To begin to find an answer to that question, please join me at a recent gathering of parish delegates from the two adjacent Welsh dioceses of Cardiff and Menevia.

It was in a parish hall in Miskin, outside the Welsh capital, at the urging of Archbishop Mark O'Toole (named in April 2022 as both Archbishop of Cardiff and Bishop of Menevia) who wanted us to consider the prospect of formally merging the two dioceses into one.

No surprises there.

Faced with nosediving numbers, such mergers are being considered across England and Wales, with Rome's blessing.

The point of this shake-up is not just to rationalise and cut costs.

No one quite articulates this, but something bigger is afoot: a reset, a shake-up.

For a long time we've been in "emergency mode", is how the archbishop explains it, and we can't go on like this.

We have to consolidate and cooperate for the sake of mission, in a Church where parishes are both spread out over a large and diverse territory (Menevia includes Welsh-speaking Catholics, Cardiff the English periphery of Herefordshire) and shrinking and ageing.

The crisis is not a shortage of priests, but a shortage of people.

England and Wales have one of the highest ratios of priests to lay people in the world.

The archdiocese of Cardiff, spread over 1,180 square miles, has 131,280 Catholics (8.4 per cent of the population) but just 8,276 at Mass, down from roughly 20,000 in 1990 and 14,000 in 2019, just before Covid snatched more than a third of them, never to return.

The ancestral rural diocese of Menevia, spread over 3,590 square miles, has just over 26,000 Catholics (three per cent of the population) and 4,650 at Mass, compared with roughly 12,000 in 1990 and 6,000 in 2019.

The trend will continue to slump.

So you'd imagine that this meeting on 10 February would be sombre, even grumpy: competing narratives to explain the decline and to vindicate agendas; sadness about the future; a painful sense of loss, especially of the young; a sense, perhaps, of failure.

I've often found such desolation in our parishes these days, speaking around the country about the Synod.

Yet the Miskin meeting had none of those craters: it was upbeat, and creative.

No magic wands were waved, but we saw change coming, and the grace in welcoming it.

Horrified at the prospect of ageing, beleagured enclaves, we sat round tables imagining a future of mucking in together for mission.

People said this would need a culture change: you can't go on in the same way, can you?

You have to go out, learn to listen, hear from the young who don't want to come in, and the elderly who since Covid stay away.

We have to learn to share ministries and resources for mission, go beyond boundaries, build bridges and synergies.

We need to create means of decision-making in common, through strong local deaneries and a diocesan pastoral council.

One person at my table said synodality had re-energised her parish, and she now realised how key it was to the future.

I doubt anyone in Miskin that day had read Tomáš Halík's Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change, published in English this week.

It's been swirling around inside my head for many months: the Czech priest-prophet has penned the most compelling, thorough account of what Pope Francis means by this being a "change of era" in the Church.

The shift is much bigger than most realise, one that requires re-imagining much of what we take for granted.

But before letting Halík himself explain that change, let's name the key spiritual move being made here. Continue reading

• Austen Ivereigh is a UK-based Catholic journalist, author, commentator and biographer of Pope Francis. His latest book is "First Belong to God: On retreat with Pope Francis."

We remember how Malcolm Muggeridge, a proclaimed atheist, became a Catholic after meeting Mother Teresa.

Curiosity about our Faith doesn't usually have such a dramatic result.

Still, many of us have been in this situation: we are asked questions about our Faith but because the other person has had no experience of religious language our answers do not connect.

How do we cross this divide? How do we find language that will have meaning for someone who has never been inside a church?

In writing about this, I am restricted by a commitment not to repeat personal conversations.

However, I think I can use statements I've heard many times, followed by the kind of response I usually give to try to give meaning.

To help make meaning, I'll begin with the most common introduction.

I'm not religious but I am spiritual.

Response: I am so glad you didn't put that the other way around. Tell me why you are not religious and how you know that you are a spiritual being.

So you believe religions causes conflict in the world? I think that only happens when religion gets polluted by politics.

What do I believe?

Quite simply, that we come from a greater reality, we return to that greater reality, and out little time here in life school is for the growth of the soul.

For me, religion provides maps for the spiritual journey.

Those maps can be very useful when I feel a bit lonely or lost. They make me aware that I'm a child of God.

I don't believe in God.

Response: That's good. It means your mind and heart are open to what that word really means. God is not a name. God is an indicator pointing to a presence that is everywhere and in everything yet cannot be named.

We know that presence in many ways: as creator, life, growth, abundance, light, beauty, love, transformer.

For me, the presence that gets called God is all there is.

We become aware that we are like drops of water in the ocean of this presence.

What about the old man with the beard?

Response: That is a visual parable of the sacred presence being like a caring father. If we think of It being literally, an image of an old man we name God, then we have created an idol.

What do you mean by idol?

Response: We worship an image that we ourselves have made.

In the limitation of incarnation, we do need images, and they can change as we grow.

We don't say of a chosen image, "This is God." but "This is how I feel about the eternal presence in me at this time."

Images, like the word God, are indicators. For example, many Catholics have statues or pictures of Jesus and his mother Mary, in their home.

These are not photographic likenesses, nor are they objects of worship. They are reminders that awaken us to spiritual awareness and our connection with the divine.

Didn't Jesus die two thousand years ago?

Response: His spirit is very much alive and with us. We understand Jesus as the special incarnation of eternal love, the unnameable named. We call him The Way, the Truth and the Life because in our spiritual relationship with him we discover how we are meant to live.

Then why are there so many different Christian churches?

Response: Because we are like children. In this country we have a good education system, but we can all remember a time when we insisted, "My school is better than your school."

As we grow, we step over the fences we have built. We are good neighbours to other houses in the Christian village.

I walk with Christ Jesus in the Catholic church. I also find his presence in other churches, in a mosque, a temple, a synagogue, in nature, in other people and especially in young children.

Why did you become a Catholic?

Response: That's a simple question to answer. It was about coming home.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

The other two are France and the Netherlands.

These are some of the predictions made by Washington-based think-tank, Pew Research Centre, in a recently published report.

The report predicted that by 2050

• In the Asia Pacific region, the proportion of freethinkers will decline from 21% in 2010 to 17%
• The proportion of Christians in New Zealand will decline from 57% to 44.7 %
• The proportion of unaffiliated in New Zealand will reach 45.1%, making this category the largest "religion," by a whisker.
• In North America the proportion of people unaffiliated with any religion will increase from 19% to 23%
• In Europe the proportion of unaffiliated will increase from 17% to almost 26%.

These projections, which take into account demographic factors such as fertility, age composition and life expectancy, forecast that people with no religion will make up about 13% of the world's population in 2050, down from roughly 16% as of 2010.

This is largely attributable to the fact that religious "nones" are, on average, older and have fewer children than people who are affiliated with a religion.

Listen to Radio New Zealand's "The Panel" discussion, Decline of religion

Other predictions include:

• 40 million people are predicted to switch to Christianity, while 106 million are predicted to leave.
• The number of Muslims will grow from 1.6 billion in 2010, to 2.76 billion by 2050.
• The growth in those choosing Christianity will grow far slower, rising from 2.17 billion, to 2.76.
• The percentage of Christians remains at 31.4 %, while the percentage of Muslims rises from just 23.2% to 29.7%
• Atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion - though increasing in countries such as the United States and France - will make up a declining share of the world's total population.
• The global Buddhist population will be about the same size it was in 2010, while the Hindu and Jewish populations will be larger than they are today.
• In Europe, Muslims will make up 10% of the overall population.
• India will retain a Hindu majority but also will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia.
• In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050.
• Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion in the United States. Muslims will be more numerous in than people who identify as Jewish on the basis of religion.
• Four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The number of countries with a Christian majority is expected to decline from 159 to 151 by 2050.

Pew's researchers took six years to analyse information from about 2,500 data sources, including censuses, demographic surveys, general population surveys and other studies.

Source

• PewResearchCentre
• Pewresearch.org
• channelnewsasia
• Radio New Zealand
• Radio New Zealand
• Image: The Huffington Post

The uncommitted will listen to them far sooner than to an evangelist or apologist.

So says Philip Yancy in the HuffingtonPost.

He says he decide to write his book Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News? after reading Walker Percy's novel, The Second Coming.

In it one of the characters says about this about Christians, "I cannot be sure they don't have the truth."

"But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are repellent precisely to the degree that they embrace and advertise the truth?

"A mystery: If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it?" Continue reading

By 2010, this percentage had more than doubled to 18 percent. That's a difference of about 25 million people, all of whom have somehow lost their religion.

That raises an obvious question: how come? Why are Americans losing their faith?

Today, we get a possible answer thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail.

He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet.

He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.

Downey's data comes from the General Social Survey, a widely respected sociological survey carried out by the University of Chicago, that has regularly measure people's attitudes and demographics since 1972.

In that time, the General Social Survey has asked people questions such as: "what is your religious preference?" and "in what religion were you raised?"

It also collects data on each respondent's age, level of education, socioeconomic group, and so on. And in the Internet era, it has asked how long each person spends online. The total data set that Downey used consists of responses from almost 9,000 people. Continue reading.

Source: MIT Technology Review

Image: theamericanjesus.net

In his review Listener columnist David Larsen said, "So what is the point of the religion, exactly? 'To give us a sense of proportion and humility, not to be obsessed with our own salvation. We need to balance ourselves by turning from ourselves.' This atheist came away deeply impressed.

My fellow atheists have suggested, not always politely, that I'm not an atheist, that I'm not really praying, and that praying is not acceptable behavior for atheists. As politely as I can manage, I would like to defend myself on all three counts. Continue reading