The Church has moved in a few years from being under siege to becoming the belle of the ball. Adapting is difficult for both the Church and the world, but everybody needs it.
US President Donald Trump tells the Pope how to behave. A Defense official gives the nuncio a history lesson on Avignon. Vice President JD Vance debates St. Augustine’s just war, and techno-billionaire Peter Thiel comes to Rome to deliver a lecture on the Antichrist. It may be easy to dismiss it all as bizarre. How can people with a smattering of knowledge about the Catholic Church teach priests, who have spent their whole lives studying the holy texts, about God or right and wrong?
Still, this is all very significant. It shows that the Catholic faith has become very important to Americans, and not only to them. In fact, the world was astounded by these developments.
What is happening? It is certainly the American Pope Leo XIV. There is certainly Trump’s knack for grabbing headlines with controversies. But perhaps it’s also something else—the start of Catholic popularity. It’s the two recent popes; their music is groovy. In different ways, they reached out to the world. And perhaps there is also a tectonic shift in the history of the Church and the world. Here is a brief detour.
The Church under siege
Between 1648 — the Peace of Westphalia — and 1683 — the Siege of Vienna — the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church managed to repel the dual assault of the Protestant revolt in Northern Europe and the Muslim onslaught of the Ottoman Empire from the southern Mediterranean. From that point on, the Church lived as if under siege.
It had succeeded in converting the protest of the French Huguenots, led by Henry of Navarre, into Catholicism in 1593. But that victory was partial, because in the decades that followed, Catholic France nonetheless pursued its own policy of alignment with the Ottoman Empire against the Catholic powers of Spain and South Germany.
The cultural siege — even before the political one — had many dimensions and, between the late 1600s and the 1700s, evolved into a progressive and total rejection not only of the Catholic Church but of every Christian faith and beyond. Atheist faith was first legitimized by the French Revolution and the Enlightenment and then became the official religion of the new communist regimes. The new communist materialism, which shunned any transcendent aspiration, proved so successful that it was fought on equal footing by consumerist materialism.
After the end of communist, materialist, and atheist faith, with the fall of communism in 1989, all traditional Christian religions were left weakened. The two atheisms had fought on the battlefield of materialism, leaving rubble of ancient religions in their wake. Then the fall of communist atheism also brought down consumerist atheism. A new religious quest is rising, but the growing demand meets a dwindling supply.
It left a religious vacuum, where the Catholic Church, because of its history and organization, emerged scathed but still in a better shape than its ancient ‘rivals’. It was not through its own effort, but through the failures of others. It also happened thanks to the US that, as Europe needed cultural and political rebuilding after fascism, it bet on Catholics.
Adenauer in Germany, Schumann in France, and De Gasperi in Italy were all German-speaking Catholics born in the Holy Roman Empire. The US supported the Polish Pope John Paul II in their shared fight against the atheist Soviet Empire. In 1989, the Church played a pivotal role in Europe’s reconstruction.
Now, it is the only strong structure left to fill the vacuum somehow and meet the growing religious demand. Still, for the first time in centuries, the Church is no longer under siege. It is a new space and atmosphere to which the Church is surely not used.
Demands for papal attention come from anywhere, although they may not be classical requests for baptisms or communions. They come from the Western world, where people may not go to mass because they find it out of touch, yet they seek a religious spirit.
No Caliphs
There is also a growing demand for Christian attention from the Muslim world, torn apart by radical extremism, where moderate mullahs have become an often-silent minority. The world that, for centuries, had been the church’s main enemy, both culturally and politically, is now aligning with the Holy See.
Islam faced existential challenges from the West after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1919. Without a caliph and confronting the new political presence of Israel in their traditional turf and holy city, it lost a sense of direction. It began to radicalize after the Shia Ayatollah took power in Iran, founding the first modern, fully religious state in the history of Islam in 1979.
That also fueled Sunni radicalization, which the US initially favored as a counterweight against the USSR. However, radical Sunnis gradually lost their appeal after their defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s and the loss of ISIS in Syria a decade ago. Also, after 2023, the battering of the once-invincible Shiites in Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran is a cultural defeat for radical Islam. Then ordinary Muslims are often lost. Without moderate spiritual guides and with defeated radical guides, some pay attention to the Vatican.
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There is a call for a new religious faith in Asia. First communism, then wild state capitalism, have laid waste to ancient religious traditions in China. In India, the traditional Hindu caste system and Islam struggle to meet new needs.
Buddhism is no longer the mighty force that opposed the spread of Christianity and Islam in past centuries. Most often, Buddhist monks seek ways to work with Christians, emphasizing common ground rather than hostility.
The same thing is happening in the United States. Here, new waves of immigration are arriving from culturally Catholic regions like Latin America, regardless of whether the newcomers are practicing Catholics.
The cultural and civilizational DNA of America — born white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant — is changing. The new America must reconcile with the new Catholicism.
Then, the Catholic Church, faced with these new, unexpected, and unsolicited forms of attention and interest arriving after centuries of siege, often does not know what to do or how to react. So, the new attention from powerful Americans such as Peter Thiel or JD Vance is interesting beyond what they openly say.
What to do
The Church is the only institution that can position itself as an aggregating pole for other religions, which oppose the use of religion as a tool of justification — and therefore encouragement — of war.
The Church could help promote the organization of crusaders for peace, a “Jihad for Peace,” in which men of all faiths, Christian and otherwise, unite to seek ways to promote peace, justice, and liberty.
In the Middle Ages, political organizations such as the Knights of Malta played a role; now it may be time for something similar yet profoundly different.
Bridges with moderate Islam must be multiplied and deepened. This might also involve revisiting the idea of the Muslim faith — not as a religion completely alien to Christianity, but as a variant of Christianity itself. Despite the wars, theologians from the 7th century through at least the 14th century regarded Islam as a Christian heresy rather than as an alien or pagan religion.
Today, this ancient connection could be revived to build bridges. After all, Catholics engage in dialogue with Evangelicals and Mormons, whose theology is sometimes more distant from Catholicism than that of moderate Islam.
Within this context, there is also a new interest in theology. But it is theology itself, as a discipline, that has changed, becoming closer to the lives of ordinary people, as demonstrated in the works of Marcello Neri. A bizarre, though not isolated, episode is the experience of Father Marco Bernardoni, who, convicted felons have asked to teach theology in prison.
The Church perhaps should talk to them as brothers. They may not want to break or destroy the Church; they want to serve, as most of the world does. And surely, for the Church, it’s difficult to move from feeling under siege to being the apple of desire. It needs a big heart, which the Church has in abundance.
L’articolo mi è piaciuto molto e in buona parte ho condiviso , anche se mi resta la diffidenza di quegli emiliani cui , come scriveva Bacchelli , quattro secoli di dominio papale hanno insegnato unicamente che dall’ordine costituito della Chiesa può venire soltanto il male….. L’idea della “guerra santa per la pace ( jihad for peace ) mi va comunque molto a genio!