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Since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, a small but vibrant Roman Catholic parish has entered the public eye. As the city's Catholic hierarchy struggled to deal with widespread damage to church property, the St. Augustine parish was slated to close in March and merge with the much larger St. Peter Claver parish several blocks east. But parishioners and supporters protested. "There are people who have roots in this church who are all over the country," New Orleans resident Joan Rhodes told The Louisiana Weekly. "You shut that down and you really are putting a knife in the heart of the culture."

St. Augustine was founded in 1841 by slaves and free blacks and through the years has also welcomed Creole, Haitian, French, and Spanish worshippers. Today, one result of this unique cultural ministry has been a Sunday morning service belying "America's most segregated hour," as people of many backgrounds, races, and ages gather amidst the stained-glass saints and oil paintings of Christ to sway and clap under the leadership of one of the city's best-known clergymen, 76-year-old Fr. Jerome LeDoux. In his 15 years at St. Augustine, Fr. LeDoux has established the parish as a focal point for New Orleans culture, integrating jazz music and African drumming and dancing into the worship, blessing local jazz groups, and holding festivals and special services to commemorate musicians such as Louis Armstrong.

To the relief of many, the parishioners of St. Augustine have gained an 18-month grace period to prove the parish's viability. Whether or not St. Augustine is finally allowed to keep its autonomy, it is the determination of congregations like this that will form the Christian backbone of New Orleans's rebuilding.

Is the spiritual foundation of Europe collapsing? Catholic theologian George Weigel thinks so. In a recent interview about his book The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God, Weigel described visiting Paris and seeing the 40-story-high white marble cube, La Grande Arche de la Defense, completed in 1989 for the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. As he compared this colossal structure with the medieval Notre Dame Cathedral nearby, he wondered, "What culture would better create the moral foundations to sustain human rights and democracy: the culture that produced the starkly modernist, indeed rationalist, featureless, cube of the Great Arch of la Defense, or the culture that produced the gargoyles and bosses, the stained glass, and the carved stone—the 'holy unsameness'—of Notre Dame?"

However one might answer Weigel's provocative question, Europeans' growing ignorance of their historic Christian roots is having practical consequences. The "Christian I.Q." of ordinary citizens in the Netherlands has declined so sharply over the past few decades that the curators of one Dutch museum have had to shut its doors for a "Christian history overhaul." Built in the 16th century, the Catherine Convent in Utrecht was opened as a museum on June 9, 1979, with a mandate from Queen Juliana to tell the story of the nation's faith—both Protestant and Catholic. Today the convent-museum houses an unparalleled collection of artifacts, including illuminated manuscripts, ecclesiastical vestments, and paintings by Rembrandt and other famed Dutch artists.

But for several years, the permanent collection has been closed for a radical revamping. The convent's website explains: "Twenty-five years ago most people were still familiar with the most important stories from the Bible and with the associated days in the church calendar. Today, it can no longer be assumed that visitors share that knowledge, and this has consequences for the way in which the museum communicates its story to the public." The museum is scheduled to reopen on June 9, 2006.

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