John Paul – The Last Western Pope?

Not, of course, that future popes (including the next one) may not be Europeans, but that the concerns of the papacy will tend to shift away from Europe, the USA, and our “culture wars” and toward issues of pressing concern in the “2/3rds world,” where global Christianity’s center of gravity is shifting to. That, at least, is Ross Douthat’s contention:

[D]espite the Pope’s efforts to propose an alternative path for the West, it seems likely that the Christian story in Europe is nearing an end. What was once the heartland of Catholicism is the most secular continent in the world, a place where churchgoing is the province of the aging and eccentric and where the birth rate has dwindled (save among Europe’s rising Muslim population). The picture is more encouraging for Catholicism in America–but even the disproportionate influence of the United States in world affairs cannot mask the fact that American Catholics constitute a small and shrinking percentage of a huge global faith.

So Christianity’s center of gravity will shift, inexorably, away from the West, and with it the concerns of the Church and of the papacy. The next pope may well be a European, but the realities of demography and devotion will force him to be far more engaged with developments in Africa or Latin America, India or China, than with the controversies that have so exercised the Pope’s Western critics. It’s not so much that the influence of the developing world will push the Vatican to continue emphasizing doctrinal orthodoxy and traditional teachings on sexual matters–though it almost certainly will. It’s that the shape of global Christendom will require future popes to spend far less time arguing with the declining population of the secular West, and more time dealing with the concerns of a world in which, by 2050, only a fifth of all believers will be non-Hispanic whites.

Thus, debates over Catholic relations with other Western faiths will take a back seat to combating syncretism in South Asia and promoting religious liberty in China. The rise of Pentecostalism in Latin America will pose more of a challenge than the question of homosexuality or women’s ordination. And above all, the conflict with Islam in sub-Saharan Africa will likely come to dominate the Church’s agenda–and the numbers and the stakes involved will make disputes over divorce and contraception feel like a sideshow.

This is largely, of course, a reiteration of the Jenkins thesis. As far as the church is concerned, the West is not necessarily the center of the world anymore. However, it will still be the case that, for the foreseeable future, the West (though perhaps increasingly places like China and India too) will remain the center of political and economic power, which is not something the church can afford to ignore.