The Decline Of Western Christianity: Gradually Then Suddenly

Here’s a graph which I entitle Gradually Then Suddenly (ladies, try not to swoon over my astonishing artistic gifts):

If you’re a classicist you might prefer the title Motus In Fine Velocior, which means things accelerate at the end. Which was the old way to say Gradually Then Suddenly.

The collapse that interests us today is Western Christianity. We had the Gradually. A case can be made we’re now, or soon will be, in the Suddenly.

If you are inclined to dismiss this claim out of hand and stop reading, then please meet “Luce”, the Vatican’s mascot for the Holy Year of 2025. The daisy-chain emblem on its chest is usually presented in rainbow colors. Brony-boy Christianity has arrived. It gives me felt-banner flashbacks and when I look at it I swear I can hear treacly Intro-To-Piano communion music playing as I look at it.

In the briefest way possible, leaving aside all sublties, let’s trace the curve of Gradually.

Western Christianity suffered a hit as it neared its peak about a thousand years ago when the Orthodox and Romans had a dispute about a vowel (I do not jest). Yet, in the end, this was more a practical than a spiritual split. The real decline began with events leading up to some Christians Protesting certain excesses, but drawing from their success the unfortunate conclusion that every man could, should, and would be his own priest.

They weren’t wrong in this prediction. They nailed it. Protesting Christian sects at first swelled in numbers wonderful to behold. Yet since interpretation is free, nothing prevents belief in the proposition “We don’t need the transcendent”. This was embraced and the masses began falling off. Membership in once enormous Protesting groups is now reduced to a husk, peopled only by a dry remnant. Think Church of England. One fellow tracks a number of UK Protesting sects and figures most will be extinct in 10 years. Whether that’s true, there is no sense of any increase, especially in those without gray hair. It’s not helping that even as the ordained decrease, the majority are now women (55% new ordinations in 2020 were women in the CoE).

One man has a site entirely devoted to church attendance modeling. To pick what might be the best single picture from the site, here is the membership in Methodists in Great Britain (up to 2020). Don’t forget, while looking at this, that the Great Britain population was about 10 million at the start of the plot, and was about 69 million at the end. So it is much worse than it looks.

Gallup discovered in 2021 that Church membership (across all denominations) in the States fell below 50% of the population in 2021. Not attendance, mind, which is always lower, but membership. Here is their version of Gradually Then Suddenly, which looks (and looks can deceive) to be heading into Suddenly territory:

I don’t want to bore us with a flood of numbers, because they are all much the same. Here’s one source for Europe. Church membership, belief in God, which in post-Christian countries means belief in the Christian God, belief in doctrine, all down, down, down. Most places it’s as it is in the USA: Church members are now in the minority, or soon will be. There are still pockets of life here and there, of course, and even isolated growth. But a lot of growth in smaller denominations is from people fleeing the collapse of the larger ones.

The Romans still boast of a large census, which is even true in practice outside the West, in places. In the West itself? Well, they are turning “synodal”, by which is meant Protesting. “Listening”, “inclusion”, “accompanying”, “journeying together”, “discerning”, “dialoging”, and other nausea-inducing verbiage predominate in the leadership.

Here’s some rough plots (found here) compiled from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate site.

Population of the USA in 1970 was just over 200 million. It’s at least 350 million now, not counting all those who entered illegally. Meaning, again, the pictures are far worse than they appear.

Here’s Fr John Naugle quoting Sheen, who wrote late in the Gradually period:

“Ethical Christianity has failed. Western Civilization is not just suffering from a famine of spiritual values; it is not even caring about them. It is now seeking to stuff itself with the husks of the secular, the economic, the political, the worldly. This new thing which no longer is concerned with the soul, but with the belly, is a philosophy of life which mobilizes souls for economic and secular ends, a Ceasarism or adoration of the State, a glorification of the human collective through the depersonalization of man, and a suffocation of human personality and its subsequent absorption into the mass.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Here’s two flavorful anecdotes pertinent to the Gradually-Suddenly debate. The first is the Australian headline (from a “neutral” news source): “Former Labor powerbroker Joe de Bruyn sparks graduation ceremony walkout with abortion and gay marriage comments”. Quote (second ellipsis theirs):

Hundreds of staff, students and their families have walked out of a graduation ceremony at the Australian Catholic University after former Labor powerbroker Joe de Bruyn began spouting Catholic views on abortion and gay marriage. …

However ACU students from the faculties of education and arts, and law and business were stunned when the ex-union boss began spouting Catholic doctrine in his speech.

“He was just talking about all these accomplishments in politics and unions and stuff, and then it took a hard right turn, and he started talking about how abortion was wrong,” ACU student Charlie Pantelli told ABC Melbourne on Tuesday.

“It was shocking. I only heard abortions and then IVF, and I was one of the first to get up…  I’ve said ‘that this is enough’ and I left.”…

The ACU student estimated 95 per cent of the audience walked out during the speech, claiming the people who stuck around were only doing so to record it for news outlets.

Spouting, you will have noticed. Spouting correct Catholic views at a Catholic University, during an official Catholic function.

In fairness, it may have been the first time Charlie Pantelli, and the other hundreds who walked out, heard Catholic teaching on these matters. Meaning the priests and religious charged with instructing Charlie, and the hundreds, let them down.

Many priests do run from dogma, some because they don’t hold with it (hello, Germany), others because of fear. Of their bishops, of the women who have taken over their parish, of the public. You name it. At ACU, they trotted out a flak to say the expected asinine thing: “ACU is committed to providing a safe, inclusive and respectful environment for students and staff of all beliefs.”

All beliefs? All? Do they hear themselves speak? My dear readers, of course they do not. Propagandists are not chosen for their intelligence.

Here is our second story. I don’t want to make too much of it, because it is one of a legion of such idiocies. From this story:

The city of Toulouse has just welcomed to its city centre a questionable machine, nicknamed Lilith, depicting a disturbing creature that is half-woman, half-scorpion, with spider legs and ram’s horns. The invention was originally developed for the Hellfest festival, held every year in Brittany. This international gathering of metal bands is always the occasion for a debauchery of satanic references and mortifying symbols, even if the organisers insist that it’s simply a question of “culture” and that there’s nothing wrong with these artistic representations of dubious taste.

The plastic and metal toy features a nude woman’s torso which looks like any of those nauseating “music” performers we are everywhere plagued with. It is doubtful any of the people involved in this childish stunt believe any of the nonsense surrounding the bacchanalia. The only interesting thing about it is they thought of playacting like this in public. In living memory, they would never have dared: to be this disrespectful to their elders would never have occurred to them. Today, they would see it as disrespect if they were barred from their activity.

Yet there is still life in the Church. The Archbishop of Toulouse, one Msgr. Guy de Kerimel, decided upon a “spiritual response”, and dedicated the city to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Which is on the Gradually, not Suddenly, side of the ledger.

There have been bleak times and revivals and Awakenings, and only a fool would say they are impossible. Still, it seems to me Suddenly looms. Transcendence is like the helium in a balloon from a birthday party from last week. The End of Suddenly does not mean there are or will be none left in the Church in the West, but that it ceases to be any important cultural force.

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