In March, I drove with my family up from Rome into the mountains of southeastern Umbria, to reach the town of Norcia and the monastery — now an abbey; it’s been promoted since our visit — of St. Benedict on the Mountain, a community of Benedictine monks perched above a wide valley that was then just greening with the spring.

The monks of Norcia are, as monks go, not obscure. They brew beer, they have a chant album, they were profiled in The Times in a story about their region’s recovery from the terrible 2016 earthquakes. They also feature prominently in Rod Dreher’s 2017 case for Christian retrenchment and renewal, “The Benedict Option” — for understandable reasons, since Norcia is the birthplace of Western monasticism, the home of St. Benedict, the place where medieval Christendom arguably got its start.

And it is a peculiarly resonant place to visit in this particular moment. Christianity in Europe, even in Catholic Italy, has been declining for generations, and now in the wake of de-Christianization comes depopulation. The countryside around the monastery is emptying, with picturesque villas and ancient hill towns vacant — a process accelerated in Norcia by the toll of the earthquake, but part of a general phenomenon across an Italy that’s growing ever older and having ever fewer kids.

Yet here sits a thriving abbey with its youthful monks, drawing pilgrims while its Benedictines pray the ancient Latin of the Roman church. It’s not the fall of the Roman Empire all over again, but there is a strange rhyming quality, a similar sense of death and rebirth.

Every Christmas I try to write a column on religion, and over the years they’ve often circled themes of challenge, struggle and decline. In an essay this week on the discovery of God, my colleague David Brooks jokes that “entering the church in 2013 was like investing in the stock market in 1929,” and something similar might be said about becoming a Catholic newspaper columnist 15 years ago: Traditional religious institutions have been scandal-racked and fractured throughout my years at this paper — suffering through an early 21st-century ebb tide, if not quite a vast withdrawing roar.

This Christmas seems different. There is statistical evidence that the latest wave of secularization has reached some sort of limit. There is suggestive cultural evidence that secular liberalism has lost faith in itself, that many people miss not just religion’s moral vision but also its metaphysical horizons, that the arguments for religious belief might be getting a new hearing. Notre-Dame de Paris has been rebuilt from its ashes. I rashly predicted a religious revival earlier this year, and at the very least I expect religious trends in the later 2020s to be different from the trends of the 2010s.