Ecclesiastical Tourism

On Monday S.D. heard my confession and approved of a conclusion I’d come to about some of my repeating forms of behaviour, asked what my stay in Malling Abbey had been like, and then moved on to tea and gossip. He’d just been to Venice for a few days with a friend and marvelled at the state of the Catholic Church there.

‘We went to St Eufemia mid-week and the congregation was four old ladies, two old men, and us. The priest hadn’t prepared the service and spent ages flicking through the altar book to find the right eucharistic prayer, huffing and puffing. At another church – similar congregation – there was a Nigerian priest who sat with his hands in his lap and kept yawning all the way through Mass. At least with the Tridentine service you had a sense of reverence and care; what we saw was just sloppiness and boredom. There’s a church of the neo-Catechumenate round the corner with a gigantic full-immersion font and a communion table the size of this room, and that’s where all the young people are supposed to go, but people told us none of them do. We went in during Stations of the Cross – the priest stood around clearly irritated waiting for his elderly ladies to clamber their way around these huge fittings. They were singing the Stabat Mater but it took us quite a while to identify what it was. At one point a nice young Venetian man came in and stood watching for a bit, and he clearly would probably have joined in if anyone had spoken to him but nobody did. I think a sort of hopelessness and depression has set in.’ (Although we agreed that people have never really gone to church much in Venice).

At his own local church of St Saviour Pimlico, S.D. said, ‘We get about 60-70 on a Sunday, and it’s not a huge number, but I look around and there are a few young families with children and some solicitors and professionals and so on, and a group of old ladies from the housing estate, and that seems wholesome. It doesn’t feel like a weird pastime for an isolated group of people: new people still arrive. And there’s hope and life in that.’