In March, I drove with my family up from Rome into the mountains of southeastern Umbria, to reach the town of Norcia and the monastery — now an abbey; it’s been promoted since our visit — of St. Benedict on the Mountain, a community of Benedictine monks perched above a wide valley that was then just greening with the spring.
The monks of Norcia are, as monks go, not obscure. They brew beer, they have a chant album, they were profiled in The Times in a story about their region’s recovery from the terrible 2016 earthquakes. They also feature prominently in Rod Dreher’s 2017 case for Christian retrenchment and renewal, “The Benedict Option” — for understandable reasons, since Norcia is the birthplace of Western monasticism, the home of St. Benedict, the place where medieval Christendom arguably got its start.
And it is a peculiarly resonant place to visit in this particular moment. Christianity in Europe, even in Catholic Italy, has been declining for generations, and now in the wake of de-Christianization comes depopulation. The countryside around the monastery is emptying, with picturesque villas and ancient hill towns vacant — a process accelerated in Norcia by the toll of the earthquake, but part of a general phenomenon across an Italy that’s growing ever older and having ever fewer kids.
Yet here sits a thriving abbey with its youthful monks, drawing pilgrims while its Benedictines pray the ancient Latin of the Roman church. It’s not the fall of the Roman Empire all over again, but there is a strange rhyming quality, a similar sense of death and rebirth.
Every Christmas I try to write a column on religion, and over the years they’ve often circled themes of challenge, struggle and decline. In an essay this week on the discovery of God, my colleague David Brooks jokes that “entering the church in 2013 was like investing in the stock market in 1929,” and something similar might be said about becoming a Catholic newspaper columnist 15 years ago: Traditional religious institutions have been scandal-racked and fractured throughout my years at this paper — suffering through an early 21st-century ebb tide, if not quite a vast withdrawing roar.
This Christmas seems different. There is statistical evidence that the latest wave of secularization has reached some sort of limit. There is suggestive cultural evidence that secular liberalism has lost faith in itself, that many people miss not just religion’s moral vision but also its metaphysical horizons, that the arguments for religious belief might be getting a new hearing. Notre-Dame de Paris has been rebuilt from its ashes. I rashly predicted a religious revival earlier this year, and at the very least I expect religious trends in the later 2020s to be different from the trends of the 2010s.
But different probably means really different, not just a return to what existed in the past. The last bastions of the before times, the old religious establishments, are likely to remain in existential trouble.
For instance, Catholic Poland, one of Europe’s last hubs of intense national religion, seems to be following the same de-Christianizing path as Ireland and Quebec and Italy. The American Protestant Mainline isn’t about to leap up from its sickbed, nor is an all but expired Anglicanism in Britain. Likewise, groups such as the Southern Baptists and the Mormons, fast growing a few decades ago and struggling today, aren’t going to automatically rebound or boom again.
Instead, any growth is likely to be nondenominational, subcultural (think Latin Mass Catholics or converts to Eastern Orthodoxy or communally oriented Protestants), mystical and sui generis, with notable flowerings in places where traditional faith has rarely grown before (like in the tech industry, say).
As part of my larger bet-on-America theory of the future, I expect any renewed religious vitality to spread from the United States back to the older Christendom of Europe. (The abbey in Norcia is a case study: Its founding Benedictines were a group of entrepreneurial Americans whose community has since added European brothers, as well.)
And I also expect a stringency that the old religious establishments in their dotage conspicuously lacked. On our first night above Norcia, we took our kids to Compline, the evening installment of the daily monastic cycle. The prayers took 20 minutes or so; it was lovely, we trooped off to dinner, and one of the monks suggested that I wake up and join them for the beginning of their daily cycle, Matins, which they were scheduled to pray at roughly 2:30 a.m.
Sure, I can get up and pray for 20 minutes and then collapse back into bed, I thought confidently.
So I set my alarm and rose and shuffled to the chapel in the wee hours …
… and almost two hours of Latin prayers later, I staggered back out into the starry Italian night, thankful to God for the experience, but also concerned that a real religious revival might not entirely be for me.
Merry Christmas.
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