A reader writes:

Besides your blog, I like reading the stuff at ‘thecatholicthing.org’ it really is both authentically Catholic and intellectually stimulating. Have you ever checked it out? If you have not, I suggest you do, it’s worth your time. So anyway I was on it today, and saw this link in their news section.

This is very sad news indeed. I know Europe is heavily secularized and has been for some time, but to have the numbers jump so high like that, that’s terrible. Is there even a effort to re-evangelize Europe? If there is one it does not seem to be having a big effect, or am I wrong? Mark, in your honest opinion, do you think Europe will ever be Christian again, or is there even a chance of this happening? Seeing such low numbers in Europe depress me, its such a travesty to see the once gloriously Christian Europe succumb to the nothingness of secularism. It’s like the story of Dracula, once great defender of Christendom, then turned satanic inverse, the arch enemy of everything Christendom stood for.

Prophecy is above my pay grade and speculation about the future tends to lead us away from Hope and into either presumption or despair. Rather then depressing ourselves with gloomy thoughts about events we cannot possibly foretell, I think wisdom says, “Look and see what God is up to now and try to support that.” If we’d have looked at Israel at the moment of the Babylonian Captivity, we’d have said, “That’s it. It’s the end of Israel and of the entire story of revelation to Abraham, Moses, and David. The whole thing was an illusion and the whole “messianic promise” nonsense was just a lot of wishful thinking.

Turns out we’d be wrong. It ain’t over till it’s over. Hope lives while Christ lives. And he lives forever.