"Stealing from Churches"

A wonderful essay, by Roger Scruton (HT:Rod Dreher).  The essay, Dreher writes,

is a sketch of two deeply humane Catholic believers who made an enormous impression on the atheist Scruton: a Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, an aristocratic Englishman and popular old-school priest, and Basia, a poor Polish philosophy student who had suffered. What you miss in the excerpt is the opening, in which Scruton writes poetically about being drawn to old and nearly abandoned French country churches as a young man. He opens by relating a sense of being a vandal in visiting churches as an unbeliever, as many tourists are:

Of course, they don't steal the works of art, nor do they carry away the bones of the local martyr. Theri thieving is of the spiritual kind. They take the fruit of pious giving, and empty it of religious sense. This theft of other people's holiness creates more damage than physical violence. For it compels a community to see itself from outside, as an object of anthropological curiosity. Those holy icons that returned the believer's gaze from a more heavenly region are suddenly demoted to the level of human inventions. Those once silent, God-filled spaces now sound with sacrilegious chatter, and what had been a place or recuperation, the interface between a community and its God, is translated to the realm of aesthetic values, so as to become unique, irreplaceable, and functionless. The tool that guaranteed a community's lastingness, becomes a useless symbol of the everlasting.

Scruton then relates his role in an actual minor theft from a country church (of crystal cruets), and how it haunted him for years afterward. The real theft, though, was sacramental -- his failed marriage to a Catholic woman, which broke him spiritually. He writes of his lesson as a spiritual thief: "Stay away from holiness, was the lesson. Stay away until you are sure it possesses you."

That's more or less where the essay picks up at the link above. The profiles Scruton writes of those two very different Catholic believers illustrate what it is like to live one's life devoted to the Good, and the Good in the person of Jesus Christ. . . .