European priests

Eamon Duffy's essay on the de-Christianization of Europe ("The Mass Bells of Maremma," November 5) rang true to me during a recent visit to see my daughter in Spain. I noticed then, as I have in trips to Europe over the last fifteen years, the growing disconnect between the continent's rich Christian heritage and the faith of its inhabitants. In my opinion, the clergy are a key reason for this divide.

Let me admit that, as a resigned and married priest, it's not possible for me to be objective. But as a parent, I desperately want my daughter's generation to weather the crisis of de-Christianization. Yet over and over again, I encounter priests (whose principal role is to interpret and pass on our tradition at the liturgy) unable to connect the past to the present imaginatively. At one of Madrid's principal basilicas on the first Sunday of Advent, with the church relatively full of middle-aged and elderly worshipers, the liturgy of the Word was lead exclusively by the priest. Standing at the lectern, he shouted the scriptural passages in the same monotone that he used both to read from the prepackaged notes introducing the readings and to lead the mumbling congregation in the responsorial psalm. The obliviousness of such priests to the people-centeredness of the liturgical reforms of more than a generation ago has become their surest legacy to what Duffy calls the church's uncertain future.

PAUL E. DINTER

Cortlandt Manor, N.Y.

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