Making Europe Christian Again

On this Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, Pope Leo XIV celebrated Holy Mass and closed the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica, officially concluding the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope. 

Although the physical door marking this period of renewal was closed, his message to the Church was that the path to hope remains permanently open. In his homily, he issued a call for the renewal of Christian civilization, specifically following the example of the Magi. He said, “If we do not reduce our churches to monuments, if our communities are homes, if we stand united and resist the flattery and seduction of those in power, then we will be the generation of a new dawn.” 

This new dawn is a summons to reawaken the civilizational truth that since the birth of Christ, Europe has been shaped by the Christian faith. From its founding, the Church built the structures that transmitted belief, formed consciences, educated peoples, and ordered society. Both secular and clerical institutions emerged from this foundation, giving Europe its distinctive understanding of law and superior understanding of human dignity, authority, and freedom. Remove it, and Europe becomes a mere administrative zone with a memory problem.

This loss of memory explains much of Europe’s present disorientation. Perhaps this is why Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s remarks at last year’s Rimini Meeting earned her a standing ovation and struck a nerve across the continent. She said, 

We can only seize this opportunity if the European Union is able to rediscover its soul and its roots (and, yes, that includes its cultural as well as its religious roots, which were culpably denied years ago), quite simply because you cannot define your role in the world and your mission in history if you don’t even know who you are.

Even beyond its borders, U.S. Vice President JD Vance struck the same nerve at last year’s Munich Security Conference, when he asked his European audience what it defends itself for. Not merely from whom or from what—but, as he asked, “What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?”

As Hilaire Belloc famously proclaimed, “The faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith.” If Belloc was right, then Europe’s overlapping crises cannot merely be solved at the level that caused them. Instead, they require a proactive restoration of the faith that made the continent great in the first place. 

So, the question becomes unavoidable: what would it actually take to make Europe Christian again?

First, and most fundamentally, the European faithful must know what Christianity stands for—and what it stands against. Christianity is a truth claim about reality, and truth, by its nature, is exclusive and oppositional. To affirm one vision of the human person, of freedom, and of the good is necessarily to reject others. Today, the two most pernicious heresies striking at its survival are an aggressive leftism that denies nature, hierarchy, and the transcendent altogether, and political Islam, a worldview that does not share Christianity’s understanding of God, man, or freedom nor tolerate those who do. Christians are called to love their neighbors without exception, but pretending that all value systems are equally compatible with Christianity is neither honest nor sustainable. Native Europeans living in London, Paris, Brussels, Vienna, and other cities are the primary witnesses to what Gad Saad termed ‘suicidal empathy’—parallel societies with practices and laws entirely antithetical to their Christian values. Christianity’s properly oppositional quality need not manifest itself in an ugly or antagonistic form. Renewal, however, demands the courage to affirm what is good and name what is destructive.

Second, the faithful must harness the spirit and power of creative minorities. Pope Benedict XVI offered a crucial insight for our moment when he called Christians to become a “creative minority.” Faced with worldly attacks, Christians have three options: to accommodate them uncritically, to withdraw from them resentfully, or to engage critically and creatively. Only the latter is a serious solution to sustaining the faith and the civilization that built it.  

This critical engagement means boldly proclaiming a different vision of man and God. To make Europe Christian again, Christians must enter or re-enter public life as protagonists—artists, parents, teachers, lawmakers—who show, rather than merely assert, the excellence of the Christian vision and the love it conveys. It must also accept the reality of uncertainty and suffering this brings; as Pope Leo XIV stated in his Epiphany homily, as the Magi, “sense the need to go out and search, accepting the risks associated with their journey,” even in a world that is often “unpleasant and dangerous.” Because Christianity itself is structured around faith—belief in the person of Christ—rather than bloodlines or borders, the future of Christian Europe depends uniquely on the living of the faith of its people. 

Third, Christians must engage secular society on its own stated terms, particularly in the realm of public policy, where appeals to reason remain the accepted currency of debate. 

Christianity is not opposed to the laws of reason. On the contrary, it presumes and elevates it. But in hyper-secular Western Europe, there is an allergic resistance to citing faith in the public square, especially as a justification for policymaking. This aversion is unfortunately quite institutionalized as well as cultural, exemplified by the deliberate omission of any reference to Christianity in the 70,000 words of the European Union’s Constitution, adopted in 2004. As a result, political leaders in much of Western Europe are effectively barred from invoking faith-based arguments without severe professional consequences. To oppose measures such as assisted suicide on explicitly religious grounds is often politically fatal.

For this reason, policymakers must strategically and compellingly recover what Pope St. John Paul II modeled so powerfully: the willingness to meet the world to convert the world. In practice, this requires articulating Christian policy positions not primarily through doctrinal citation, but through arguments grounded in reason, natural law, and objective human goods. This appeal to the post-Enlightenment premium on reason translates its moral claims into a language accessible to a secular audience while holding allegiance to rationality.

For example, the Christian pro-life and pro-family policy framework is not just rooted in a belief of man made in the image of God. It is oriented toward social continuity, protecting societies from demographic collapse and self-extinction—an outcome that is objectively harmful, regardless of one’s theological commitments. When articulated clearly, these arguments do not depend on revelation alone; they rest on observable consequences and rational assessment of human flourishing.

Christian policymakers must therefore engage secular audiences by demonstrating how policies such as abortion on demand and assisted death erode respect for human life, weaken the family as a social institution, and ultimately produce destabilizing societal outcomes. Framed in this way, the defense of life is not a confessional demand imposed external to public reason but a rational argument about the conditions necessary for a society to endure. This approach serves as a strategic means of pointing the secular world to the moral order embedded in the creation story, even when explicit theological language is omitted.

Importantly, this strategy does not neglect the necessity of personal witness. Christian leaders must live in accordance with the truths they defend, especially exuding statesmanship in public life. Reason, rightly understood, harmonizes with the transcendent order. European leaders and Christian saints are the reason we know this; we must learn it again. 

Fourth, the Christian faithful and Church leadership must work deliberately to win the hearts of their fellow citizens, not just their intellects.

Reason alone will never be enough to sustain a civilization. Societies are animated ultimately by what they honor, love, and are willing to die for. Better said by George Weigel, 

History is driven by what men and women honor, cherish and worship; what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature and the arts, by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on. 

Any effort to renew Christian Europe must therefore attend to the affective and cultural dimensions of belief, and this places a particular responsibility on clerical leadership. The Church must demonstrate fierce conviction and accept dangers that come with genuine witness. 

This comes with recovering a more demanding account of Christian life. The call to take up one’s cross is not an incidental feature of the faith but central to it, as is gratitude toward those who built and defended the civilization Christians now inherit. Among devout Catholic communities in contemporary Europe, such as France’s Academia Christiana, love of God and love of country are not treated as competing loyalties but as mutually reinforcing. This form of Christian patriotism, properly understood, can serve as a powerful foundation for evangelization, especially within one’s own cultural and national context. As Pope Pius XII affirmed in Summi Pontificatus, the church’s universal quality is not “in contrast with love of traditions or the glories of one’s fatherland.”  

In the twentieth century, Fulton Sheen warned that young people would not be satisfied with technocratic, mild liberalism that asks little and demands nothing. Human beings, particularly the young, are hungry for a life of meaning, purpose, and sacrifice. When the church fails to offer a compelling and demanding vision of the faith, that hunger does not disappear; it is redirected. History shows us how spiritual vacuums can be filled by morally just movements or by monstrous ones, as was the case in Europe’s darkest decades. 

Recalling the slew of evils that struck 20th-century Europe, it is heartening to remember that the native land of the faith has endured worse than this. It has never been so afflicted as to fail to produce great warriors of extraordinary faith and courage. Christian Europe survived Roman persecution, the fall of their monarchies, repeated Islamic Ottoman invasions, intra-religious wars, the Holocaust. It will survive this crisis too, provided it remembers who it is.

To make Europe Christian again is not to rewind history or establish theocracy. The continent must re-anchor itself in the singular event of the Incarnation that gave it life. Christianity has spread throughout time by witness, sacrifice, and truth lived publicly. One of the most beautiful, yet overlooked strengths of Christian Europe today is the endurance of its faithful communities—clerical and lay—who rise each day to pray for the future of their homelands. 

Prayer has always been Europe’s greatest weapon. If Europe is to survive the present crisis and emerge renewed, it will be because it chose once again to believe in its great past and what makes it worth defending in the first place.