. . . as he told in his A Yankee in Canada.
He found size, silence, reverence, none of which he had found In the “almost wholly profane” Protestant churches he knew. He spoke “not . . . only of the rich and splendid” structures such as he and a fellow traveller entered in 1850 as tourists, but of “the humblest of them as well,” apart from the magnificence he described.
With a single companion, I found my way to the church of Notre Dame. I saw that it was of great size and signified something. It is said to be the largest ecclesiastical structure in North America, and can seat ten thousand. It is two hundred and fifty-five and a half feet long, and the groined ceiling is eighty feet above your head.
The Catholic are the only churches which I have seen worth remembering . . .
He and his companion had entered from a “hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages,” had “pushed aside the listed [designated?] door of this church,” and found themselves instantly in an atmosphere which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any.”
He didn’t but was sensitive to its aroma.
They saw “one or two women who had stolen a moment from the concerns of the day . . . but if there had been fifty people there, it would still have been the most solitary place imaginable.”
Neither woman looked at them, “nor did one regard another.”
The two visitors “walked softly” down the aisle, “hats in hands.”
No one told them to do that.
“A troop of Canadians” came in “who had come to the city in the boat with us. One and all knelt in the aisle before the altar — somewhat awkwardly, in their homespun, as cattle prepare to lie down.
“And there we left them.”
It was as if some farmer’s sons from Marlboro [NJ], having come to cattle-show, were “silently kneeling in Concord meeting-house some Wednesday! Would there not soon be a mob peeping in at the windows?”
“It is true,” wrote the man from Walden Pond, “these Roman Catholics, priests and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their symbols. It is as if an ox had strayed into a church and were trying to bethink himself.”
Sinners all, of course.
“Nevertheless,” he continued, “they are capable of reverence; but we Yankees are a people in whom this sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink ourselves even as oxen.”
Well.
These churches’ pictures and candles, “whether tallow or tin,” did not put him off. Neither did the pictures he saw, which “appeared tawdry.” Didn’t matter.
What got to him was “the quiet religious atmosphere of the place . . . a great cave in the midst of a city,” where “altars and tinsel” were “stalactics . . . where the still atmosphere and sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought.”
“Such a cave,” he enthused, “which you can enter any day, is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only Sundays — hardly long enough for an airing,—and then filled with a bustling congregation.”
Here instead was “a church where the priest is the least part, where you do your own preaching, where the universe preaches to you and can be heard.”
He concludes, with a crack at priests, unfortunately: “I am not sure but this Catholic religion would be an admirable one if the priest were quite omitted.”
Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground 