The pendulum swings
My aunt asked me to record a video for the Velada at this October’s Assumption alumni homecoming—the Old Girls’ Day. She belongs to the High School Class of 1961, the Blue Diamonds. In her message to the younger batches, she recalled how her class chose noblesse oblige as its motto in 1960: those who are given much owe something to those in want.
She spoke fondly of the Convent of the Assumption on Calle Herran in Manila, of schooldays under French nuns, and of the world that shaped them.
From saints to history lessons
When the video was done, she stayed, energized like a schoolgirl, and began naming France’s saints. St. Geneviève, patron of Paris, who, according to legend, stood at the center of the city’s defense against Attila the Hun in 451. Joan of Arc, the teenage visionary, burned at the stake in 1431 and canonized in 1920. Marie-Eugénie de Jésus, who founded the Religious of the Assumption in 1839—the order that carried this French tradition across an ocean to girls like my aunt.
At 81, she has never lost the habit. She taught English and Comparative Literature at UP Diliman for many years, so the saints’ lesson gave way to a history lesson. She began with Charlemagne, crowned emperor in Rome in 800 CE, then hinged the story on literature: Roland at Roncesvalles, the old tales of kings and kingdoms.
She remembered the phrase la fille aînée de l’Église, the eldest daughter of the Church. Clovis baptized at Reims, kings crowned there, monasteries and schools and the parish calendar. It was the France she had learned through books.
The separation of Church and State
Those stories rested on older ground. Christianity had taken root across the Roman Empire, including the Gaul that would become France, and when the Western Empire broke apart, the successor kingdoms carried that legacy with them. By Charlemagne’s time, the faith was part of Western Europe’s political fabric, and his coronation seemed to join the Roman heritage to the new Frankish kingdom.
But how did a country that spent centuries calling itself the eldest daughter of the Church arrive where it is now?
By the eve of the Revolution, the Church was one of the great corporate powers of the ancien régime. It owned vast land, collected the dîme, and was tangled up with aristocratic privilege. So when the Revolution came for one, it came for both. Church property was nationalized, the clergy pulled under state control, religious orders dissolved, churches repurposed. Then came the slower dismantling: secular schooling under the Ferry laws, and finally the 1905 separation of Church and State.
It was something like chemotherapy—a long, aggressive course of treatment meant to remove religion from the body of French public life.
The treatment was not painless. It killed institutions, stripped the Church of its avaricious privilege, severed old habits (and heads). France built a republic whose state belonged to no religion. That became laïcité, and it worked so thoroughly that secularism itself became part of French identity.
Their faith, their choice
In 2026, 13,234 adults are expected to receive Catholic baptism in France, according to the French Catholic Church’s National Service for Catechesis and Catechumenate. That is a 28 percent increase from 2025 and more than three times the 4,124 recorded in 2016. The 18-to-25 age group is now the largest among adult catechumens, accounting for 42 percent, just ahead of those aged 26 to 40.
That is remarkable only if we understand what it does—and does not—mean.
I’m not saying France is suddenly becoming Catholic again. The country’s Catholic population has declined dramatically across generations. Pew Research Center’s recent data show 34 percent of French adults still identifying as Catholic, while 26 percent were raised Catholic but no longer identify as such. Only two percent of French adults were raised outside Catholicism and now identify as Catholic.
A 20-year-old who walks into a French parish and asks to be baptized is doing something fundamentally different from a Filipino infant carried to the baptismal font. The infant does not choose. The parents choose while the godparents promise, then the priest baptizes. The child receives a name, a sacrament, and, usually, a religious identity before they are old enough to decide whether they want to pledge to a three-in-one God, the Virgin Mary, and a universe of saints.
The French catechumen, by contrast, arrives after years of not having the faith and says: I want this. That is the part I find fascinating.
Extraordinarily durable, extraordinarily stagnant
And then I think of the Philippines, which is almost the inverse of France. We never had a revolution that violently expunged Catholicism, and all of its trappings, from public life. Our Catholicism survived colonial rule, revolution, Americanization, dictatorship, and democracy.
Religion became so embedded in Filipino life that it is branded upon the child—well before personal choice.
Pew’s 2026 survey puts the Philippine Catholic population at 76 percent of adults. A separate Pew analysis found that 88 percent of Filipino adults were raised Catholic, and 78 percent still identify as such. We remain, in that sense, extraordinarily durable in our Catholicism. Extraordinarily stagnant.
My thoughts return to the pendulum. When the pandemic began closing borders in 2020, there was already a sense among economists, sociologists, and political thinkers that COVID-19 was bound to reshape societies permanently. In a 2020 working paper, the International Monetary Fund found that major pandemics had historically been followed by increased social unrest, with lower economic growth and greater inequality among the mechanisms involved.
A contested political center
We are now several years beyond the lockdowns, and Europe looks different. Across several European democracies, parties on the right and radical right have made significant gains. In France’s 2024 European Parliament election, the National Rally, the country’s major far-right party, won 31.37 percent of the vote. In Germany’s 2025 federal election, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist party, won 20.8 percent, placing second nationally. In Britain, Reform UK—a right-wing populist party associated with opposition to high immigration and the Brexit establishment—won 14.3 percent of the vote in the 2024 general election.
While these countries and parties operate under different ideologies, they are all symptoms of a broader phenomenon: The political center that seemed so permanent after the Cold War is actively being contested. This is where France’s Catholic story stops feeling quaint.
Europe has been here before. The continent knows what happens when old certainties crumble, and people start searching for new ones—sometimes in religion, in nationalism, in ideology, or in the promise of making something great again.
History is not reassuring. Christian Europe has its own ghosts. In 1933, German church leadership backed Adolf Hitler’s ascent and stood by in silence—whether out of active endorsement, apathy, or fear—during the state’s violent campaign against Jews, political dissidents, Polish prisoners, and other deemed undesirables.
That history is why Europe’s resurgence of faith and identity demands some thought. This isn’t about a young French person seeking baptism—there is something deeply beautiful about choosing a faith out of genuine agency rather than obligation. The issue is about the shifts in the concept of belonging and exclusion.
When the pendulum swings, we should pay attention. Europe has always been more than a continent. It has been an engine of ideas—religious, political, philosophical, imperial. Those ideas travel.
So when something stirs in Continental Europe, the rest of the world will feel the tremors.
Europe has always been more than a continent. It has been an engine of ideas—religious, political, philosophical, imperial. Those ideas travel.
