QUEBEC — The popular perception of religion's decline in Canada is so strong that when the decline halted and reversed four years ago, it went unreported. Editors discounted the numbers, which pollsters buried in appendices at the end of their reports.

Perhaps most tellingly, Time Canada found 27% of those surveyed last November attending church weekly, up from the 21% reported by Statistics Canada three years earlier.

But in the cover story for which the poll was conducted, Time used the lower Statistics Canada number.

“They were caught in the whole myth of inevitable secularization of Canadian society, of linear decline in church attendance. But it just isn't happening,” said University of Leth-bridge sociologist Reginald Bibby, who has been tracking Canadian religious attitudes and activity for nearly 25 years.

Speaking at the Eucharistic Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec looked ahead to 2008, when the congress will be held in his city. He said he hopes the event will “awaken a new time, a new era.” The Church in Canada would try to use the event to renew the region's catechetical program and raise awareness of the need for religious instruction in schools, he said.

“We're going through a difficult time of secularization” in Canada, said Cardinal Ouellet, who attended this year's congress Oct. 10-17. “For some decades now, people have even been abandoning Sunday Mass; we have been losing (the) faithful. So there is a great need of evangelization.”

The selection of Quebec to host the congress is owed in part to the region's need for new evangelization, Cardinal Ouellet said.

But there are signs of hope. Even the Canadian media woke up to the resurgence — although briefly — with the publication last month of Bibby's latest book, Restless Churches: How Canada's Churches Can Contribute to the Emerging Religious Renaissance.

In it, Bibby reports not only Time's poll, but similar results from his own hitherto unpublished survey in 2003, which found 26% of Canadians attending church weekly, and a 2002 poll done for Focus on the Family-Canada, which put the number at 30%.

Though attendance in Catholic churches in Quebec continues to decline, Catholic attendance outside Quebec is up 5% from 2000 in Bibby's study, as it is for Protestants, while evangelicals are up even more.

Bibby, a Baptist, attributes the turnaround to the work of the Holy Spirit and the imitation by Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, whether consciously or not, of evangelical practices such as small prayer or Bible groups, emphasis on spirituality, and contemporary music and liturgies.

While, overall, evangelicals have not grown in the past 100 years in terms of their share of the Canadian population, they have boosted weekly attendance markedly, especially among youth, Bibby said. “Evangelical teens have climbed from 51% weekly attendance in 1984 to 70% in 2000 — I believe because of youth ministry.”

Canadian Catholic teen-agers, again outside of Quebec, increased in weekly attendance from 27% to 31% from 1992 to 2000.

“It's all about ministry,” Bibby said.

He said the “secularization myth” is accurate when applied to Western Europe, where weekly attendance ranges from 5% in Scandinavia to 10% in France and Germany, but not North America.

Dean Henderson, pastoral assistant at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia, like Bibby, believes today's youth are open to evangelization. “You'll definitely see an increase in numbers if you put the resources into young people,” he said. The “College and Careers” group he set up two years ago, inspired by evangelical models, has grown from eight to 38.

For younger people, Henderson said Catholics rely on their schools (which are partially to fully funded by taxes in different provinces of Canada) to minister to them, but they should certainly form stronger links between parishes and schools. When schools prepare students for the sacraments, it's a good opportunity to bring not only the students into parish life, but also their parents, he added.

Steve Weatherbe writes from Victoria, British Columbia.

Catholic News Service contributed to this report.