Unmarked graves

In France as well.

We’ve been house-hunting some more, and hopefully getting closer to where we want to be. This week we found ourselves looking a very nice former presbytery in the town of Lebreil, near Montcuq-en-Quercy.

The presbytery is of course attached to the adjacent church, and then to the adjacent graveyard. The church is one of many in France that is nearly ready to be decommissioned, with reportedly only a very rare funeral taking place there, and even more rare weddings.

The sad fact is that France has become a place where fewer and fewer people attend church, and even the wealth of Rome isn’t enough to support the hundreds of buildings that now sit empty nearly all of the time.

That saddens me. When the doors are open and you can walk in, you can see that these buildings were the centre of local life for centuries. Whether it’s the art of multiple eras on the walls, or the inevitable plaques honouring les Enfants of the parish who were killed in the last two world wars, or the path from back to front of the church where millions of footsteps have worn a long smooth hollow into the stone floor, you can appreciate the grip that the church used to have.

I was not raised in any religion, barely attended Sunday School for one season, and honestly can’t claim any faith as my won.

Yet as much as I reject the superstition and mysticism of organised religion, and as much as I can acknowledge the damage that it has done to the world, I also know that when I visit these churches in France I feel like something important and powerful has been discarded, and that the communities around them are weaker for it.

And yet, when I look at France, and how it cares for the weakest among its population, and how it values education, and thought, and quality of life, and how it has to a large degree avoided the overwhelming capitalism that governs so much of North America, I have to think that even if the buildings sit empty, the hearts, minds, and actions of the French people are guided by that sense of community and charity.