The always-interesting Rod Dreher has a good chin-scratcher of a post today, about the relative value of Christian kitsch. He describes, in excrutiating detail, a honeymoon pilgrimage he and his bride made to Fatima:

A more gaudy, vulgar display of popular piety I’ve never seen. There were (literally) glow-in-the-dark Virgin Marys in shop windows. There was “Fatiburger,” and “The John Paul II Snack Bar.” On and on and on. It was grotesque, and deeply disheartening. By the time we reached the end of the street, we almost wanted to get back on the bus and return to Lisbon.

We walked through a wall of trees to reach the vast asphalt plain in front of the basilica, and beheld a large crowd of pilgrims making their way toward the church. From the looks of things, these were mostly poor people. In front of us, we saw a young couple inching forward. The wife was on her knees, on the wet asphalt, praying as she crawled forward. Her husband stood by her, and next to him stood an older woman — his mother, or mother-in-law — holding an infant. It was plain that these humble people were making a pilgrimage to thank the Virgin for her prayers for their baby.

I looked out across this throng and felt kind of ashamed for my judgmentalness. Many of these people were stopping at a chapel on the plain, where there was a big fire going. People were burning candles to the Virgin there, and you could purchase life-size wax figures of limbs and body parts to throw onto the fire as an offering (e.g., you had a bum leg, buy a wax leg). It was profoundly pagan, but people were doing it, and you know, I understood why. It occurred to me as we joined the crowd moving toward the basilica that these poor, or relatively poor, people, people who were far less proud about showing their faith in public than we restrained North American bourgeois Catholics, were also likely to fill the trunks of their cars up with all the Jesus-and-Virgin-Mary kitsch being peddled by the souvenir shops.

Who, in the end, had more faith of the kind that saves and transforms? The tasteless poor, or the tasteful bourgeois?

Read the whole thing and draw your own conclusions.