The chair in Rome is empty ...

And haunted by old questions. Truth is, some churches are growing, while others are dying. Easter follows Good Friday

It’s Bright Monday morning and I am still exhausted, in a good way, by the wild, exhilarating services of Pascha (Easter in the West) here in the hills and mountains here in Northeast Tennessee. And, of course, I need to write something for Rational Sheep.

I also need to prepare for an “On Religion” column tomorrow, to meet my usual Wednesday morning deadline (as I head into year 37).

All of this is happening, of course, while the Internet reacts to the death of Pope Francis. I was not planning on writing about Francis this morning or tomorrow. I was planning on writing about the signs pointing to what I believe is the biggest religion story in Christianity around the world.

I can state this bluntly: Some churches are growing. Many churches are dying. Journalists need to realize that both of these statements are true. Ah, but why is there so much life in some places and death in others?

On one level, this is the answer: Easter follows Good Friday. In a way, that’s the topic that I was working on for this week’s column — focusing on all those headlines about rising numbers of Catholic converts in France and the UK.

However, I was going to start with a flashback in which Pope Francis noted some rather prophetic words from the late Pope Benedict XVI. Here is the top of a Catholic News Agency report from 2022:

Pope Francis has described Benedict XVI as “a prophet” for predicting that the Catholic Church would become a smaller but more faithful institution in the future. …

“Pope Benedict was a prophet of this Church of the future, a Church that will become smaller, lose many privileges, be more humble and authentic and find energy for the essential,” Pope Francis said during the meeting with Jesuits at the apostolic nunciature in Malta on April 3.

“It will be a Church that is more spiritual, poorer, and less political: a Church of the little ones.”

It really helps to read Benedict in his own words, which were drawn from a 1969 German radio broadcast. In 2009 Ignatius Press published Father Joseph Ratzinger’s remarks in a book — “Faith and the Future.”

For some of the crucial material, see this file at the Aleteia website — “When Father Joseph Ratzinger Predicted the Future of the Church.” Here are some quotes that, to say the least, remain relevant:

* “We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists. …”

* “From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge -- a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.”

* “The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. … The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain. …”

* “The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”

Again, that was 1969, after Ratzinger made his way out of the theological liberalism that surrounded him in Europe and, especially, his own Germany. The future pope was moving past postmodernism and returning to ancient realities.

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There is much more reading ahead, folks, as I think my way through all of this.

This brings me to a must-read New York Times column by Ross Douthat, who is a convert to Catholicism. The headline: “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.” It probably took a powerful surge of self control (I’m just guessing) for Douthat not to include a quote or two from those Ratzinger prophecies.

There is really no way to avoid reading all of this Douthat sermon, which focuses on how the world of technology is replacing the humble realities and joys of human life. In his Substack today, Rod “Living in Wonder” Dreher unlocked the text for those who want to Read. It. All.

As you would expect, this essay included lots of screens-culture quotes that jumped out at me — trends in technology that are directly linked to the global marriage and fertility crisis. Douthat’s overture noted that digital trends are “forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a ‘bottleneck’ — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.”

This reality is affecting everything from Hollywood’s red ink, to global political chaos; from (yes) dying churches to the rise of AI; from young people struggling to absorb information deeper than a TikTok video to the surge in older parents with no grandchildren.

Yes, here are a few of the Douthat quotes for Rational Sheep readers:

* “When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.

“And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off.”

* “ … (F)or anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.

“That challenge is made more complex by the fact that much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.

“In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.”

* “It starts with substitution: The digital age takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen. For romance, dating apps supplant bars and workplaces and churches. For friendship, texting and DMing replaces hanging out. For entertainment, the small screen replaces moviegoing and live performance. …

In many cases, the virtual substitutes are clearly inferior to what they’re replacing. The streaming algorithm tends to yield artistic mediocrity compared with the movies of the past, or even the golden age television shows of 20 years ago. BookTok is to literature as OnlyFans is to great romantic love. Online sources of local news are generally lousy compared with the vanished ecosystem of print newspapers. Online friendships are thinner than real-world relationships, online dating pairs fewer people off successfully than the dating markets of the prior age. Online porn — well, you get my point.”

* “Unless the true A.I. doomsayers are correct, in the year 2100 there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books. But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master.

“Some of these choices will be especially difficult for liberals, since they will often smack of chauvinism and fanaticism and reaction.”

Finally, there is this from Douthat.

Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. … Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.

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Now, let’s circle back to this big idea: “Some churches are growing. Many churches are dying. … Easter follows Good Friday.”

At this point in time, the second most popular Rational Sheep post — in terms of clicks with a mouse — is relevant to this discussion: “Young men are flocking into pews — But the New York Times says these marriage-hungry guys are joining "bad" churches.”

Popular post No. 4 is relevant, as well: “The great P.D. James didn't write today's headlines — But, with ‘The Children of Men,’ the novelist offered a scary take on the (near) future.”

Some of this is showing up in viral reports from The New York Post. Maybe you saw this headline, one of many about the surge in young converts (many are young men) in the ancient churches of the East. Remember this headline? “Young men leaving traditional churches for ‘masculine’ Orthodox Christianity in droves.”

I noted, at the time, that the story was simplistic. Yes, there are Orthodox parishes that are exploding with growth (including my own). At the same time, there are many Orthodox parishes that are in slow or rapid decline.

But there are stories in those growing parishes. How does a church baptize a small army of converts in the same rite, in under — let’s say — three or four hours? Check out this video from St. John of the Latter Orthodox Church in Greenville, South Carolina. Head to the 30-minute mark, or thereabouts.

Yes, that’s an Orthodox thing. I’m looking for online video from the Holy Saturday and Easter rites at Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church, another surging congregation in Greenville (see this recent Dreher post). That parish is bursting at the seams, and so is its school. Thus, the congregation is starting a college, as well.

That’s a real trend, too. And, as you would expect, the New York Post has served up another headline: “Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse — driven by pandemic, internet, ‘lax’ alternatives.”

The omnipresent Ryan Burge responded with these valid points:

So the New York Post has realized that it can cherry pick stats about religious growth and get lots of traffic.

They did this with Orthodox Christianity a few months ago.

It's based on very flimsy data. Like a diocese in PA that saw a 70% increase (40 to 68 converts).

True, that. But this points to half of an important equation. Yes, we have to return to that earlier statement: “Some churches are growing. Many churches are dying. … Easter follows Good Friday.”

What should journalists do? Here were my suggestions — looking at the Catholic questions, in this case — in a Rational Sheep post-podcast: “Why are young priests more conservative?”

The bottom line: Look for the common factors in growth, as well as those in decline. Cover the whole story and look at the trends on a map.

This works with the Orthodox, with Catholics, with Anglicans, with Lutherans, with all kinds of believers. Here we go:

* Where are the dioceses that are ordaining a significantly higher number of priests? Where are the ones in which ordination statistics remain in rapid decline?

* Once you have that map, it’s possible to see how the ordination numbers compare with other basic trends in church life — such as the number of marriages, baptisms, adults conversions to the faith, churches and/or Catholic schools closing (or opening), etc. In other words, where on the map does one find obvious signs of life?

* OK, I will ask: Do these Catholic patterns have anything to do with the red vs. blue fault lines in American cultural life (and, yes, politics)? Do Catholic statistics (birth rates, for example) resemble the state-by-state numbers seen in other pews and in secular life?

* Are the strategic promotions in the American Catholic hierarchy (think about who gets red cardinal hats) going to men from high-growth areas as opposed to low-growth areas? Who is Rome praising and who is, well, being overlooked or even punished?

Take it away, Father Ratzinger.

These are the questions surrounding that empty Chair of St. Peter in Rome.