Two subjects that come up around here quite a bit are the state of Christianity in Europe, and the state of faith among those who work in the Church.

We cluck and worry about the former, and some of us shake our heads at the latter, while others of us, who’ve been there, know the struggle.

For me, in Rome, the two points of discussion came into sharp focus, illuminated each other, and finally clicked.

As bowled over as I was by richness of the Roman experience on every level, it took about a day for me to get it. To totally get how one could, in the midst of this richness, drift away.

Early on, a commentor who was born in Europe mentioned that she was grateful, for the sake of her faith, that she had moved to the United States – it put her in an environment completely different than the European context, and challenged her to critically examine her faith and address it, not as an aspect of culture, but as a decision that must be made.

The discussions about Europe and Christianity have been frequent here, and I think most of us get the complexities. There was no rapid collapse – what we see now is, in part, the consequences of 300 years of outright war against Christianity in some countries, massive destructive wars and totalitarian regimes, not to mention philosophical revolution and a Church that was often inadequate in meeting the (daunting) challenges.

I hasten to add that the doom-mongers are also often challenged here, and rightly. Robert Duncan of the marvelous Spero News reports first-hand from Spain that the Christian faith is most definitely not dead or dying there, at least.

But still, some of us wonder. Gosh, how could Christianity seep out of the considerations of daily life, fall from the center of life when people go out and about their daily business in a landscape dotted with 3 churches (at least) on every block, shrines to the Virgin tacked on the corner of innumerable buildings, the Pope in the neighborhood and the place crawling with priests and nuns?

Exactly.

As I said, within a day I got it, and within two days, I was even feeling it. Not that it should be a complete surprise, for one of my themes, as I’ve indicated above, has been – Beware of your desire to do ministry: Can be dangerous to your faith. (Why? We’ve done this before. Short answer: it becomes a "job" with all of the attendant frustations, and it becomes hard to separate your own personal faith from this. You see amazing rotten things up close and personal. You are sorely tempted to fall into the Customer Service Dymanic, and see the people you’re serving as customers, who are usually annoying, and you’d rather they all just go away and stop bothering you with their problems. You fall in a rut, and your motivation starts coming from other places, not the commitment to serve.)

Anyway. For some reason, the whole scene made a lot of sense to me in Rome – Rome a city with a history of the Church, not only as a spiritual power, but as the power over earthly matters as well. We all know how we end up feeling about those who wield that kind of power of us, don’t we? Rome, a city filled with church bureaucrats, some of them there serving sincerely, others sent there to get them out of the country, others evidence of the Peter Principle, others evidence of the James and John’s Mom Principle, others just pleased they don’t have to be in an actual parish.

Living among this, not only in the present, but in the historical presence, in museums, palazzos, piazzas and churches, of clerical concubines and children, of clerical wealth, of the beautiful remnants of a culture that produced glorious evidence of its existence, but in that glory lies irony and the continual question of power, its uses and abuses. (to be addressed in another post).

It seems obvious that this in an environment that would breed cynicism like mold on old bread. It is also, I hasten to add, an environment that somehow produced – or at least did not discourage – the greatest commitment to charity and human well-being that the world has ever known, consistently, over two millenia. (that too, in another post).

But yes. One would think, living in this land of suburbs, malls, pragmatism, public skepticism about religion and wariness about public religious expression, that being in a place so vividly "Catholic" from the street names to the angels on bridges to the dome of St. Peter’s glimmering in sight, it would be so much…easier there.

I’m guessing it’s not. It is perhaps too cliched to end this with…a cliche: Familiarity breeds contempt.

But aren’t cliches just that…because they’re true?