Speaking of Gashwin (sort of – see below), John Allen spoke at the University of South Carolina last night, and has reflections:

Finally, a young woman from Belgium, whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch, wanted to press me on what I said about the crisis of faith in contemporary Europe. First, she asked, isn’t some of the extreme secularist sentiment one finds in Europe today a product of an overly cozy relationship between church and state in Europe in earlier centuries, which has produced the equal and opposite reaction of wanting to drive religion into a completely private sphere? Second, isn’t part of the reason that the so-called “new movements” have prospered in Europe but not to same degree in the United States precisely because they fill a gap in a depleted European church that doesn’t exist to the same degree in America?

To both questions, I could but respond “Amen.”

Amplifying the questioner’s point, I told the story of a meeting between Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Pope John Paul II, when Mahony asked the late pope why he was such a big supporter of “the movements” – groups such as Focolare, the Neocatechumenate, Regnum Christi, and so on. As Mahony tells the story, John Paul replied that the United States is the only country in the world where the revitalization of the parish intended by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) had actually happened, so that America perhaps doesn’t need the movements in quite the same way. Given the depleted state of many European parishes, the pope said, the movements remedy an important ministerial deficit.

These are no more than snatches of a much broader conversation, but if nothing else they serve to illustrate the thoughtfulness and interest with which so many American audiences engage religious issues – and that in itself is another reason why, despite everything, I continue to hit the road.