Powers and Change in the Atlantic Decline

1. Internationalism
2. No. 77, July 2025
3. Pages 1 and 2

The Vatican and Atlantic Decline

Social change and power relations, class struggle, and the struggle between States driven by uneven economic and political development have been at the heart of every reflection on revolutionary strategy, since its inception in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. This requires knowledge of the ruling class, its political expressions, the bourgeois State and system of States.

It should come as no surprise, then, that social dynamics and international politics are also the two main guidelines along which we have attempted to assess the Catholic Church and the Vatican in recent decades. It is the largest organisation of the ruling class, the only one with global roots, and one of the very few – perhaps even the only one – whose conceptions have a long-term view of historical processes.

Cardinal Walter Kasper is one of the leaders of the most actively conciliar political currents among the bishops, and one of the inspirers of the papacy of Jorge Bergoglio. In several books, he has given an account of the process through which the Western roots of the Church are gradually losing their central role, creating the conditions for a multipolar Church. In a 2013 assessment, 50 years after the Council, Kasper argued that Vatican II wanted to recognise the end of the Constantinian era, i.e., the symbiosis of Church and State which has defined the historical relationship with political power, beginning with Emperor Constantine in the 4^th century during the Roman Empire, then during the period of feudal fragmentation, and later in the system of States in Europe. In 2011, in his text on ecclesiology – a subject understood as the theory of the Church as a political organisation – Kasper discusses this in the context of a crisis of culture and civilisation in Europe. These processes were grasped by the Council in the 1960s, but today they are dramatically accelerating:

The long Constantinian era (4^th-18^th centuries) and its effects on the bourgeois era, together with the Church of the people supported by its surroundings, came to an end with the First and then completely with the Second World War. Thus, the ‘Christian’ era of Europe has also come to an end. The end of the Constantinian era means the end of the Corpus Christianum and of the era in which Christianity was by far the majority religion in Europe, could count on political power as its secular arm, and could largely influence social life.

For Kasper, that end was dreadful, marked by two totalitarian systems and two world wars that profoundly changed the world and literally ravaged Europe. In a terrifying way, Auschwitz and Stalin’s gulags showed the failure of modern ideologies and utopias. Not only Christianity but also the Enlightenment was called into question, and the consequence is nihilism.

In his assessment half a century after the Council, Kasper points out two differences. At the time, the issue was modernity; today we are in the post-modern age, an undefined term that well represents the void of meaning and ideals, or in a late modern age, a formula in which we recognise echoes of the social traits of late imperialist maturity analysed by our Marxist theory.

The second transformation is that, since the 1960s, the Church has become a world Church: in the globalised world, more than two-thirds of Catholics do not live in Europe but in the Southern Hemisphere, and the questions of unity and multiplicity, i.e., the relations between the Roman centre and the local churches, are being raised in a new way.

According to Kasper – again in his 2011 book – many people in Europe and the West had lost heart and felt bewildered in the crisis, but in the vacuum created in that late modern society, the Church could present itself as a source of meaning. If you like, the Church can provide a faith-based order, whereas Marxism offers the new generations a scientific order. However, for Kasper, secularisation is not an inevitable destiny to which one must simply concede, provided that the Church does not fall into the nostalgic dream of a greatness that cannot return, nor into the radical utopias of a new Church of the Third Millennium. To implement this programme, there is no need for majorities, which are now impossible, but only a sufficient number of creative minorities:

In fact, the time of the old-style Church of the people has definitively passed with the end of the Constantinian age. As things stand, Christians in Europe must resign themselves, now and even more so in the future, to living in a situation of diaspora and minority in a culturally and religiously pluralistic society. Furthermore, they must get used to the fact that Christianity in the world will no longer be dominated by Europe but has become, in a new concrete sense, a world Church.

It is crucial to note that the strategic framework that has characterised Bergoglio’s papacy, a multipolar Church in which its Eurocentrism has been scaled back, was shared by Joseph Ratzinger. In Last Conversations, published in 2016, he wrote:

It is clear that it is no longer a given that Europe is the centre of the world Church: the universality of the Church is authentic, the different continents have equal weight within it. Europe retains its responsibility, its specific tasks. In Europe, however, faith is in such decline that the Old Continent can only be the true driving force of the world Church within certain limits. At the same time, we see that it is new elements, for example from Africa, South America, or the Philippines, that are giving it a new dynamic, refreshing a tired West, and infusing it with new energy.

For Ratzinger, taking Germany as an example, bureaucratisation and politicisation limited a lively dynamic; it was therefore encouraging that other influences were gaining ground, and that Europe now needs to be re-evangelised from outside.

It is difficult to say how much of this conceptual framework will be fully adopted in the programme of Robert Prevost, that is continuity in rebalancing. Precisely because of its broad consensus in the Conclave, this is necessarily also a compromise between different lines and different tactical emphases. It certainly does not coincide with the national-Catholic orientations that have gained the upper hand in Poland and Hungary, or with the pro-Western trends of certain American and European political currents. The framework could find support in the area that referred to Camillo Ruini and his cultural project, elaborated in his presidency of the CEI [Italian Episcopal Conference]. However, his project revolved around the inevitability of a public role for the Church, and on the need for a West confident in its roots in order to confront new giants such as China and India, which are foreign to the Christian tradition. Drawing the consequences of the end of the Constantinian age, while upholding the Christian roots of Europe, is not an easy puzzle, especially since, for Kasper, the path to a Church that is a qualitative and creative minority involves a difficult farewell to the old organisational structure: churches built in the years of plenty will prove too large and will have to be closed; the structure of parishes will have to be changed and meritorious charitable and social institutions will have to be repurposed.

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Let us make four observations. First, the expression end of the Constantinian era evokes a break of more than a thousand years; it has a strategic sense (the end of the centrality of Europe), but also one of social change, because it encompasses the transitions between three modes of production – slavery, feudalism, and capitalism – to arrive at the bourgeois 19^th century and the imperialist 20^th century. Limiting ourselves to the last millennium, the Church has gone from being one of the biggest feudal landowners, setting the pace of life for the whole social body with the sound of its church bells, and recruiting from a peasant society (in which the seventh or eighth son, unable to work the land, was destined for the seminary), to the society of late imperialist maturity, with its only child families, its mass individualism, and the great yawn of its disoriented opulence, to use Kasper’s expression.

Secondly, whatever difficulties it may encounter in facing this centennial – or even millennial – change, there is no other organisation of the ruling class which can even remotely claim to be as much of an expert in humanity as the Church, according to Pope Montini’s formula. Moreover, its pluralistic global structure means that the Church is simultaneously confronted by all of the various degrees of development which it encountered in Europe between the 19^th and 20^th centuries: from the disintegration of the peasantry and the megacities it faces in the global South; from the Opera dei Congressi (Work of the Congress) to Catholic mutual aid societies and white cooperatives; from the third ways of the cycle of State capitalism and the cycle of imperialist liberalism to the fears and resentments of late imperialist maturity today.

The Church’s ability to operate and assist in these different stages of development is part of its political offer to the ruling class. The social doctrine of the Church, from Rerum Novarum to Centesimus Annus, is part of this dual purpose: to adapt to change, and to put itself forward as the governor of change. By offering itself as the Catholic Church to a plurality of States, with some of which it also has an organic relationship enshrined in concordats, and by establishing its supranational centre as a territory, the Vatican State, the Church is by nature both subject and object of the international politics of the powers. In the appendix to the book, we have included the chapters of La questione storica dell’Unità italiana (The historical question of the unification of Italy), where we retrace, in the period between the end of the 15^th and the 16^th century, the founding moment of the role of the Papal State in the balance of Italian and European power. During the bourgeois 19^th century and the imperialist 20^th century, the Church and the Vatican went from maintaining relations with the system of Western European States (which was then extended to include the United States), i.e., from the concert of Europe with its colonial offshoots to the imperialist world war – a European civil war in which the Old Continent destroyed itself; from the division of Yalta in which the papacy was an Atlanticist bulwark, to laying down the global and pluralistic roots initiated by the Second Vatican Council with its Catholic Third-worldism, finally emerging today as the Church of multipolarism.

Social change and international politics are intertwined; by interpreting change, the Church has become an interlocutor of the competing powers. Although this entailed a difficult adaptation to capitalist modernity and the transformations of the imperialist era in Europe between the 19^th and 20^th centuries – and again in the mid-20^th century, with the Second Vatican Council and the adaptation to the progression of this development on a global scale – it can be said that this is the origin of their conception of strategy as a movement of classes and States.

Today, that conception is confronted with the crisis in the world order, where the emergence of a multipolar plurality of powers, notably China, coincides with the Atlantic decline and the weakening of America’s role as the cornerstone of the old order. The multipolar Church established by Bergoglio must be accompanied by a rebalancing that takes into account the other side of the irruption of China and the global South: the American crisis. Facing this crisis seems to be the perspective of Leo XIV, pope of multipolarism but also Augustine, American pope. In Rome, one might think, given the risks inherent to sudden change and the hazards of decline (as seen in the wars by choice waged in the spirit of a Protestant crusade), that even in the US there is a need for the field hospital that Bergoglio spoke of. The Church can help the US and the global order avoid catastrophic upheavals. This mirrors the political lines that see a role for Europe in curbing American volatility, in formulas ranging from transatlantic reciprocity to the Europeanisation of NATO.

The third observation concerns the balance sheet of the 40 years of development collected in this book. In Italy, the end of the DC (the Christian Democratic Party) as the unified representative of Catholics had its own dynamics in the Tangentopoli (Bribesville) crisis and was a less direct result of the clash between ecclesiastical factions than could be seen at the time. After the break of 1989-91, the lines of Catholic nationalism and national Europeanism had different meanings depending on the situation. In the tensions between the northern tax revolt and Rome’s political imbalance, a revealing episode was Karol Wojtyła’s prayer for Italy; it was a matter of countering the secessionist threats of the Lega (Northern League), which for a time seemed real. In Eastern Europe, after the collapse of the USSR, a completely new political cycle began: it seemed that the Vatican had the political personnel to reproduce the Western experience of Christian Democratic popular parties. In reality, the national-Catholic formulas that emerged later from this experience are much more at odds with the Euro-Vatican strategic orientation of the Holy See.

At its height, Wojtyła’s long pontificate showed that it had reversed the decline in priestly ordinations in Europe and completely overcome the post-conciliar crisis of the 1970s; there was talk of a counter-trend to the difficulties of recruitment in the secularised modern West. In 2006, on the basis of these results, we assessed that there was an international dimension to Ruini’s approach, because recruitment rates in Italy were twice as high as in Spain and four times as high as in France.

We updated those assessments in 2013, when Ratzinger’s abdication symbolised a new phase of deep crisis in the ecclesiastical organisation. It could be estimated that the mobilisation during the years of the Polish pope had raised recruitment rates in Europe by about 20%. In a decade of erosion and crisis, marked by sex-abuse scandals which struck directly at the heart of youth activity, there was a 25% decline. Today, that decline can be estimated at 50%. At the large gatherings of World Youth Day, in 1997 in Paris at the Champ de Mars and in 2000 in Rome on the Tor Vergata esplanade, it can be estimated that up to 1% of the European youth population was mobilised. Calculated on an annual basis, about one-tenth became priests; in relation to the corresponding demographic cohorts, the ordinations of diocesan and religious priests were in the order of one-per-thousand; today that figure has halved to 0.5-per-thousand.

Source: our analysis based on data from Annuarium statisticum Ecclesiae.

Andrea Riccardi writes in La Chiesa brucia (The Church is burning) that the interpretation of John Paul II’s years remains to be addressed, between the opposing theses of a parenthesis or an unfinished change; for critics, with his charisma, Wojtyła covered up the crisis rather than addressing its causes. Riccardi notes, however, that for the Polish pope, the ‘spirit of crisis’ was a generator of crisis. The extent to which the subjective role of mobilisation and the moral factor can influence an organisational outcome can be traced back to that recovery of one-fifth of recruitment levels.

Be that as it may, the picture of recruitment levels shows that in 1969 more than three-quarters of ordinations came from Europe and North America. Today, Western churches have fallen to one-quarter, compared to one-third from Africa and about one-fifth each from Asia and Latin America. After two generations, this is certainly the result of Vatican II and is the future of the multipolar Church personified by Bergoglio. As for its organizational structure in Europe and for what Cardinal Kasper calls the creative minority, in two generations the current level of 155,000 priests may fall to 60-70,000. Considering the contribution of women’s orders, there would be a total of around 150,000 clergy. Although more than halved, the Catholic organised minority would remain unparalleled.

Finally, we need to reflect on the thesis of the end of the Constantinian age in relation to the two imperialist world wars. Cardinal Kasper too easily rejects responsibility for these wars as solely the result of 20^th-century ideologies. Those wars were the product of the dynamics of unity and scission within imperialism, and it was the ideologies and political organisations of the ruling class, including the Church, which became their instruments. If there was a moment when the symbiosis between Church and State was expressed to the highest degree, it was precisely in the imperialist total war: we have estimated that in 1914-18 the Catholic Church provided 10,000 military chaplains to the two warring sides, while at least 80,000 priests were enlisted, 40% of the 200,000 priests available to the Catholic Church among the belligerents. Comparable figures apply to the Second World War.

It is crucial to notice that the division of roles during the war – i.e., local churches accompanying the scission of the imperialist conflict by participating in war mobilisation, while the Roman centre embodying and preparing for unity and post-war recomposition – is not at all disowned by the Church, but rather explicitly and directly offered to the ruling classes. As we have seen in the pages of La Civiltà Cattolica, the historic experience of 1914-18 is offered as a guarantee to the patriotic Church and to Chinese imperialism; communion with Rome will not be an obstacle to the national mobilisation of the faithful in China.

Certainly, the Vatican will try to avert the emergence of the sort of American patriotic Church that can be glimpsed beneath the surface in Trump’s influence on US Catholicism. Above all, it believes that it can somehow hold back the scission between the declining West and the ascending Asia, but in the end, American imperialism will also be offered the same kind of loyalty to the nation. The same is true for European imperialism, where the Euro-Vatican strategy and support for the consolidation of the Union remain a pillar for the multipolar Church.

The era in which the Church was the chaplain of the West, as suggested by the thesis of the end of the Constantinian era, may well have come to an end. But what the wars of the 20^th century anticipated was an organic relationship with the system of States of imperialism as a whole, in its dialectic of unity and scission: chaplains to all. This is the irreducible difference from communist internationalism.

Translated from Guido La Barbera's introduction to the book Chiesa multipolare nella crisi dell'ordine (The Multipolar Church in the Crisis of the World Order). This piece is originally published in Lotta Comunista, June 2025, pp. 1 and 8.