This question could have been worded differently: Is Christian faith dying? After all, the Church is the community of the believers and if the Church is dying it is because people are losing their faith.

Judging by our – and those of Europe and North America – emptying churches, one would say that the Church is dying. During the COVID pandemic our churches remained closed for health reasons but once the pandemic was over they did not fill up again.

Nor is this trend something of the third millennium. The process of secularisation has been going on at least since after World War II. We can even stretch it back to modernism and rationalism, although these involved mainly the elite and did not really dent Christian culture.

More successful in shaking Christian culture were liberalism and capitalism, together with the affluence of the post-war period. Without attacking Christianity directly, these philosophies of life managed to alienate people from God and from Christianity.

This situation was not totally unexpected. Around 50 years ago, Karl Rahner, the great German theologian of the last century, had written a book about the Church of the future ‒ The Shape of the Church to Come. Rahner’s future is now, so it would be useful to dwell on what he had foreseen.

In the past, secular culture coincided with Christian culture and practically everybody defined themselves as Christians. However, not everybody was a committed Christian. There has been a continuum ranging from the very committed to the not committed at all.

In that culture, Church participation was essential. Most Christians lived their faith in the Church around the sacraments and in an almost exclusively ‘God and I’ vertical relationship. This Rahner calls “the Church of Society”.

As post-modern liberalism and affluence triggered off the separation of secular culture from Christian culture, those who were less committed, no longer being sustained by culture, began to have difficulty in sticking to their faith.

In order to understand better what was and is still happening, we can borrow an image that the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl had used in order to explain what was happening to his fellow Jewish prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp.

In those terrible conditions, some, believing that God was not powerful or willing enough to protect them, lost their faith. However, the faith of others increased.

Frankl says that what was happening was the same as happens to a flame in the wind.

If the flame is weak, the slightest breeze blows it out; if it is strong, as in the case of a forest fire, the stronger the wind the more the fire blazes.

This explains the speed with which secularisation is bringing about not only the dwindling numbers in Mass attendance but also the loss of faith of so many.

Rahner says that this gives rise to what he calls “the Church of the little flock”, a phrase borrowed from the Gospel (Lk 12,32), but their role is different from that of the first community Christians. Those Christians lived their faith “privately”, surrounded by people who didn’t know Christ and to whom they tried to announce the Gospel.

In the Church there is room for everybody- Fr Alfred Micallef

The members of today’s “little flock” dissociate themselves from the a-religious society they live in and make a conscious and personal commitment to Christ and transmit a prophetic message to that society.

Their relationship with God is not only vertical but also horizontal. They are aware that Christianity demands outgoingness and working for justice and solidarity among the people. Fr Pedro Arrupe, the late Superior General of the Jesuits, said it beautifully: they need to be “men and women for others”. We can see this happening through some of the many Christian communities that are sprouting among believers, especially after the Vatican Council.

As Rahner had predicted, the future Church – that is, the present Church – will consist of two branches, the branch of the “little flock” and the Church of the “remnants of the Church of Society”.

These latter live their faith in quite a similar way to the manner in which the Church of Society lived theirs in the past, around the sacraments and in an almost exclusively vertical relationship with God. However, their faith will be built on a personal choice. They will be the committed ones without having the need to be sustained by a Christian society.

In the Church there is room for everybody and it is important that these two branches of the Church continue to live and pray together and to respect each other.

Our reflection won’t be complete unless we look beyond our world of the west and appreciate how the Church is growing in the rest of the world, especially in the continents of Asia and Africa.

Hopefully, as the numbers of these new Christians grow, these Churches won’t become a Church of Society but would be Churches of people who adhere to Christ and His Church through a free personal choice based on the belief that only in Christ is there salvation.

Given that their conversion to Christianity implies a conscious moving away from other religions or non-religion, it is quite likely that this would happen.

The fact that these Churches are already gifting the Church with martyrs is already very telling.

Fr Alfred Micallef is a member of the Society of Jesus.