The mass bells of Maremma: the waning of European Christianity.

For several years now my wife and I have spent part of the summer in rural Tuscany, sometimes in the picture-postcard mountain countryside above Fiesole, deep in what the British (whose current prime minister regularly holidays there), like to call Chianti-shire, but more recently in the hills of the western Maremma, miles from the tourist route. In this less glamorous though still lovely agricultural region, almost nobody speaks anything but Italian and, by and large, foreign tourists rarely come. So last July saw us once again ensconced in a friend's farmhouse, just outside a small hill town two hours' drive from Rome.

To avoid the hideous 1960s parish church in the marketplace, you can drive instead to a chapelry in a neighboring hamlet. The priest--let us call him Don Ignazio--is a barrel-shaped septuagenarian who has been the parocho of both communities for close to fifty years. The ancient building, tiny and topped by a dissonant bell that clanks out the call to Mass, is dedicated to an obscure virgin martyr. Her statue, glassy eyed and clutching something alarmingly moist and anatomical-looking in its right hand, gestures operatically from a niche over the altar. The altar itself is a Baroque wedding cake in a sanctuary that has never been reordered. Don Ignazio therefore celebrates with his back to us, though this is necessity, not liturgical intransigence.

In July, even up here in the hills, the sun can be oppressively hot, and then, in defiance of recent Vatican directives, the perspiring old man dispenses with his chasuble and functions in crumpled alb and stole. Don Ignazio's sermons are essentially folksy and energetic retellings of the Gospel story of the day, rounded off with appropriately edifying liturgical and theological generalities, though to Anglo-Saxon ears he makes surprisingly little effort to relate these general truths to the specifics of real life or current events. By contrast, his bidding prayers and notices are warm and detailed, displaying a close knowledge of the people we are praying for, and dwelling specially and affectionately over the memory of the dead for whom the Mass is being offered. This summer the congregation consisted of three elderly men, one of them in a wheelchair, eight women aged thirty to seventy or so, and us. There were no children or young adults, though this perhaps reflected the fact that the hamlet, picturesquely suspended over a deep river gorge, is no longer much of a working community, many of its houses empty, or converted into neat retirement or vacation homes.

Mass in the town church two miles away is less picturesque, but Sunday congregations there are of course a little bigger, and do include a handful of young families, or at least their women and children. Nevertheless, the numbers attending don't often get far into three figures, and the vast majority of the little town's residents stay away, as they have increasingly done now for several generations. The Communist Party has traditionally had strong support in the region, and though that has faded, there is widespread cynicism about the church's financial affairs and postwar political entanglements. The proprietress of the only local hotel, an educated and decent woman who has lived in the town all her life, wasn't able to tell us the Sunday Mass times, and, so far as I know, never goes herself.

Besides all this, the social structure of the town is in flux. Until a generation ago, it was a functioning market town, most of its inhabitants engaged in the local agricultural economy, the town itself the center of a self-contained district with a strong regional identity. Nowadays it is half empty for much of the year. Though the majority of its houses are still in the hands of the same families who have always owned them, many of their owners have left in search of a living. They work in Rome, and drive up to the hills for vacations or weekends. Interestingly, these nostalgic weekenders are far more likely to turn up at Mass, at any rate on the major festivals, than the locals who have never gone away. The appalling modern church, plug-ugly and decorated with kitsch religious art that makes Mickey Mouse look sophisticated, was and is Don Ignazio's pride and joy, built in the 1960s, when congregations had grown too large for the ancient medieval pieve, or parish church. The pieve would hold them all comfortably now, and Don Ignazio, who is, incidentally, the historian of his town and a man of character, energy, and distinction, like many another country priest, has presided over a local religious decline mirrored everywhere in Italy, a country that can still turn out ardent crowds to greet the pope in visits to shrines like Loretto, but whose regard for the teachings of Catholicism as a practical guide to life is sufficiently indicated by the fact that it has the lowest birth rate in Western Europe.

Don Ignazio is hardly to blame for the evaporation of religious commitment in the idyllic and once deeply Christian countryside of the Maremma. The practical alienation of Italians from their church began several centuries ago, and can be traced to a variety of specific causes. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the church's long and inglorious history of association with political repression in a divided Italy, and more particularly its disastrous confrontation with the emerging Italian state in the nineteenth century, a relationship whose low point was signalled in 1878, when a Roman mob tried to throw the coffin of Pope Pius IX into the Tiber.

De-Christianization is, of course, a familiar feature of modernity, though the encounter with its more extreme expressions can still surprise and shock. I was stunned recently by a story told by a Cambridge colleague who went to a local jeweller to buy a silver cross for a goddaughter's birthday. "Certainly sir," said the helpful young shop assistant: "Would you like a plain one, or the kind with the little man on it?" Such breathtaking disengagement from even the basics of the Christian story is startling in an ancient university town, with its daily ringing of the bells of parish churches and college chapels. It would be very much less remarkable encountered in the vast anonymities and ethnic mix of any major English industrial town, or for that matter in New York or Chicago. But we tend to think of de-Christianization specifically as an urban phenomenon, and Europeans have been slow to realize that Christian sensibility is fading even in its rural heartlands, that Europe even outside its cities is inexorably returning to paganism. The fictional Italian priest Don Camillo, hero of Giovanni Guareschi's heart-warming if idealized stories of the "Little World" of the Po valley during the 1950s, also functioned in a community governed by anticlericals and nonchurchgoers, but Don Camillo's fictional sparring partner, Peppone, the Communist mayor, sent his children to be baptized, knew the essentials of the faith he had been taught as a child, and harbored a secret loyalty, if not to the church then at least to the Christ of heart and conscience. He was a cultural Catholic, and in some important sense still a religious one too--as Guareschi himself wrote, "in the end the two enemies find they agree about essentials."

No such agreement can nowadays be taken for granted, in the Little World or anywhere else. The crisis of de-Christianization has been masked and moderated by the survival of a vestigial framework of Christian values and Christian sensibility, but my sense is that we in Western Europe are in many places close to the exhaustion of that reservoir of inherited Christianity. A few years ago, Andrew Greeley published a characteristically lively and upbeat book on the Catholic imagination, one of the subthemes of which was that we should not worry too much about the alleged process of de-Christianization. Even lapsed Catholics share in "a deep and pervasive religious sensibility that inclines [them] to see the Holy lurking in creation," and this religious sensibility "has extraordinary durability. It has lasted fifteen hundred years ... it is unlikely to disappear."

I fervently hope he's right, but on this side of the Atlantic, at any rate, we can no longer take it for granted. Christian sensibility is indeed, thank God, a durable commodity, but it has to be transmitted somehow--through family structure and family values, through formal catechesis, through participation in distinctive ceremonial behaviors that imprint, often subliminally, the package of values and belief that have shaped the rituals. Much of that still goes on, of course, though even in Italy as elsewhere in Europe family structure has taken a bit of a pounding in recent years. In Don Ignazio's hill town in the Maremma, though few go to church, they still decorate the pavements with flowers for the Corpus Christi procession, school children still scatter rose petals before the monstrance and the Madonna. But there must surely come a point when such behavior, unless it is backed by solid teaching and reiterated moral challenge, will decline from subliminal sensibility formation to merely picturesque and vestigial "heritage." And the behavior itself has no guaranteed continuance. Don Ignazio is old, and it is by no means clear who, if anyone, will replace him.

I don't have recent figures for the Diocese of Pitigliano, of which Don Ignazio is a priest, but ordinations there have certainly dried to a trickle, and in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, the gap between the supply of new priests and the retirement or death of the elderly is widening exponentially year by year. A friend who regularly stays in rural central France tells me that his parish church there is booming, packed with young families, and is a center of vital social engagement and Christian education. But our less cheerful experience in the Maremma could certainly be replicated all over Europe. Here in England, where neither of the two major seminaries outside London has more than two dozen students, diocesan plans are being formulated that envision massive closures of parishes, and in those parishes that will remain, the growing centrality of lay--that is nonsacramental--ministries, in sustaining a religion that is surely nothing if not sacramental. Even in what is still, despite a recent catastrophic collapse of public confidence, the most observant Catholic country in Western Europe, my own native Ireland, they are experiencing an unprecedented shortage of priests. Cobwebs form in the corridors of Maynooth, the great national seminary, that only a generation ago numbered its annual intake in the hundreds.

Catholicism is more than its priests, and rural de-Christianization is of course not an entirely new phenomenon. The word "pagan" originally meant country bumpkin, and Christianity is in its origins an urban, not a rural, religion that won its way with difficulty into the countryside of late antique and early medieval Europe. There is perhaps a sense in which its hold there has always been provisional. In the seventeenth century, Vincent de Paul found in the French countryside a degree of radical ignorance and sub-Christian morality that not only he but sophisticated modern historians like Jean Delumeau have been willing to describe as pagan (mistakenly in my view, but that's another story). In the generation after the French Revolution, St. Jean Vianney considered himself to be a missionary preaching Christianity as if for the first time to the country people of Ars.

Yet we are in a new and worrying situation all the same. Andrew Greeley has observed, surely correctly, that a Catholic sensibility and "take" on life is less the product of formal education and the activity of the clergy than it is the result of a process of subliminal transmission of stories through a network of intimates--parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, friends, the parish community, the spouse, the liturgy. But none of that is sustainable without the input of the clergy, for the parochial framework and its liturgy have been foundational to that entire network for more than a thousand years. Underpinning the whole Christian project in Europe has been the existence, sometimes robustly assertive, at other times faint and faltering, of a cycle of resonantly symbolic action, in which the Christian story and the values it embodies has been celebrated and transmitted, and through which it has been woven into the rhythms of life itself, summer and winter, light and dark, birth and death, moving to the clanking of the Mass bells.

As the Cambridge jeweler's ignorance of the identity of the "little man on the cross" suggests, more and more people now seem to be growing up beyond the reach of that great cycle of story and celebration, and its continuance as part of the fabric of life across Europe, even rural Europe, seems now in doubt. Will there be a priest in Don Ignazio's rectory in twenty years? As the emptying of the seminaries indicates, the institutional church in many parts of Europe is unquestionably in crisis, yet the institutional church seems to me neither to have registered nor as yet risen to the challenge with anything approaching the appropriate level of urgency. Plans to run parishes with fewer and fewer priests really do seem like the busy rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic, just as assurances that we in Europe are relatively well off, that the churches of Africa or Latin America have much less favorable priest/people ratios, or that there have been crises in priestly recruitment before, miss the distinctive novelty of the situation in which we find ourselves.

For always in the past institutional Christianity in Europe has had immense natural advantage on its side. Till the 1960s over most of Europe, recruitment into the priesthood, quite apart from its purely spiritual attractions, was recruitment into a respected and privileged caste. For the country boys who formed the majority of priestly candidates, in Don Ignazio's Italy as in the Ireland of my own boyhood, priesthood was a social escalator into greater comfort, unique respectability, and a wider opportunity for effective action than was available in almost any other walk of life open to the son of a poor family. Becoming a priest certainly meant the sacrifice of sexual fulfillment and the comforts of family life, but it offered in their place greater financial security than most laypeople would ever enjoy, an education, a respected role in society, and an open field for energetic idealism: all this and heaven too.

These advantages still apply in the developing world, in all the growth points of the church where recruitment to the priesthood and the religious life is booming. But in Europe, much of this has evaporated. As educational opportunities have multiplied, priesthood is no longer a privileged route to self-improvement or greater social usefulness. Nor in many places is it any longer a guarantee of respectability, as society at large has ceased to value what the church has to offer, and tarnished as it has been by the scandal of sexual abuse, terrible in itself and made infinitely worse by gleeful media hype. And in the radical reappraisal of the value of sexuality that has impacted so profoundly inside as well as beyond the church over the last two generations, the ideal of celibacy, which for centuries has been deemed to be a constitutive part of the mystique of priesthood, has come to seem, even to Catholics, less intelligible, less persuasive.

I doubt if the model of priesthood represented by Don Ignazio can survive these changes. It is hard to conceive of any pattern of social change, in Italy or anywhere else in the West, that will fill the seminaries again, or staff the rural rectories with a supply of learned, pious, and colorful bachelors, willing and able to be the spiritual fathers of their communities for fifty years. Terrible as the thought is, it seems possible that the Mass bells will not go on clanging across the wooded hills of the Maremma for very much longer. Unsurprisingly, under a pope whose own heroic conception and practice of the priestly life have been closely modeled on that of the Cure d' Ars, current Vatican teaching on priesthood insists on the perennial value and viability of our inherited patterns. I hope it may be so; yet it seems to me that the church of the third millennium is being called to a more drastic revision of its fundamental structures, to an imaginative and structural creativity on the same scale as that which, a thousand years ago, created the parish as a pastoral unit, and gave birth to our present understanding of priesthood, in the early and high Middle Ages.

It is a daunting prospect. The church in the early Middle Ages was, institutionally, financially, and culturally, in considerably better shape than we are now, if only because it was then at the cutting edge of the culture--intellectually and educationally, the only show in town. In the cacophony of modernity, we walk with a less confident step toward a more uncertain future. It is well, then, that we do not walk alone: Veni, Sancte Spiritus.

Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book, Faith of Our Fathers: Reflection on Catholic Tradition, is published by Continuum.