CHRISTIANITY is treading a slow, painful path to its own Calvary. Two thousand years after its emergence as an alternative to Judaism, it is succumbing to a 21st-century malaise the disparity between the ultra-rich and the irredeemable poor.
It has been reported that a community of Benedictine nuns in Poland needs $1 million urgently to preserve their 800-year-old abbey, which is almost half as old as Christianity itself. Until now, the abbey has been supported by the European Union and sustained by the sale of its own tomatoes and preserves, supplemented by income derived from visitors.
(A contemplative order in Karachi the Monastery of the Angels in Malir similarly relies upon income from its bakery and confectionery).
One would have imagined that Catholicrich countries like Brazil and Mexico, or the Vatican (worth $5 billion) and the Vatican Bank ($5.4bn) would help subvent the Polish monastery. Apparently, Peter and his pence are not so easily parted.
The predicament within the Catholic church is not unique. Almost 500 years ago, the English King Henry VIII disbanded ‘over 800 Catholic monasteries, abbeys, priories, and nunneries’ across his kingdom. They owned roughly ‘a quarter of all cultivated land in England and held vast amounts of gold, silver, and jewels’. King Henry diverted their wealth to his private coffers and demanded their loyalty to himself as the head of his new Church of England.
Today, that Church of England is as indigent as its progenitor King Henry once was.
More than 8,000 churches across the UK have closed ‘due to declining congregations or structural issues’. They have been converted into ‘private homes, shops, or community spaces’ into anything but a mosque. Out of roughly 16,000 Church of England buildings, only one (St Mark’s in Peckham, SE London) eventually became a mosque, but only after it had already been used as a scrap yard and a factory.
Deconsecrated churches and parish pr operties in the UK are listed on ‘LoopNet UK Churches for Sale’ or The Church of Scotland Properties for Sale. That decline has spread across the channel to France where ‘deconsecrated chapels, abbeys, and former convents’ are put on the market. Even in Italy, ‘Immobiliare Italiano Church Properties/ Monasteries’ offer online deconsecrated churches, chapels, monasteries, and abbeys. Prices range from a minimum of 30,000-85,000 to many millions for larger buildings.
Interestingly, for the first time in its history, the Church of England today has afemale Archbishop of Canterbury. By tradition, since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, British monarchs (including queens) have been Supreme Governors of the Church of England. The United Kingdom will not readily admit it, but it is technically at par with other theocracies: Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Vatican.
Another ‘first’ occurred when last year, out of the 91 nationalities represented in the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals, 116 of the cardinal electors voted in an American Robert F. Prevost, originally from Chicago’s South side to the papacy.
He chose the title Pope Leo XIV deliberately. The name echoes the proactive history of earlier Leos Leo I, who persuaded Attila the Hun to spare Rome; Leo X, who excommunicated Martin Luther, causing the Protestant Reformation; and the modernist Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) addressed issues such as ‘industriallabour,workers’rights, and Catholic social teaching’.
Reports of Pope Leo XIV’s health are acause of coneern. But he will survive his secular counterparts his fellow American President Donald Trump and the ne0-American Benjamin Netan-yahu, both of whom are struggling to remain electorally relevant.
Voters in Pakistan are also suffering from a diminution of faith in democracy.
They have watched political parties join fists against popularity. And now those erstwhile allies stand pitted against each other. As one 17th-century Royalist said, after being defeated by the parliamentarian Roundheads: ‘Now that you have done with us, go fight amongst yourselves.
Of late, JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rahman has fallen out with the present hybrid form of governance. Over the years, he used his narrow electoral base to negotiate admittance into the corridors of power but it was never large enough to make him more than a petulant spoiler. Like Trump and Netanyahu, he craves relevance. Who was it who said: ‘Power reveals who we are, not who we pretend to be’? Prof J.H. Plumb (a specialist in British 18th-century history) defined history as ‘a dream made of actual events’. Had he been alive, he would have written about our political shenanigans as a recurring nightmare, ‘made up of actual events’.
The wnter is an author.
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