ONLY THE POOR MEET THE POPE
Apathy, not apostasy,
Brussels IN THE Netherlands, with its Protestant majority and dissident Catholics, Pope John Paul II faced profound, violent opposition to his papacy during his visit last week. Despite the Holy Father's obvious impatience with the Dutch, Holland poses no threat to Roman Catholicism. The real danger comes from the next two countries he toured, Luxembourg and Belgium. The Dutch, for all their apostasy, at least take religion seriously. The prosperous Luxem- bourgeois and Belgians do not care enough about the Pope or the Church to which most of them nominally belong to register a protest. If Catholicism suffers, it will be through spiritual lethargy, not opposition.
The booklet Poopstvisite zu Letzbuerg, prepared by the Luxembourg Church, con- fronted the problem: 'A small community like ours, situated in a wealthy country like Luxembourg, is constantly in danger of sinking into complacency and forgetting the worldwide role of the Church.' It was not always thus. For centuries, Luxem- bourg was the 'Gibraltar of the north', a Catholic fortress which withstood the Lutheran and Calvinist assaults of the Reformation. The Jesuits in the 17th cen- tury made it the bastion of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The fortifications built by the Marechal de Vauban around Luxembourg town made it impregnable to arms and to heresy. The proud Luxem- bourg motto was 'We are what we want to be'. The coat of arms of the Grand Duchy's most famous ruler, John the Blind, was 'I serve'. (Ich dien. Welsh mercenaries who admired the courage of the blind warrior- duke they had killed gave his motto to the Prince of Wales.) More than 95 per cent of Luxembourg's 365,000 people are Catholic to this day.
Luxembourgeois, so long as the barba- rians and Protestants were at the gates, proved St Jerome right, in The Story of Melchus, that 'even in the midst of swords and deserts and wild beasts, virtue is never made a captive; and that he who has surrendered himself to Christ may be slain but cannot be conquered.' But the walls of the city, and of orthodoxy, began to come down in 1867 after the Treaty of London guaranteed the Grand Duchy's neutrality. Prosperity followed the construction of steel mills and, in this century, the estab- lishment of offshore banking. Luxem- bourg's rich, middle-class Catholics donate more money per capita to foreign missions than do Catholics in any other country. They make it seem that their religion, like some of their fine Moselle wines, is mainly for export.
The faith which thrived during siege and persecution is not surviving wealth and the modern age. The Givenchy and Chanel shops near the Place d'Armes are usually more crowded than the Cathedral of Our Lady, Consoler of the Afflicted. Mass attendance of 25 per cent is lower than the divorce rate of 30 per cent. In 1983, three in every ten weddings took place outside the Church. Only 83 per cent of babies born that year were baptised. The birth rate is down to 1.4 children per family and would be even lower if the statistics ex- cluded Portugese and Italian immigrants. The clergy are dwindling to almost no- thing: only two men a year are ordained. The average age for a priest is 61 years seven months, and half the priests are over the age of 65. Many parishes could not function if it were 'not for the voluntary help of retired priests.
It was the Grand Duke John, scion of the House of Nassau and godson of Pope Benedict XV, who last week welcomed John Paul II to Luxembourg. The Duke studied under the Benedictines at Ample- forth and served as an officer in the Irish Guards during the war. He led a company into Luxembourg to liberate it from the Nazis in 1944. He has presided over an increase in prosperity and decrease in religious observance since 1964, when his mother abdicated in his favour. When the Pope kissed the ground at Luxembourg airport to begin his 32-hour stay, Grand Duke John had few words to explain why his countrymen's rise to riches should be accompanied by a decline in spirituality.
The Pope had some words for the Luxembourgeois, in French, German and even a little Luxembourgish. At mass outside the Esch-Belval steelworks, John Paul, who as seminarian Karol Wojtyla had been a steelworker in Poland during the Nazi occupation, said: 'People today have been dazzled by progress and prosperity and often look only to earth. They look no farther than the world in which they are enclosed. They accept secularisation.' The next day, Ascension Thursday, the Pope said an open air mass in the centre of Luxembourg town. Look- ing around the large car park in which he said the mass, he must have been silently grateful that anyone at all had turned up. Admittedly, he needed a rest after the rigours of Holland. But he has seen bigger crowds for private audiences at the Vati- can. The police kindly said there were 40,000 people there, though they must have been including the people who watch- ed it on television. There was no traffic, not even any noise. A cafe near the town centre was full, as it usually is on public holidays, but only a few of its clients left their sausages and beer long enough to look out of the window when the papal motorcade went by. An Italian friend, who has been on most of the papal trips, said that only the poor came out to see the Pope. But the poor, for whom the Christ- ian message was first intended, were in short supply in Luxembourg.
It was a similar reception in Belgium, where Grand Duke John's brother-in-law, King Baudouin, played host to the Holy Father over the last five days. Again, there were no Netherlands-style protests. People came out to look, but not to listen. Belgium's Panorama magazine conducted a survey which found a third of the country's Catholics opposed to the visit. The reason: not theological or moral re- servations, as in Holland, but fear that the taxpayers would have to underwrite the cost. Even their leading theologian, Bel- gian Dominican Edward Schillibeeckx, has given up the fight and accepted that his earlier writings on democracy in the Church were wrong. Only 25 per cent of Belgium's Catholics, both Flemish and
Walloon, attend mass, and 20 per cent of their children go unbaptised. This country which once burned Protestants at the the stake rather than allow them to wean the faithful away from Mother Church is going the way of all flesh. Like the children of Israel, who began worshipping the Golden Calf as soon as they escaped the Egyptian yoke, Belgian Catholics are drifting out of a church their ancestors were martyred for.
The Pope's arrival did not seem to hurt business along Brussels' Rue du Marche, near the Gare du Nord. The prostitutes sat in the windows, illuminated in red fluores- cent like any of the other produce on sale in the Euro-capital, and men walked slowly
by to see which place they might shop in. Inside the window of the Mistral Bar sat
one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life. For 20 pounds, I could rent her for part of the evening. A few centuries ago, she might have been a nun.
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