This past Sunday, before Mass, a boy of only 14 years asked me: “Father, my mom was very angry when I told her that I do not believe in God because I do not see him. Was I wrong?

I answered: “Have you been to Disneyland?”

“No” he said.

“Do you believe it exists?” I asked.

“Yes, because my sister has been there and she told me it was fantastic,” he replied.

“But you haven’t seen it,” I argued. “See, there are many things that exist which we have not seen.”

“You are right, Father,” he agreed.

In the depths of my soul I was very concerned when, later, the same boy came up for Communion, closing his eyes with apparent devotion. He is a student in our Catholic school system and I could not blame our catechism teachers, his Catholic parents, or myself, for not educating our children sufficiently.

Western Christianity has been under sustained pressure for at least three centuries, a process that began with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, foremost exponent of rationalism, and which accelerated in the 19th century with the theories of Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus.

This pressure has really begun to tell in the past three decades, a decline dictated by demography, as older churchgoers are succeeded by young atheists. Christian believers are dying and not being replaced, and the balance has even tipped in the United States, long seen as an exceptionally highly religious western country. The decline of the mainline Protestant churches is finally starting to show there, while the Catholic Church is also ailing. Not even mass migration from Latin America can save it, with Hispanics leaving the faith in droves. 

The number of Americans identifying as atheists doubled between 2007 and 2014, according to the Pew Research Center, while Catholicism loses six times as many followers as it gains, becoming part of the worldwide Church Despondent. Even the most religious countries in western Europe, Catholic Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy are catching up with France, Germany, and Britain. It seems we are doomed, as the Calvinists might say.

Secularization theory holds that as countries develop economically, religious belief declines. This has certainly been the case in Europe, where it has reached the stage where faith is regarded as an eccentricity and is incomprehensible to a religiously illiterate media. Yet believers have for some time held out hope of a miracle to give them final victory: the battle of the cradle. They may now have found it.

As religious belief declines, birth rates fall dramatically. France was the first country to undergo secularization, and by the late 19th century it had a fertility rate half that of the more churchgoing Britain. But the paradox is that as overall birth rates decrease, the gap between the religious and secular starts to grow, so that the next generation comes disproportionately from religious families. 

We must also consider the distinction among practising Catholics, nominal Catholics, and secular Catholics. The faithfully practising are the ones who are defecting more from the Church, while the nominal Catholics are in particular the youth who are ready to gather in the millions to see the Pope but do not go to Mass the following Sunday. Nevertheless, they do not defect from the Church by a formal act, such as asking to be removed from the baptismal registry, and they will occasionally attend funerals and special liturgical ceremonies.

I must confess that, for many reasons, Catholics are in a deadlock, and the situation in the Vatican confuses the faithful. We are now in the season of Lent, preparing to celebrate the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus. It is the occasion to pray that Jesus’s wish is fulfilled – his prayer to the Father a few hours before his death – “ut omnes unum sint,” that all will be one.

“The virus of polarization and animosity permeates our way of thinking, feeling and acting,” said Pope Francis at a 2016 ceremony when he created 17 new cardinals.

He added: “We are not immune from this and we need to take care lest such attitudes find a place in our hearts, because this would be contrary to the richness and universality of the Church, which is tangibly evident in the college of cardinals.”

They, the college of cardinals, are extremely divided! As this drama unfolds in Rome, it is our duty to pray daily for unity and the reconciling of these divisions at the highest levels of the Church.

Controversy is sometimes a sign that the Church is alive and well, but we should also consciously avoid being too preoccupied by our divisions. Our suffering world expects us to be united in works of mercy. We have no right to let it down.