Reading Rod Dreher’s fuller account of his interview by Tara Isabella Burton, I was reminded of how impressed I was by the Mass I attended at Saint Sulpice in Paris two years ago.

I knew that France had become very secular, and I assumed (and assume) that Paris was in the vanguard. So I was expecting a watered-down, thin-gruel Mass like that in many (most) American Catholic Parishes. (Then why did I, Orthodox, go? For the Organ recital after Mass.)

Wrong. Apparently the Catholics who remain observant are really observant Catholics, not crypo-Protestants (and the less orthodox type of Protestant to boot), and get a reverent Mass (ad Orientum, if memory serves) and longish homily.

It’s a familiar story, how Christianity, marginalized, gets purified.