Why Europe's great churches are empty

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'The Cube and the Cathedral'

Why Europe's great churches are empty.

BY BRIAN M. CARNEY

Thursday, April 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

At Mass last Sunday, Amiens's gothic cathedral, the largest in France, was virtually empty. Not just sparsely filled--it was, except for a handful of tourists, vacant. Mass was being conducted in a side chapel fit for the couple dozen worshipers who showed up for it (I among them).

Amiens is hardly the exception. Europe's largest churches are often unused these days, reduced to monuments for tourists to admire. And there is a reason for this neglect. In "The Cube and the Cathedral," George Weigel describes a European culture that has become not only increasingly secular but in many cases downright hostile to Christianity. The cathedral in his title is Notre Dame, now overshadowed in cultural importance by the Arc de la Defense, the ultramodernist "cube" that dominates an office complex outside Paris. "European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular," Mr. Weigel writes. "That conviction and its public consequences are at the root of Europe's contemporary crisis of civilizational morale."

It is true that throngs of believers recently descended on Rome to bid farewell to Pope John Paul II. And yet even as Catholics mourned the pope's passing, Socialists and Greens in France decried the French government's decision to fly the flag at half-mast in his honor. Officials were reduced to claiming, in response, that the honor was afforded to John Paul II in his capacity as a head of state, not as a religious leader.

The incident that forms the centerpiece of Mr. Weigel's critique is last year's debate over whether "Christianity" should be explicitly acknowledged in the European Union's constitutional treaty. "By the time the draft constitution was completed in June 2004, a grudging reference to 'the cultural, religious, and humanist inheritance of Europe' had been shoehorned into the preamble's first clause," Mr. Weigel notes derisively. This was about as much religion as Europe could stand in a constitution that runs, by Mr. Weigel's count, to 70,000 words.

Practicing Christianity in Europe today enjoys a status not dissimilar to smoking marijuana or engaging in unorthodox sexual activities--few people mind if you do so in private, but you are expected not to talk about it or ask others whether they do it too. Christianity is considered retrograde and atavistic in a "progressive" society devoted to the good life--long holidays, short work hours and generous government benefits.

What is the deeper source of European antipathy to religion? For Mr. Weigel, the problem goes all the way back to the 14th century, when scholastics like William of Ockham argued for "nominalism." According to their philosophy, universals--concepts such as "justice" or "freedom" and qualities such as "white" or "good"--do not exist in the abstract but are merely words that denote instances of what they describe. A current of thought was set into motion, Mr. Weigel believes, that pulled European man away from transcendent truths. One casualty was a fixed idea of human nature.

"If there is no such thing as human nature," Mr. Weigel argues, "then there are no universal moral principles that can be read from human nature." If there are no universal moral truths, then religion, positing them, is merely a form of oppression or myth, one from which Europe's elites see themselves as liberated.

This is a big argument for a small book, and much more could be said to make it wholly convincing. One place to go for a fuller discussion is Richard Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences," which Mr. Weigel slyly alludes to but does not cite. "The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a course of truth higher than, and independent of, man," Weaver explained a half-century ago, "and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of humankind."

Mr. Weigel is on firmer ground when he analyzes Europe's present condition, with its low birth rates, heavy debts, Muslim immigration worries and tendency to carp from the sidelines when the fate of nations is at stake. In what is certainly the most attention-grabbing passage in an engagingly written book, Mr. Weigel sketches the worst-case scenario--the "bitter end"--for a Europe that is religiously bereft, demographically moribund and morally without a compass: "The muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from the central loggia of St. Peter's in Rome, while Notre-Dame has been transformed into Hagia Sophia on the Seine--a great Christian church become an Islamic museum."

One need not find this scenario especially plausible to feel persuaded by Mr. Weigel's more measured arguments about Europe's atheistic humanism. Without a religious dimension, Mr. Weigel notes, a commitment to human freedom is likely to be attenuated, too weak to make sacrifices in its name. Europe's political elites especially, but its citizens as well, believe in freedom and democracy of course, but they are reluctant to put the "good life" on hold and put lives on the line when freedom is in need of a champion--say, in the Balkans or, especially, in Iraq. (Mr. Weigel is at pains to emphasize, however, that his analysis is not born of disenchantment over European popular opposition to the Iraq war.)

The good of human freedom, by European lights, must be weighed against the risk and cost of actually fighting for it. It is no longer transcendent, absolute. In such a world, governed by a narrow utilitarian calculus, sacrifice is rare, and churches go unvisited.

Mr. Carney is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe. You can buy "The Cube and the Cathedral" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006554