Is Paris Turning?
Some Unexpected Signs of Christian Vitality in Post-Christian Europe
by Matthew W. Maguire
The faithful surround the altar—students, parents, the elderly, and children fill the chairs in the nave, the transept, and the apse. The priest has just welcomed a new catechumen. Now, in his homily, he urges the congregation to remember that in baptism, God is at work: “Baptism is not simply something we choose . . . it is God who calls us. We must be ready to listen to his call and serve him!” The congregation listens intently, and sings its hymns enthusiastically.
At the end of Mass, several people continue to pray, as others move to light candles beneath shrines and statues. In a nation where Evangelical Protestantism is increasingly popular, this Catholic church is educating its parishioners with vigor: There are education classes for children and adults, pilgrimages to holy places, colorful placards in the vestibule clarifying church teachings with quotations from the Catechism (this month it is a triptych on “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory”), photos of World Youth Day, and notices of lectures at local churches and seminaries.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Evangelicals in this country numbered only 40,000; now there are 400,000. Their thriving mega-churches in the suburbs, though criticized by other Protestants and Catholics who object to what they describe as their superficiality, emotional excesses, and consumerist ethos, are the subject of media commentary.
At the same time, more established Protestant and Catholic churches, surrounded by a broad secular consensus and prodded by new religious possibilities, are proposing the fullness of their faith with renewed energy.
Minarets & Spires
The nation is, of course, France. (The church I described, Saint-Médard, is in the heart of the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank of Paris.)
How can this be? To hear many American Christians talk of Europe, the minarets are all but fitted onto the spires of Chartres and Notre Dame, and Europe is spiritually exhausted and doomed to oblivion, a fate for which its low birthrates and alienated minorities are harbingers. These predictions are occasionally applied with unseemly haste to the land of Thérèse de Lisieux, Vincent de Paul, and Henri de Lubac, alleged home of dyspeptic obstructionists or, to put the objection in the least fair and flattering argot, surrender monkeys.
Europe is without doubt decidedly more secular than America, and there are crises of vocations and church closings in many European countries. In European Catholicism, the abuse crisis has exacted its usual share of terrible suffering and generally deserved criticism of many seminaries and bishops.
It is also true that in Europe, Christianity still suffers in many quarters for being considered the bulwark of traditional hierarchies opposed to democracy, though that sometimes accurate, sometimes erroneous association is slowly fading. Drawing upon a complex history in distorted and bizarre ways, less than judicious Europeans use Christianity as a scapegoat for every crime in European history since Constantine.
Matthew W. Maguire is Assistant Professor of History and Humanities at Kenyon College. His book The Conversion of Imagination has just been published by Harvard University Press.
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