of satanic and explicitly anti-Christian nature, which lead aggressive campaigns against religion. The abundance of pornographic material on the internet is also to be condemned: it degrades the dignity of men and women and can only distance the human person away from the living faith. Hence a pastoral approach to the mass media is of prime importance [6].
The New Age, New Religious Movements and the Elite
"The proliferation of sects is also a reaction against secularized culture and a consequence of social and cultural upheavals which have uprooted traditional religion" (Towards a Pastoral Approach to Culture, n. 24). While the movement known as the New Age is not a cause of unbelief, by its nature it contributes to the growth of religious confusion [7].
The opposition and harsh criticism from certain elites, new religious movements, and sects of Pentecostal persuasion contribute to the weakening of the life of faith. This is probably one of the greatest challenges to the Catholic Church, particularly in Latin America. The most serious objections and criticisms made by these sects against the Church are that she fails to face up to reality, that she portrays an image of herself which is far distant from the reality, and that her proposition of the faith is not incisive and is incapable of transforming daily life. These sectarian communities developing in America and Africa attract the youth in large numbers and lead them away from the traditional Churches, but do not manage to satisfy in the long term their religious needs. For many they are the exit-points from religion. Only exceptionally do they return.
3. Secularization of Belief
The problem is not that of secularization, understood as the legitimate autonomy of the temporal realm, but of secularism, "a concept of the world according to which the latter is self-explanatory, without any need for recourse to God, who thus becomes superfluous and an encumbrance" (Evangelii Nuntiandi , n. 55). Many who call themselves Catholic, and similarly those who belong to other religions, give in to a lifestyle in which God, or religion, is of little importance. The faith appears void of substance and no longer requiring personal engagement. There is incoherence between the faith-as-professed and the faith-as-lived. People no longer dare declare explicitly their belonging to a religion and the hierarchy is systematically criticized. Where there is little witness of Christian life, the abandonment of religious practice ensues. It is not simply a matter, as in times gone by, of a simple abandonment of sacramental practice, or of a scarce vitality in living out of the faith, but of something which strikes at its very roots.
The disciples of Christ live in the world and are often influenced and molded by the surrounding culture which shows no need for God and no thought for God. In a context so uninvolved and unresponsive to the very idea of God, many believers, above all in the more secularized countries, are overcome by a hedonistic, consumerist and relativist mentality.
The observant critic of our societies sees the lack of clear references in the minds of those who make public opinion and who reject all moral judgment when important aspects of society are thrown into the spotlight by the media, leaving such to the individual appreciation of every individual under the guise of a "tolerance" which simply puts convictions apart and anaesthetises consciences.
Moreover laxism in lifestyle and morality, and the attached pansexualism, have negative effects for the life of the faith. Premarital and extramarital cohabitation have become the norm in many traditionally Catholic countries, especially Europe, even among those who later marry in Church. The manner of living out human sexuality has become a purely personal question. For many believers, divorce does not cause problems for the conscience. Abortion and euthanasia, denounced by the Council as "abominable crimes" (Gaudium et Spes, n. 27) are accepted on mundane criteria. There is too a leveling out of the fundamental dogmas of the Christian faith: the incarnation of Christ, his uniqueness as Savior, the survival of the soul after death, the resurrection of the body, eternal life. The doctrine of reincarnation is quite widely held by those who identify themselves as believers and who frequent Church, alleging that it is easier to believe in than the immortality of the soul after death and the resurrection of the body, as it offers a new life within the material world itself.
The standard of Christian life in some countries seems quite mediocre, which underlines a difficulty to explain their own faith. It is a difficulty caused not only by the influx of the secularized culture, but also by a certain fear of taking decisions on the basis of faith, the consequence of a weak Christian formation which has not empowered people to trust in the power of the Gospel and has not recognized the importance of a meeting with Christ through prayer and the sacraments.
Hence a form of practical atheism is spreading even among those who consider themselves Christian.
4. New Religiosity
Alongside the spread of religious indifference in the more secularized countries, a new aspect clearly emerges from the inquiry on unbelief. It is often identified as the return of the sacred for those who find difficulty in opening themselves to the infinite, to go beyond the immediate, and to set out on and follow an itinerary of faith [8].
It is a romantic form of religion, a religion of the spirit and of the self which has its roots in the crisis of the subject who remains more and more narcissistic, and rejects all historical and objective elements. Hence it is a strongly subjective religion, almost an exclusive reserve for the spirit, in which one can take refuge and contemplate matters in an aesthetic research, where the individual is under no obligation to give an account of his reasons or behavior.
4.1. A Faceless God
The new religiosity is an adherence to a God that often has no face nor personal characteristics. Questioned about God, both declared believers and declared non-believers affirm that they believe in the existence of a force or superior transcendent being, but who has no personal attributes, much less those of a Father. The fascination of oriental religions, transplanted into the West, resides in the depersonalization of God. In scientific circles, the old atheistic materialism is giving way to the return of pantheism, where the universe itself is divin
