ROME – Well before the age of social media, the great British historian Arnold Toynbee issued a famous caution about getting swept away by newspaper headlines—a caution all the more apt today, when views of the world are increasingly shaped by the even more ephemeral impulses of the digital world.
Here’s what he wrote, in Civilization on Trial:
The things that make good headlines are on the surface of the stream of life, and they distract us from the slower, impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the surface and penetrate to the depths. But it is really these deeper, slower movements that make history, and it is they that stand out huge in retrospect, when the sensational passing events have dwindled, in perspective, to their true proportions.
It’s a reminder to keep one’s eyes on the prize that applies across the board, but perhaps in a special way to evangelists—because, frankly, if headlines and social media posts were all an evangelist had to rely on, at least in the affluent West, the case for despair would be awfully tempting.
We had a recent application of the point with Pope Francis’ September 26–29 trip to Luxembourg and Belgium, one of the most contentious and difficult of his papacy.
Once upon a time, Belgium was a Catholic powerhouse in Europe. Under the influence of Spanish Habsburg rule and the newly minted Jesuits and Capuchins, Belgium was saved for the faith during the Protestant Reformation, and as recently as 1900, census rolls reported that the country was 90 percent Catholic.
Today, however, that once-proud Catholic culture seems a shell of itself. Belgium is one of the most thoroughly secularized nations in the world, with an official Mass attendance rate of 8.9 percent, although an actual headcount of people in the pews on a randomly chosen Sunday in October 2022 suggested the real number may be closer to 3 percent.
“My interest kept growing and I thought: Rather a meaningful life than a meaningless existence.”
It’s also one of the world’s most progressive cultures, where official Catholic positions on matters such as abortion, birth control, divorce, gay marriage, and women priests are a tough sell. Exacerbating all that is the fact that Belgium has also experienced one of the worst clerical sexual abuse crises in western Europe, which has further hardened attitudes toward the Catholic Church.
Francis’ trip was thus always destined to be a bit rocky, but few would have foreseen the degree of blowback the pontiff encountered over just three days in the country.
Things began to turn sour on Friday, when Prime Minister Alexander De Croo publicly reprimanded the pontiff for the abuse scandals. Later that same day, the Catholic University of Leuven, whose 600th anniversary was the official motive for the pope’s presence, issued a stinging statement objecting to language the pope had used about women in a talk at the university, calling it “deterministic and reductive.”
Things snowballed from there with a hostile tone in the local media and ambivalence on the streets. On Sunday, during the pope’s open-air Mass in Brussels, women dressed in all white stood during the liturgy to protest the Church’s refusal to ordain women as priests.
Even after the pope returned to Rome, bombs continued to go off. On Thursday, De Roo announced that he was summoning the Vatican ambassador to Belgium to protest comments Francis made to reporters aboard the papal plane on the way home, calling abortion “murder” and doctors who perform the procedure “hitmen.”
It’s language the pope has used before, but De Roo construed it as “unacceptable interference” in Belgium’s domestic politics—even though Francis was almost certainly no longer in Belgian airspace when he pronounced the words.
If all you had to go on was coverage of the trip, in other words, you’d probably think that attempts at evangelization in Belgium would be a bit akin to trying to sell snow to an Inuit—i.e., an exercise in frustration.
And, yet.
Yet, here’s a bit of data that didn’t really register amid the Sturm und Drang climate of the papal visit: This year the Belgian Church set a new record for the number of adult baptisms, which is generally considered the most reliable indicator of missionary success in a given territory. A total of 362 catechumens were registered in 2024, which is up from 244 in 2019, the pre-Covid peak, and from 186 in 2014, meaning the total almost doubled in the last decade.
Kerknet, the official web portal of the Catholic Church in the Dutch-speaking Flanders region of Belgium, quoted a twenty-nine-year old named Jeffrey Schoenaers who was baptized during the Easter liturgy this year.
“I started reading books and discovered that Christianity was part of my identity. It was like rediscovering my own culture, a renaissance,” he said.
“God and the Catholic faith welcomed me with open arms,” Schoenaers said. “My interest kept growing and I thought: Rather a meaningful life than a meaningless existence.”
Granted, this small boom in adults hardly offsets steady declines in infant baptisms in Belgium, which fell by more than 7,500 between 2017 and 2022 alone.
Granted, too, the uptick in adult baptisms doesn’t even come close to offsetting the growing trend of requests for “de-baptism” in Belgium, when someone who was baptized as a Catholic submits a formal request to be removed from the rolls. Although the Church is a bit coy about releasing hard statistics, it’s believed the number of such requests varied from 1,000 to 2,000 per year between 2019 and 2022.
If Belgium is posting record gains in adult converts even in this milieu, imagine what might happen if the cultural winds shift . . .
Yet the fact remains that in the teeth of overwhelming cultural pressure to the contrary, hundreds of adult Belgians are choosing to join the Catholic Church every year. In many cases, they weren’t even brought into the fold by explicit missionary activity, but rather simply by the evangelization of presence and witness.
Much like Sherlock Holmes’ famous dog that didn’t bark, it’s often the thing you would have expected to happen, but which didn’t, that holds the clue to the mystery.
In this case, the unexpected thing is Belgians such as Schoenaers finding a spiritual home in the Catholic Church, despite a media climate in which such a decision may appear baffling, if not actually morally suspect. Yet even in the twenty-first century, there obviously remain intrepid souls who don’t take their existential cues entirely from what’s in the air, even if you might not know it from trawling X, Instagram, or Facebook, not to mention CNN or the Associated Press.
If Belgium is posting record gains in adult converts even in this milieu, imagine what might happen if the cultural winds shift—which, inevitably, sooner or later, they always do.
It’s part of the Navy SEAL creed that a true warrior is “never out of the fight.” In a very different sense, Belgium offers a reminder that the same thing applies to a determined evangelist—even in what might be considered “enemy territory,” under fire and harassed on all sides, it’s still possible to plant a flag for the faith.
For that lesson, at least, perhaps Pope Francis and the Church ought to be grateful to Belgium after all.