The end of a Christian Europe

The end of a Christian Europe: “This is not to say that there will be no one in Europe in 50 years’ time who prays or attends the Eucharist. It is, however, to recognize that in the next hundred years, the majority of practicing Christians will live in Asia, Africa and perhaps South America, and in its strange way, perhaps the United States; whereas Europe will be ever more secular. “The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith!” proclaimed Hilaire Belloc only two generations ago, and in the intervening years, readers of T.S. Eliot—The Idea of a Christian Society—or Jacques Maritain —L’Homme et l’Etat—might have been led to hope that the forces of secularism would not necessarily triumph . . . Paradoxically, today, it is the Muslims, on the whole, who keep alive what used to be Christian values in Europe—family virtue, and dread of usury.”