To stroll is Parisian

I was going through some photos yesterday. This one is from my second day in Paris, which I remember vividly. On my first day, I rushed right down to Notre Dame, but on day two I had no real itinerary. I wandered down to the Place de République and then zig-zagged through the Third Arrondissement. I stuck my head into Saint-Elizabeth, the Parisian parish of the Order of Malta. At a cafe across the street from the church, a car backed into a pole, causing a commotion. From there, I got all turned around and ended up in the neighborhood of Charlie Hebdo. After a stop in the Place des Vosges, the sky turned turbulent, and I took refuge from the rain in the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis in the Marais. There was a clearing and I continued on to the Seine and crossed over to the Ile Saint-Louis. It was from the bridge that this shot was taken.

My favorite part about Paris, which has become clearer in retrospect, is the delight it gives to walkers. The texture of the city is so uniformly interesting, that one can just keep going from place to place without noticing. There is such a strong continuity of experience. "To err is human, to stroll is Parisian," as Victor Hugo said. I think Washington is a good walking city as well, though it is not as uniform as Paris.

A Creole tune

Bamboula, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, 1848 - First learned of this piece reading David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris last summer. Gottschalk was from New Orleans, but wrote this piece in Paris as an attempt to synthesize Creole and African music with classical European piano.

L'église française

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote a provocative article in The Week here in which he ponders whether France is undergoing the beginnings of a Christian, and specifically, Catholic revival. On the whole, the article augments feelings and suspicions that I felt living in France for a brief time this past year. For all of our own problems that need our attention, American Catholics still tend to look with a rather unabashed smugness mixed with pity when we gaze across the Atlantic at our European coreligionists. "Well, at least we're not Europe" we are wont to say. On the face of things, I understand the sentiment. Across the continent, church attendance numbers dwell in depths that a US bishop would find flabbergasting if they occurred in his diocese. And, the overt and sometimes militant secularism of the European Union (and many French politicians) would make the ACLU blush.

And yet... Europe is under a spiritual malaise. Everyone with two eyes and a brain can deduce as much. The emptiness of consumerism and sexual libertinism have yielded only rotten fruit: an aging population that limps along with the tired economy in tow. These days, "the sick man of Europe" is Europe itself. The recent tragedies in Paris and elsewhere underscore another salient point: there is another force jockeying for the soul of Europe, and it ain't as pretty as Chartres, that's for sure.

So, before going to France, I was expecting a windswept religious landscape. My previous travels in Germanic Europe yielded such an impression, to be honest. Yet, France was different. I attended mass in Paris every Sunday I was there, and so did everyone else in Paris, it seemed. A few examples:

The nave of St. Germain L'Auxerrois

St. Germain l'Auxerrois: This historic church, which faces the Louvre in the heart of the 1st Arrondissement, was my usual church of preference. Many of my ancestors worshiped here, so I felt it only appropriate that I should honor their memory by doing the same. I typically attended the 9:45 Extraordinary Form Mass (i.e. the pre-Vatican II traditional Latin Mass). The congregation often numbered around 250 people. There were people of all ages and descriptions. Yet, this was not a tourist parish by any means. These were Parisians. The community was not as tight-knit as your average American parish, but it was obvious there was a vibrancy there. The priest was of middle age and, to the best of my French, seemed very orthodox in his preaching. He had one sermon that I found particularly interesting - he enumerated the goodness of God's plan for the family and explained how gay marriage and divorce damage our ability to truly love one another. Have you ever heard that from an American Catholic pulpit? I haven't. And, despite the parish offering the traditional mass, it is not what I would call a particularly conservative or traditional parish.

St. Cécile-St. Eugene: This parish is the heart of the Parisian traditionalist community. It was what you would expect in that regard: reverent liturgy, solid preaching, traditional devotions, etc. And it was packed. Always. Little mantilla'd old ladies and young professionals alike filled the pews. Yes it is probably an outlier, but an encouraging one nonetheless.

St. Laurent: I lived across from this small Gothic church at the heart of the 10th Arrondissement. The neighborhood is working class with a decent immigrant population and a certain hipster element. This church offered a mass that was what I would call the equivalent of your average American mass: some organ, some guitar, some incense, the exclusive use of the vernacular, et cetera. Again, the church was packed. The congregation was much more diverse than the other two churches, but I certainly would not call it an immigrant parish. I sat beside a young couple who looked like they had left the hipster capital of Brooklyn and somehow had gotten lost in northeast Paris. In the pew in front of me was a middle-aged man with his two young daughters. Beside them was an older woman. Behind me were two women of central African descent. The priest was quite young and preached about sacrifice and rejection of worldly comforts for the sake of the kingdom. In France? Where worldly comforts are part of the national identity? C'est possible?!

Three anecdotes do not a trend make, but three anecdotes that bucked my preconceptions so intensely do give one pause. One can speculate on causes and possible effects of this situation, but there are a few things that an American audience should understand when looking at French religiosity and society in general - things I was quite clueless about. The first and most important is that the Church in France has been through everything, sometimes twice. At the beginning of the last century, the State literally seized all of the Church's property throughout the country. Schools were closed, convents sold off, etc. This was in 1907. Today, in 2015, the government still owns every church property in the country. This is but one example. The atrocities committed against Catholics during the Revolution in the 18th Century and the Commune in the 19th would fill volumes. The result, in my opinion, has been that those who wish to remain Catholic are truly committed. They have nothing to gain from it socially or politically (occasionally, quite the opposite has been true historically). 

The other thing to keep in mind, on the more political side of things is that what James Joyce said of the Church is true in France: "Here comes everybody." The political landscape in France is far more fragmentary than it is in the US. You have a devoted Communist Party. You have not one but three monarchist movements of varying popularity. You have socialists, social democrats, nationalists, and everyone in between. Into this milieu, a vocal or vibrant Catholicism does not seem out of place - it is just one more movement standing by its principles. The Church is not pressured into political correctness because in France, by and large, there is no political correctness.

Realists will charm in at this point to say that mass attendance and seminary enrollment is still abysmal. I make no argument with that. But, I will say that the commitment of those who remain Catholic in France could change the country. We need only think of some of the fairly recent French saints to see how a few people restored - if briefly - the spirituality of their nation: John Vianney, Therese of Lisieux, Catherine Laboure, etc. Europe is not hopeless, and neither is France.

Men of Letters

I am almost finished reading The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by popular historian David McCullough. It has been a fascinating look at the "long Nineteenth Century" in Paris, during which time it was the undisputed world capital of the arts, science, and culture (and maybe still is). The author follows the lives of many notable Americans who made long stays in Paris, including such luminaries as James Fenimore Cooper, Samuel Morse, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, among many, many others.

An interesting thing to consider about the book, which deals about day-to-day existence as well as wider historical happenings, is that the primary source material is from personal letters and journals. Though only a few were "writers", everyone was constantly writing. Of course, it was out of necessity in those days, but it gives me pause to consider how my generation will be reconstructed by historians. We are, generally, not writing very much. At least, not in any intimate or personal way to one another. The phone call has generally replaced the letter for such needs. But, though they may serve a similar purpose, they are not perfectly analogous. First, the letter is permanent, while the phone call (apart from some clandestine word-for-word transcription being generated by the NSA) is transient. Second, the letter, as a literary form, can pack in much extemporaneous information that is notably absent from most phone calls. Poetic descriptions of the weather, or musings on the culture that one is immersed in, are predictably absent from most phone calls that I am apart of.

We might then suppose that the internet, in all its myriad social media platforms, may be the other replacement for the letter. But, as a public forum, it is necessarily deficient in the exact opposite ways as a phone call. The internet is public, and largely permanent (though it feels transient), so a degree of intimacy and personality is inherently missing. We hurl our thoughts out into the abyss on the internet (I am doing so now) without much thought about the person-to-person conversations or discoveries that they may engender. And, when they do engender discussion, the case is that it often rapidly devolves into nonsensical shouting (have you read the comments on anything, ever?). No, the letter, with its one intended recipient, has a way of provoking thoughtful response that no blog or Facebook post ever will.

So, that leaves me to my original question, I suppose. How will we be discovered by generations yet nonexistent? Will they google us and find our blogs? Will they be able to read our Facebook messages and updates to get a sense of what we were thinking and doing? Will they raid the digital archives for our Instagram photos? And, will they, when all of this is said and done, come away with only a shallow impression of our existence - as shallow as we are accused of being by other generations for delving so deeply into the fleeting things of the digital age?

Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Libraries, like churches, are unique among structures in that they contain our collective culture. Churches, of course, are houses for our sacred culture, passed on through the centuries. Libraries, on the other hand, are houses for our secular culture, the accumulated knowledge of a civilization on display for all to see. The chief difference, of course, is that the sacred culture relies on a living thing - the liturgy, to occur within the church. The library is a mute observer to individual edification. That said, I wish to draw your attention to the splendid main reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (National Library of France) located in Paris. The building was designed by two different architects, Henri Labrouste and Jean-Louis Pascal. I am, however, unsure as to which was responsible for this portion of the building. The architecture is still rooted in classical ideas about proportion and form, but the thin steel columns and arches demonstrate the innovation made possible by the Industrial Revolution.