Postcards from the Ruins of a Christian Civilization

Christendom is not dead, French traditionalist Catholic philosopher Chantal Delsol wrote during the COVID-19 lockdowns, but “inverted.” (Her 2021 book La Fin de Chrétienté, meaning “The End of Christendom,” is not yet translated into English.) Colonialism was once generous and admirable, and war and torture last resorts; now all three are considered Satanic. Homosexuality was banned and scorned; now it is justified and praised. Abortion is no longer criminalized but recommended. Divorce faces no obstacles. Christendom itself once inverted pagan morality: divorce, infanticide, abortion, homosexuality, and suicide fell to legislation under Christian emperors in the fourth and fifth centuries. Fervent Christian believers wore away at these abominations, which now are revived by guilty liberal Christian consciences. This new moral paradigm will defeat futile last stands waged in France against in-vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and assisted suicide. Once the protector of truth, Christianity has shriveled to an idiosyncratic opinion barely tolerated by state ethics committees.

COVID lockdowns having postponed a personal pilgrimage through Christendom that would have reunited me with old friends of five decades, I had to see for myself what was left. I had a vague plan “to cut a broad swath and shave close,” as Thoreau writes, deep through the heart of Christian infrastructure — monasteries, art, books, and families — to see how badly it might have crumbled, squinting and open to where the Catholic sun might still shine, and to report it abroad to those with ears to hear.

Iona Abbey. Scotland. May 1, 2023.

St. Columba brought Celtic Christianity to druids and Picts on this tiny island in A.D. 637, changing the winds, resuscitating the dead, foretelling events, discerning sins in absent souls, and doing penance for taking sides in a bloody Irish battle. I consult his muse on a steep hill where his writing hut overlooked the sound and the abbey, destroyed by the Vikings but rebuilt (a lot of that through the years) in the 13th and late-19th centuries. The Book of Kells was written here, after Columba.

Nunnery ruins with marvelous, latticed, mossy granite-and-shale stonework are down the road, not far from a still-functioning grammar school and baaing sheepfolds. I pray to St. Kenneth in the cemetery, and for the intentions of friends at a chapel shrine built over St. Columba’s grave. For a donation, the co-ed, ecumenical, monastic Iona Community now in residence offers rainbow ribbons for LGBTQIA+ “rights,” white ribbons for general peacemaking, purple ribbons to end domestic and sexual violence, and black ribbons for the Black Lives Matter movement. I look in vain for a crucifix and confessional.

Three hours to the mainland and another three back to Glasgow, by two ferries and two buses, Iona was less remote in the first millennium, claims a cathedral docent, because water travel was much faster than land travel. He says that Roman and Norse gods replacing the Greek may indicate an original proto-Indo-European Pantheon. We talk for an hour. Docents know off-beat details and are bored stiff: take advantage.

When I return to my hostel late, two homeless men are screaming into each other’s faces in an incomprehensible Glaswegian vitriol. The Gospel has more work to do.

The Oratory of St. Philip Neri. Birmingham, England. May 3.

A few lines down from Benedict XVI, I write my name at St. John Henry Newman’s desk (on which sit an Italian dictionary and a menology of England and Wales) and pray in his chamber’s chapel (again for the intentions of friends). Pictures of his deceased Catholic friends served as reminders when he said Mass; a portrait of St. Philip Neri hangs behind a crucifix above the altar.

Last night, the Traditional Latin Mass was offered at the Italianate-marbled oratory. The well-read, cassocked Oratorian director prefers Tolkien to Chesterton; à chacun son goût. The library and museum are worth the morning, a remote life made present in simple things: Trollope’s novels, postage scales, quill pens, a gray wig made after Newman lost hair to a Sicilian fever, Tolkien’s red-ink highlights of a schoolboy commentary on Macbeth. (John “Ronald” Ruel Tolkien attended the Oratory Grammar School.) In the afternoon, are the bells ringing incessantly at St. Martin’s in the Bull Ring for the coronation of King Charles III in three days? No one seems to notice them, but Islamic proselytizers have prominent places in the open market.

Westminster Abbey (via television in Hampton). May 6.

I watch the coronation in my anti-clerical friend Steve Morley’s flat near Hampton Court. He makes cracks about royal pedophilia (which he omits as gracious emcee of the coronation quiz at his social club later tonight) while his wife, Claire, and I take in the pageantry: the five-pound bejeweled crown, the white gloves, the anointing behind the screen, the Beefeaters’ Wodehousian “hip-hip-hooray,” the Liturgy of the Sacrament, homage paid and prayers offered to be a blessing “to all beliefs,” to deliver justice and mercy, and to be “like unto Christ.” Christendom is still wheezing. I wouldn’t mind a monarchy under God coming back to real power, even if the title Scourge of the Infidels is passé.

Winchester Cathedral. May 7.

After a Novus Ordo Mass in Latin with Gregorian chant at St. Augustine’s Abbey in Chilworth with Benedictine monks behind a massive crucifix and rood screen (the NO with traditional elements soars), I pay a visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. I find her brass burial marker and memorial window here, along with Isaac Walton’s black funeral stone and a green canopy over St. Swithum’s grave (with ancient spelling): “St. Swichuns day [July 15] if thou dost rain for forty days it will remain; St. Swichuns day if thou be fair for forty days twill rain nae mare.” Either Hodgkin’s lymphoma or Addison’s disease took Jane. Her well-ordered, Georgian-bricked house and outbuildings put flesh in the novels, masterpieces teaching the West the lost practice of virtue, especially, Alasdair MacIntyre says, prudence, self-knowledge, and constancy, before the catastrophe of the Enlightenment made moral discourse problematic.

Drawing paying tourists more than worshipers now, Winchester claims the longest nave (558 feet) and greatest overall length of any Gothic cathedral in Europe. Iconoclasm couldn’t defeat transcendent dimensions, but I hate Protestant church entry fees.

Southwark Cathedral. London. May 8.

I’ve never been so groggy and unsteady on my feet entering a church, and I’ve never sneaked past a sacristan at closing. I was supposed to pay? Blame last night’s “Ports of Crawl” tour of Shakespeare’s pubs (the Black Friar, the Cock, the Anchor Bankside, the George Inn) with Steve’s actor mates. “No better time to drink real ale in England!” they informed me, thanks to a Chesterton-style distributist take-down of beer monopolies’ stranglehold on pubs. Nonetheless, I’m told, two pubs perish per day, victims of (1) no-smoking legislation, (2) DUI crackdowns, and (3) availability of beer in takeaways and department stores. They had eight pints and yet made it home alive, though one fell off his stool declaiming Churchill’s “We shall meet them on the beaches” speech, word for word, unimpeded, still declaiming as we parted. Even a half-pint at each round was too much for my feeble American liver, but the “live,” still-fermenting real ale, bitter, warm, and flavorful, has captured my palate.

As for Southwark, there’s a monument of Shakespeare with his famous characters, which real ale prevents me from identifying. I’m looking forward to getting shut of these stripped-down Protestantized cathedrals, but ancient Gothic skeletons are better than updated Pizza Huts.

Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Lisieux. France. May 10.

It’s the centenary of the Little Flower’s being declared a saint. This modest Gothic cathedral crammed with chapels is more fitting to the Little Way than is the grandiose basilica on the edge of town. I kneel before the cordoned-off confessional where at 7 AM she stood up to have “Jesus’ tears purify” her soul at her first confession in the Chapelle de l’Assomption. Her simple child’s words describing that moment in The Story of a Soul bring me back to the monastic humility of St. Columba’s rugged stones that carry such power, but familiar Catholic bric-a-brac, rococo, marbled, and glimmering baroque kitsch also delight my fancy. Les Buissonets, Thérèse’s family home, is closed for restoration, but the story of her parents, SS Louis and Zélie Martin, is well documented here. God makes saints, but holy families outfit them.

I write out prayers for Catholic friends and families and drop them in a basket at the basilica. Do prayers at distant shrines have especial power?

Église Sainte-Catherine. Honfleur. May 11.

Have you ever seen a church that looks like an upside-down Viking longship? It’s a 600-year-old all-timber church (the oldest in France), but I love the axe-grooved ceiling. Fifteenth-century shipbuilders (more organized here on the Channel coast than stonemasons were) indeed flipped and mounted two hulls. Another great claim to fame is that this church is not far from a fromagerie with a fantastic selection of four classic Normandy soft cheeses: Livarot, Camembert, Pont l’Évêque, and Neufchâtel. Belloc said, “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there’s music, laughter, and good red wine” — and often stinky washed-rind French cheese with hard cider. Vive Livarot! Vive Livarot catholique!

Église Saint-Joseph. Le Havre. May 12.

It’s great to see my colleagues from 45 years ago at Lycée Classique François Premier (vide emeritus professeur J.P. Sartre’s Nausea): Hans from Austria and Fernando from Spain, who prefer moderate to robust glasses of Ribera and golden lagers. Hans has left the Church, but Fernando, from Dominican Salamanca, still practices, “even the holy days of obligation.”

Auguste Perret, Le Corbusier’s teacher, raised an octagonal concrete lighthouse tower 351 feet high (Winchester is 78 feet) in the city center that was razed by the British (5,000 civilian deaths!) after D-Day. Marguerite Huré’s abstract stained glass focuses green and lavender on the theater-in-the-round altar. It’s not Gothic, but it reaches toward the sky and out to sailors from the drab, rebuilt blockhouse city center (now painted here and there for variety).

At our old school, a monastery turned into a lycée by Napoleon, Muslim students with foulard head coverings mill happily around the gate, either ignoring the prohibition of religious symbols or testing the limits of laicité. I want to ask these smiling North Africans an exam question: “Can revelation be true or false?”

Le Havre is more animated and certainly more commercialized than when we taught languages here under a communist mayor in 1978. Near the Maison de la Culture, a several-story mall (where I learn about the cut-rate airmail postage for French books!) bustles, but many small cafés, patisseries, and boulangeries are boarded up, going the way of pubs in England and churches in Christendom. Is there a connection?

Providence keeps me on the scent of my beloved writers: a Proust museum visit and walk à l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs seaside at Cabourg (Balbec) stirs a discussion with Hans as to whether there can exist a Catholic author. We’re 22-year-young teachers again, drinking and arguing in French, our lingua franca, like Burke against Rousseau, but breaking no new ground: Should the European Union and the United States get involved in Ukraine? (“Freedom!”) Should Bl. Karl have been beatified? (“Mustard gas!”) Should homosexuals be married? (“Born that way!”) Is an embryo a human being? (“Cluster of cells!”) The French language and French gourmandise keep us cool and friendly, and Hans invites me to Habsburg country in June.

Cathédrale primatiale Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption de Rouen. May 14.

I’ve never been in a church so packed in Europe. It’s Confirmation Day, and the primate of Normandy is giving an impressive homily on the demands of the Christian life, requiring the New Testament as a bedside book, to lycéens and lycéennes, many of whom are brown-skinned and kinky-haired, all of whom are smiling. Some of my prayers are for teenagers in America like them. I’m in black slacks and rust sweater, knapsack at my feet, next to white dresses and dark suits but totally at home with joyful Christians.

Celebrating extended families fill up restaurant terraces. I’ll take skin-deep status-proclaiming bourgeois French Catholicism over nihilistic American consumerism any day. Dominical joy mitigates existential boredom.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims. May 17.

I am standing in one of the cradles of Christendom on a stone marked in French, “Here St. Rémi baptized Clovis King of the Francs.” That would have been A.D. 508. Clovis went with Nicaea against the Arians and dragged the eldest daughter of the Church along with him. Thirty-two more kings have been crowned here since. De Gaulle and Adenauer reconciled France and Germany in this austere nave in 1962.

The Revolution and World War I took their toll on eight centuries of work. The western façade’s two symmetrical towers stand tall and elegant over three grand entrances, but it’s dark and stripped inside. Chagall’s stained glass makes another historical statement of reconciliation and typology: Abraham and Christ in the center panel of the chapel, where I pray again for friends and family at morning Mass accompanied by gentle, lay a cappella, the kings of Judah on the left, the kings of France on the right. The Church, setting of reconciliation, has suffered much from the state, but they should not be opposed to each other.

The only restaurant open on Monday night is an Indian curry bistro full of American college students. I take lassi rather than champagne. Saints were once as common and are now as forgotten and obscure as boarded-up corner groceries with their owners’ names not yet erased, like dying erudite and sober print journals: Rémi, Aignan, Ouen, Mungo, Adresse. Europe was the faith, and the faith was Europe.

Monastère Saint-André de Clerlande. Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. May 21.

Neither the Zen House architecture nor informal liturgies at this summer camp in steep Belgian woods are to my taste, but the monks are genuinely hospitable and Easter people. The primus for the somewhat dippy French vernacular chant, who also makes exquisite icons, repairs my shaving box and impishly presents it to me in a Brussels luxury-goods box. Another monk, who takes me for an Anglican, thoroughly washes and carefully folds my month-old laundry. They themselves wear simple civvies, except at Mass and Liturgy of the Hours.

The ample meals have rich Belgian sauces and foamy, strong Trappist beer that outperforms British real ale. We talk freely when silence is relaxed at souper. These men are peace-lovers and biblical scholars. A dapper Italian monk has just written a book on Greek aesthetics in St. Paul. Prior Pierre-François de Béthune, who has given conferences on hospitality in Swahili and Japanese, tearfully remembers the day he discovered his vocation: He was a boy lulling in a boat on his aunt’s private lake in 1939 when suddenly military aircraft darkened the sky. His prayers for peace forcefully call on God’s help. We don’t see much of a peace movement in the West today. “We’ve learned our lesson,” one brother says, “but the Slavs still haven’t.”

I’m spending part of the week in the cellar library, reading a Swiss Calvinist and former pacifist’s revisionist “Pourquoi la guerre?” (he’s for the war in Ukraine), reviving my faltering Hebrew, and enjoying C.S. Lewis’s book on the Psalms. Monasticism here is living the psalmody and studying Scripture: ora as labora.

I am horrified by one moment during l’Eucharistie: the consecrated host is a chunk of leavened bread, a crumb of which falls from my hand onto the sanctuary floor, where I had been motioned to enter. I pick up the wounded Christ, say a prayer, and consume Him. Sacrilege? Illicity? Invalidity? Leaven invites travesty; sensible religious sisters stamp wheat into flat wafers.

Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam, Netherlands. May 25.

I’m not in a church, but I am in front of magnificent Catholic art in an indifferent, secularized space. The demand for tickets to “Vermeer: Exposition of a Century” crashed the computers this spring, but Providence brought me here on my birthday. Maybe it’s because I’ve just left a conciliar monastery, but I immediately feel the emphasis on the Incarnation here in these paintings. Maybe it was Vermeer’s Jesuit neighbor’s camera obscura, but a forgiving grace seems to triumph over silly sin by means of papal gold and Marian blue. Maybe it’s the sunny month of May, but I see a hidden worldly Mary all over Vermeer: through an Annunciation in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, in the little way of domestic tasks in Woman with a Water Jug and The Milkmaid, and pondering Judgment in her heart in Woman Holding a Balance. His famous Girl with a Pearl Earring isn’t here, but I now think of this famous yellow and blue maiden as Mary just before her betrothal. I detect Counter-Reformation triumphalist ecstasy only in Allegory of Faith.

I’m interpreting and remembering rather than seeing, and so I go back and spend another half-hour before View of Delft, which Proust sent me in search of 45 years ago: a strip of darkened city between gloomy sky and water, a swatch of sandy beach, the cracked red bricks and roof tiles, the speckled white mortar and gutter, the lacemaker in the doorway, the scarved servant on her knees helping the vagabond under the bench, the clock at 7 AM. Six intense hours here (I want a full morning on each painting), and then I had to relax at the Heineken Museum with a different style of tourist, whom old Amsterdammers loathe: beer-swilling Brits on holiday.

Back at the hostel, I share Fernando’s last Ribera with a homeless, half-Indonesian Dutchman. If I am injured in traffic walking on this literary and religious pilgrimage à l’improviste, it will be by a bicyclist in Amsterdam.

Maredsous Abbey. Belgium. May 29.

I’m offering my pilgrim prayers in front of a magnificent wooden altarpiece, as high as a reredos, featuring a long-bearded St. Benedict. The neo-Gothic, 19th-century, counter-revolutionary upward trajectory of this hundred-year-old basilica seems abandoned by the daily contemporary French Liturgy of the Hours here, which is beginning to wear on me, especially after yesterday’s more traditional Novus Ordo Solemnity of Pentecost with some of the Ordinary in Gregorian chant in Latin. This statue of St. Benedict is 18th century, and I can see Enlightenment in the extravagant baroque crenellated carving. The authentic perennial architecture of the West, whether Gothic or Baroque, aspires with extravagance.

Reform, whether Cistercian, Lutheran, Disciples of Christ-y, or Vatican Two-ish, is plain and horizontal. The longer axis of the Cross, however, is vertical. Didn’t I learn at Iona Abbey that the Celtic cross developed its awkward verticality because the original horizontal arm was too heavy? A long, elaborate reach upward is necessary in order to heal sin, which takes a booming organ and fine-tuned choir to scare away, not a guitar or upright piano.

My confessor has brought the words of absolution on a paper so he won’t forget them. Has it been that long since he’s heard a confession? At dinner, one monk (in civvies) pours Maredsous golden lager and says, “It’s not a great place for alcoholics with a brewery a hundred meters away.” Another peels his apricots skillfully with knife and fork. Aristocratic manners: the Clerlande prior was from the Bethun family, from whom came the architect of Maredsous.

The cause for Bl. Columba Marmion, former abbot and spiritual author, is open. Saints’ names themselves inspire sanctity. The Old World is dense with them. The Maredsous Bible was translated in 1950 because World War II revealed that Catholics hadn’t absorbed the Gospel message of peace. Are we closer?

Basilica of the Holy Blood. Bruges. June 4.

The promenade up a staircase to venerate the relic of Heilig-Bloed is among the wildest 15 feet in Christendom. You cross yourself before a glass phial fogged up a dark flaky red and guarded by a Burgermeister. If you slip him a euro, he slips you a prayer card. There’s a long line at 2 PM. The Catholic burgher element in this Spanish-Austrian Netherlands city is strong: canals less crowded than Amsterdam’s and cleaner than Venice’s, unconstrained High Baroque Counter-Reformation pulpits three stories high (here and in Ghent and Antwerp) to beat the Reformation’s emphasis on the Word, Dutch ergonomics (windmills, bicycles), and Catholic joie de vivre. I wish they spoke French, as they’re also supposed to, instead of a Dutch dialect.

St. Salvador’s Cathedral is itself an art museum and has one, too. Finally, enfin, I see a poster calling specifically for an end to the war in Ukraine.

Admont Abbey. Austria. June 7.

The Stiftsbibliothek Admont is the largest cloistered library in the world, and it makes the Library of Congress look like a Barnes & Noble. Oculi and windows in all the nooks flood the frescoed rooms with light. I don’t see a book not bound in Morocco leather among tens of thousands in these white and gold bookcases. Joseph II’s enlightened despotic decrees failed to touch this masterpiece, or else he had the sense that the Church is the best friend of culture and education.

Hans can’t resist showing me Melk Abbey’s imperial chapel. Existentially threatened, this is beauty meant to overwhelm skepticism. I’m a long way from the Little Way. Sometimes the Church needs to fight back with grandiosity. Now might be the time: Pride Month has invaded still-stunning Habsburg imperial churches. At a Corpus Christi procession, I am the only participant to fall to my knees, delighting Hans; later, mothers in traditional Carinthian dresses untie the stays to their bulging bodices and walk the paths around Bodensee for all to see.

I say goodbye to Hans’s dying mother; she says the reason the socks she once knitted me have lasted 45 years is that she knitted them. It was her only lucid moment while I was there. Hans has had to fight off the government euthanizers, like a Catholic holding firm, although now his religion is “the rights of man.”

Cathédrale Saint-Pierre et Saint-Paul. Nantes, France. June 13.

The Church does sometimes need to fight back. This cathedral has been closed since an arson fire in 2020: organ destroyed, western stained glass exploded, 19th-century stalls charred, electric system fried, and lead poisoning throughout. Spray paint disavows the posted details of damage as “faux!” Outside in a roundabout, the only statue of Louis XVI in France stands helplessly.

Nantes resisted the Revolution, says Odile, my old friend and guide from Brittany, a dissenting and lapsed Catholic but proud of French Catholic culture. She still lights votive candles, prays in intimate historic chapels, and studies their art. Every two weeks, a French church succumbs to vandalism, decay, arson, theft, or demolition; two monuments are targeted a day; and nearly a thousand attacks on Catholic property (including Catholic bookstores) occur per year, according to Catholic News Agency and La Croix. Spanish Buenaventura Durruti of anti-clerical Civil War fame was quoted on social media after the Notre Dame fire, saying, “The only church that illumines is a burning church.” Vikings, Reformers, Revolutionaries, Muslims — violence bears the Church away. We’re in another historical anti-Catholic wave.

Monastère de Fontgombault. June 17.

We’re also in another Counter-Reformation traditionalist wave of cassocks, the Vetus Ordo, and exquisite, Solesmes-inspired Gregorian chant. Fontgombault with 50-plus has three times as many monks as Clerlande and Maredsous. Young traditionalist Bon Pasteur priests are making a retreat. After Matins, maybe a dozen candlelit low Masses are “read” at altars against the nave columns, a server and a few lay communicants for each priest, so quietly that I can almost hear the candleflames flicker.

The Benedictines here milk cows, keep bees, tend gardens, make wine, and even dam the river Creuse for their electricity. Petit déjeuner is coffee, hot milk, honey, brown bread, and butter — all but the coffee produced by the monks. We listen to the hebdomadary read Pope Francis’s letter on Pascal at déjeuner. The Père Abbé is young. On a walk, I wear a wooden Benedictine cross that a monk blesses and am called Père by a woman needing directions. I work hard to keep up with the Latin and the prayer routine at 5 AM. A comeback isn’t for the fainthearted, but this one will be by the Way of Beauty.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. June 21.

I am sitting outside the Sorbonne reading Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s “On the Brevity of Life” and savoring my last meal in France (olives, Parmesan, beets, prosciutto, melon, radishes, and crusty baguette) when I hear dozens of sirens a few blocks away. No one stirs, but I hoof it straight for Notre Dame. Televisions in open bars show that a building in the Latin Quarter not 500 meters away had exploded. It’s the Fête de la Musique all over Europe, when the streets and church steps rock with live music, Midsummer’s Night, channeling the Nativity of John the Baptist — a great night for terrorism. There’s a crowd in bleachers in front of fenced-off and scaffolded Notre Dame, and all seems well.

A photographic display below the statue of mustachioed Charlemagne celebrates the craftsmen restoring Viollet le Duc’s restoration. Neither terrorism nor indifference has conquered. Our Lady is closed and being repaired, but it’s on her apron that the crowd has chosen to gather for string music, as in the 1300s.

Earlier in the afternoon, I hustled past the musicians’ tents around Église Saint-Sulpice, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where Sartrean existentialists had smoked and sinned, and into the marbled Baroque interior, and I marveled that confession was in business this weekday mid-afternoon. The schedule beats anything I know in America: weekdays from 9:30 AM to 7 PM, Sundays and holy days 4 PM to 7 PM. Chantal Delsol says Christendom’s conquistadores can be replaced by “Christian heroes of patience, of attention, and of humble love.” Why should I have imagined any other massive, not yet “inverted,” bedrock for Christian culture than the little way of repentance?

Cheered despite the sirens, I make for an Airbnb in a Muslim quarter to the north and, in my curtained pod like a catacombed Christian, sleep like an exhausted child in a skyscraper’s safety-code-ignoring upper room of 12 (money-strapped pagans, it would seem) after a prayer of thanksgiving to Providence. Lord willing, soon I will be home.

“Our European structure…was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the faith, or she will perish.” — Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith

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