In addition to Ken Woodward’s fine piece on the reporting of the Church scandals, there comes Philip Jenkins’ fascinating relating of demographics to the reaction in Europe :
Most evidence suggests that the Church will endure and even enjoy a historic boom—just not in places it has flourished historically. For years, its core has been migrating away from Europe, heading southward into Africa and Latin America. Some Church observers have remarked that the Vatican is now in the wrong location: It’s 2,000 miles too far north of its emerging homelands.
The New Republic seems to have corrected now its earlier online tag for the article—and good thing, for when I saw that Philip was proclaiming “The End of the European Church,” I nearly fell off my chair. The more accurate tag now reads “How the Scandal Will Remake the Catholic Church.”
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