Passport to a global church: playing tourist can lead to some unexpected discoveries. From gracious architecture to a wide worldview, let's bring a little bit of vacation back to our communities and our church.

LIKE MILLIONS OF OTHER AMERICANS, MY FAMILY played tourist this summer, spending a few glorious weeks in Florence and Tuscany. And like the legions of other visitors to the birthplace of the Renaissance, we came in search of Michelangelo's David, Brunelleschi's dome, Fra Augelico's frescoes, and Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Each day, with guidebook, map, and camera in hand, we set off for another Gothic basilica, this one with a pulpit by Donatello, that one with a crucifix by Giotto. We climbed bell towers and domes and the winding streets that led past Galileo's house and up to a Benedictine church with Della Robbia angels on the ceiling and a Romanesque crypt under the main altar. We craned our necks at vaulted ceilings covered with frescoes and mosaics of the Last Judgment, compared countless versions of the Annunciation, and tried not to stare too long at David's naked masculinity.

And along the way to all the sights we came to see (and mark off) we ran into a few million other folks from places near and (mostly) far. Noah's ark had two of every species on the planet, but Florence in the summer can boast a couple hundred pilgrims from nearly every tribe and nation on the planet. By early June the springtime torrent of British, German, French, and other Europeans gushing over the Alps has been joined by a flood of Americans, Japanese, and Australians pouring out of an armada of planes, trains, and oversized tour buses.

They are everywhere, crowding into squares, museums, and cathedrals, arriving in hordes just seconds before you, adding another hour to the wait in line and then blocking the view of frescoes, paintings, and any sculpture shorter than David. Out on the street roving bands of these tourists nudge all other pedestrian traffic off the sidewalk and generate huge lines in front of all the available rest rooms.

Of course we are tourists, too, but still we think of the other travelers around us as members of a separate and inferior species. We try to keep our maps and guidebooks out of sight lest anyone confuse us with these sometimes rude and naive creatures.

We can be excused for this hypocrisy. Even to themselves, tourists have long been an object of ridicule. Chaucer mocked them in his Canterbury Tales. Graham Greene satirized American and European globetrotters in his novels. And Chevy Chase and the folks at National Lampoon have made a cottage industry of mocking the Griswold family's vacation travels.

Still, though we may think of tourists as an annoyance interfering with our vacation (like mosquitoes or lost luggage), they are actually a vital part of the trip--and of its pleasures.

FOR THOUGH WE ONLY WENT TO ITALY, WE RAN INTO, or simply jostled up against, people from all over the world. In Florentine restaurants, museums, and gelaterias (ice cream stands) we read menus, directions, and descriptions written in a half dozen tongues, and heard tour guides and dinner companions chatting in another two dozen languages--and somehow this made the experience more interesting and not less. At Mass we read along in English as the priest proclaimed the gospel in Italian and our pew mates followed him in French or German or Spanish, and I couldn't help but wonder if we weren't experiencing a hit of Pentecost.

The millions of jostling tourists pouring in and out of Florence's train station each year not only pay for the upkeep of the city's treasures and hospitality industry, they are the reason so many of its clerks, waiters, and guides speak so many languages. These tourists are, to a large degree, what make Florence cosmopolitan, a city of the world, and what allow foreigners to find lots of people who speak their language. Try visiting Philadelphia, St. Louis, or Atlanta without speaking English. Tourists make the trip to Florence richer and more hospitable.

This hospitality also extends to the city's architecture, which welcomes crowds with wide open spaces that hold and embrace the thousands who go out each day to shop and stroll and visit. Like so many other European cities, Florence has plenty of public space for people to gather in, assemble, mingle, be entertained, or take an evening walk. There are large sweeping piazzas surrounding or facing its basilicas, palazzos, and government buildings. There are town squares and open-air markets lined with stalls, cafes, and restaurants. And there are long shady parks and winding boulevards, both decorated with fountains and lined with benches and yet more stalls and gelaterias.

Public space seems rarer to me at home, and our hospitality diminished by its loss. Many of our parents and grandparents speak fondly of block parties and sitting on the front stoop or porch and chatting with neighbors as they walked by in the evening. But television, cars, and air conditioning have driven us inside, and our malls and food courts are a poor substitute for the sweeping plazas and piazzas where one could take an evening stroll and watch one's city or town go to bed. These public spaces are a sign of a city's hospitality, not only to strangers from faraway places but also to its own citizens.

The church was meant to be a sacrament of this sort of hospitality, the kind that gathers in strangers and creates wide open spaces for the mingling of tongues and nations. The birthday of the church is Pentecost, a least that celebrates that people from all sorts of places speaking every kind of language would be able to gather together. The Greek word for church, ecclesia, means a gathering, an assemblage, a crowd--and so to be church means to make room for others, to welcome them, to share a place with them.

Roaming through European basilicas filled mostly with tourists happy to don a shawl or long pants and pay a fee to enter, one is reminded that the very architecture of Christian churches--Romanesque, Gothic, or Baroque--reflects this call to hospitality. Ancient temples only had room for priests and sacrifice, but Christian basilicas copied the architecture of assembly halls and created wide open spaces to welcome and gather in the whole Body of Christ.

Today our parish churches in America are usually much fuller than the cathedrals of Europe, but one wonders if they have the same hospitality. Except in large urban parishes, we tend to sit and pray next to people who are just like us. There's not much mixing of nations or tongues in these places, or much difference in race or class or background. Our churches are often not such a "gathering" as we might hope.

PERHAPS IT WAS THAT SENSE OF smallness or sameness that drove medieval Christians to make pilgrimages to the great churches of Europe, to take to the road and visit the shrines of saints in basilicas scattered from England to Italy. No doubt many of them went to see these extraordinary churches or to pray before the tombs and bones of famous saints, asking for intercession or offering thanks. But perhaps they also came in search of a feeling for a "bigger" church, a more ecumenical and--we would say today--global church.

The modern traveler ducking into a cathedral to check out a famous fresco may not seem as religious as the ancient pilgrim. Still, our brave travelers have gone out into the world to learn about other people and their customs and history. They have left the comfort of home and tried to learn a few phrases of a foreign tongue, showed respect for local and religious customs that are different from their own, and offered those of us who travel with them a chance to gather in wide open spaces that have at least a scent of Pentecost hovering above the babble of the crowd.

Perhaps that is why millions of us travel to these faraway places, to meet the other folks who are going there, and to get a glimpse of heaven below the frescoes and mosaics.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.