Seven is a biblical number. Like forty, three and eight, it carries a weight beyond its numerical value. It signifies completion. God rested on the seventh day. The Hebrew word for seven, sheva, is closely related to the word for oath, shevuah, and the two are at times used interchangeably. Seven therefore conveys covenantal completeness, the sense of time brought to its fullness.
It is now seven years since what can well be described as an annus horribilis for the Catholic Church. Those who were inclined to follow Church life in the late 2010s will remember it as a year when the Church could do no right.
It started badly, with Pope Francis’s defence of Chilean Bishop Juan Barros. Accused of covering up the crimes of convicted paedophile Fernando Karadima Fariña, the Bishop’s appointment to the Diocese of Osorno was more than a little controversial. His consecration in 2015 had resembled the meeting point of warring factions at a street protest more than a solemn liturgy. When questioned on the contentious matter on January 18 2018, the late Pontiff said, “The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I will speak. There is not one piece of evidence against him. It is calumny. Is that clear?”, undoing the credibility of the Church’s resolve to tackle child abuse.
The saintly Archbishop Scicluna, Archbishop of Malta, was sent to sort out the mess. All 34 Chilean bishops in active service offered their resignations, with high-profile clerics such as Cardinal Ezzati having theirs accepted and Bishop Barros also being removed from office.
As egregious as those first few months of the year were, the horror and the damage to the credibility of the Church were only beginning.
In June, the Church confirmed the credibility of accusations against the late Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a bishop-maker who had been a figurehead of the Catholic Church in America for decades. The questions quickly moved from what had happened to who knew what and why it had not been acted upon. It soon became clear that too many people knew too much and that the institutional powers of the Church had been able to protect someone in plain sight who was guilty of serious sexual offences. In August, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, released a bombshell letter accusing Pope Francis and various other high-ranking Churchmen of knowing of the Cardinal’s degenerate behaviour.
August also saw the publication of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, detailing abuse by more than 300 priests over 70 years and describing the systemic cover-ups by bishops. Harrowing stories of groups of paedophile priests targeting the vulnerable scorched the minds of Catholics, incredulous that this could have happened.
Abuse scandals across the globe surfaced from Honduras to Poland, with major reports conducted in Germany and Australia further making 2018 a hugely painful year for the Church. Cardinal George Pell, the well-liked and conservative prelate, was convicted of historic abuse, a ruling that was fully overturned in 2020 with Pell being found to have done no wrong.
As if the abuse scandals themselves were not enough, 2018 also saw the Island of Saints and Scholars, Ireland, legalise abortion, a crushing nail in the rapid secularisation of a former Catholic bastion.
The annus horribilis left behind a dishevelled Church, confused, with its moral credibility broken. The world’s largest non-government provider of health care, education and charity had somehow been tarnished with the worst evil imaginable. The Church was unpopular, flawed and apparently doomed.
Fast forward seven years, a complete cycle of biblical time, and the Church seems to have turned a corner. While the memories and repercussions of the annus horribilis shudder into the present and the Church has by no means recovered its standing in the world, something is shifting.
In the UK, among 18–34-year-olds, the share identifying as Catholic rose from 23 per cent in 2018 to 31 per cent by 2024. In the same time frame, Church attendance across age groups rose by 50 per cent. The UK also saw dioceses across the country reporting a surge in adult baptisms during Easter 2025, with London’s dioceses recording almost 1,000 between them.
France saw a similar phenomenon. The Catholic Church in the land of its eldest daughter welcomed more than 10,384 adult catechumens at Easter in 2025, marking a 45 per cent increase from 2024. The number is the largest since records began, with the 18–25 age group now representing 42 per cent of adult catechumens.
The USA is also seeing an uptake in Church life, with Gen Z and Millennials significantly outpacing the older generation in terms of weekly Church attendance. Catholicism is also finding itself at the centre of public discourse. Candace Owens, Shia LaBeouf and Rob Schneider recently crossed the Tiber. The Faith is dominating the cultural conversation, with a Catholic in the Vice President’s Office, an American on the throne of St Peter and the podcast space becoming a place where Christian ideas are debated and developed.
The question naturally arises: what to make of this history? The first is that the Church has gone a long way towards confronting the horrors within. Catholicism’s equivalent of the Epstein files has been released and the defenders put out to dry. The Church must never become complacent in its attempt to rid itself of what Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, described as its “filth”, but it has certainly made a start. In 2024, there were two substantiated accusations made against Catholic clergy in the United States, corresponding to 0.004 per cent of the priestly population. That percentage is markedly lower than the 2022 figures in America’s schools, which show 0.01 per cent of US K–12 teachers arrested on child sex crimes.
The second is that the central truth of Christianity, that Jesus is God and came to earth to found his Church, cannot lose its credibility. The actions of some men, however horrible, can never drown out that truth. The person of Jesus captivates the human mind, so much so that other religions try to claim him for their own. Islam and Hinduism, the second and third largest world religions, both try to accommodate his teachings without fully grasping them.
Catholicism claims Jesus in his fullness. It does not bend to secular winds as so many other Churches have done, only to snap due to their newfound irrelevance. It offers its believers the total sacramental reality of Jesus, present before them. It remains an effective antidote to the moral decadence and decline of 21st-century culture which, as that decline accelerates, becomes more sought.
We are told that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against the Church. The renewed vitality of 2025 shows that even the devastation of 2018 could not break that promise.
(Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images)
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