The unknown God in the heart of Europe

There is an atheism more insidious than declared atheism: Leo XIV called it “a state of practical atheism” in his first homily in the Sistine Chapel, in the presence of the cardinals. It is the atheism of those who reduce Jesus to one moral teacher among many, a respectable and harmless figure. And it is precisely this form of unbelief that prevails in countries which, historically, have never really known the Catholic faith. It happens even in Europe: the continent certainly has Christian roots, yet there are places where those roots never truly took hold. We saw this for ourselves in conversations with monks living in Estonia. They describe their experience as an unusual challenge of evangelisation: here, what for an Italian is part of a shared inheritance - culturally even before it is religious - simply does not exist. Estonia is perhaps the starkest case of this diagnosis. Regularly ranked among the least religious countries in the world, it offers figures that speak for themselves …