by Fr. Benedict Kiely .

Anecdotal evidence, while not necessarily without value or verity, needs solid facts to become confirmed as reality. For the last several years, there has been much talk of increasing numbers of young people, particularly men, coming to orthodox Christianity and, in particular, to the Catholic Faith. These stories now have a factual basis. More than 10,000 people were baptized or received into the Church in France last year. In other European countries and the United States, more people came into the Church at the Easter Vigil than has been the case for decades.

Something that is being talked about is actually happening.

It might, perhaps, be too soon and too dramatic to talk of a "religious revival" in the bleakly secular West. But the desire, among many who know little or nothing of Christ, to discover the ancient truths of the Christian faith is - if the Church is meant to read the "signs of the times" - something not only to be welcomed, but to be fostered, with the treasures of beauty, truth, and goodness, which the 2000-year old history of the Church possesses.

Familiarity, as the old phrase goes, "breeds contempt." But Chesterton, writing more than eighty years ago, spoke of the "fatigue of familiarity." He wrote in a time when, even if there may not have been widespread practice of the faith in Britain, there would have been, for anyone with a modicum of education, indeed even with an elementary school education, a general knowledge of the simple facts of the Christian faith.

As the American novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, the "constant reading of the Bible in hundreds of thousands of humble families kept a basic floor of literacy under language as a whole, and under the English language."

Chesterton's point, in what he called the "specially Christian case," was the near impossibility of making the "facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen man it is often true that familiarity is fatigue." He continued that, if Christ were presented as a Chinese hero (in other words, as an esoteric figure) people would be more ready to respond.

That familiarity simply does not exist anymore, and not just in Britain. Across the Western world, as three or four generations have been successfully educated into ignorance, not only of the foundation of Western civilization, which is Christianity, but of the works of literature, music, and art which are the products of that civilization.

Quotations from the Bible or Shakespeare, the knowledge of which could be assumed in the time Chesterton was writing, are now as unfamiliar as Sanskrit verse. To speak of "seeing through a glass darkly," or the "blind leading the blind," will not register with people who are the product of four years of expensive brain deprivation, known as a bachelor's degree.

All this, however, should not be seen as an obstacle, but rather as a magnificent opportunity, indeed, a providential moment.

There is no longer the "fatigue of familiarity," because the facts of Christianity are not only unfamiliar, they are unknown.

The Catholic sociologist Stephen Bullivant has spoken of the need for a "herd immunity" to the Gospel, before the faith can once again be proclaimed with better prospects of success. Unless I am misunderstanding him, it seems to be exactly the other way around. The masses, particularly the young, are not immune to a Gospel they have never heard; they are ripe for infection.

St. Paul walked into the Areopagus, where the Acts of the Apostles tells us, people did "nothing except telling or hearing something new." So, in this new Areopagus moment, the Gospel, ever ancient and ever new, can ignite the same fire for a surprisingly similar group of people, divided by time but not desire.

It is true that many, as at that time, will mock. But others will, and are, saying "we will hear you again about this." We know that a Dionysius and a woman named Damaris were converted by Paul's preaching of the Word to them, ...