The bumpy road back into Europe

Extract

Membership of the mainstream denominations in the UK has gone down since 1980 by half-a-million to seven million, and is likely to drop by another half-a-million before 1990. And membership of sects and non- Christian religions in the UK is going up and up.

We would be fools if we ignored the message being given to us by those now well-publicised figures from the latest edition of MARC Europe's UK Christian Handbook. On 20 September Cardinal Hume, lecturing in Dublin, spoke of the Pope's call to the European Bishops’ Conferences to re-evangelise Europe. The Cardinal thinks that times are more auspicious for evangelising the old continent, for now in Europe there is a ‘dawning of a realisation that we are entering a new phase of history’. Europeans are discovering the limits of human reason: ‘the age of Enlightenment has evidently run its course’.