(Besides wondering exactly what it was - but that's another column. Or article. Or book.)

As a student of history, culture and religion, I spend a lot of time puzzling over that a lot anyway, and the few days I recently spent in Montreal gave me even more food for thought.

St. Joseph’s Oratory looms over Montreal, an astonishing testimony both to the power of prayer and to the holiness of Blessed Andre Bessette. Two million pilgrims go to the Oratory every year, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not the beauty of the basilica itself, which is unfortunately infected with that late 50’s-early 60’s mod, looming starkness. It’s the spiritual richness of the place which you can sense everywhere from the banks of flickering candles and rows of now unnecessary crutches in the Votive Chapel, too, most strikingly, the tiny room that Blessed Andre lived in on top of the original small wooden chapel that sits on the side of the hill.

More churches followed, each more ornate than the last, all filled with a variety of gorgeous paintings, statues of stained glass, each one finding imaginative ways to commemorate holy men and women, especially those associated with the Church in Canada.

St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, the mother of education in Quebec, established the Chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. The small church sits on the harbor, a statue of Mary on top facing the river, blessing outgoing seafarers and welcoming them home. Model ships hang throughout the interior of the church, gifts of grateful sailors.

The Basilica of Notre Dame, in the heart of old Montreal, is huge and magnificent, brilliant blues meeting one’s eye in every direction, a fascinating pulpit, relics of all of the Canadian martyrs in reliquaries under the altar, and not an undecorated square inch of wall or ceiling.

It’s the same for the other churches we visited: the Cathedral, called Mary, Queen of the World; St. Patrick’s, established as a parish for Irish immigrants, and the Gesu, the Jesuit parish. They differ ever so slightly in style – the Cathedral is like Notre Dame – a mixture of spirituality with a heavy dose of obvious French irritation with British dominion thrown in, St. Patrick’s is quite gothic, and the Gesu more Italian, with tromp d’oeil paintings covering the ceilings – but the message is the same: Look what God has done.

But then you walk out the church doors, blinking in the welcome sunshine, shoving the guides and postcards in your bag, taking one final picture out front, and head for the shops.

And you have to wonder, so what?

At a Borders-type of store called Indigo in downtown Montreal, we found the religion section. Only it wasn’t called religion. It was called, “Opinions and Beliefs.”

Books about Christianity took up perhaps twenty percent of the shelf space, the rest ceded to Eastern religions, New Age and astrology. This morning, I read that Quebec’s abortion rate is the highest in Canada.

In March, the Montreal cathedral was vandalized by radical feminists who tossed sanitary napkins, condoms and underwear around the sanctuary. They painted “Neither God Nor Master” on the altar and “Religion, a Trap for Fools” on an exterior pillar.

(For an article on the incident, go here and scroll down to the bottom.)

The vandals were charged only with “unlawful assembly.” Charges of hate crimes were ruled out immediately. The local Montreal newspaper reported the vandalism on page C9, among the adults-only classified ads. The powers that be, undoubtedly the distant progeny of the church-builders, could not care any less.

So, I wonder how this happens. We mean well. We think that the a culture inundated with expressions of faith and ordered like the Kingdom of Heaven on earth must be better than a secular one, but then we are faced, almost every time, with the seemingly inevitable decline that results from such attempts, symbolized by the dismaying fact that religious indifference reaches its height in the very shadow of the Vatican itself.

The question intrigues me, and I’ve not yet settled on an answer, but I think I’ve figured out where to start looking at least: the least physically beautiful church of all, but the place where souls seemed to come most alive in Montreal, and a place rooted in the life of a man whose prime concern was not the ordering of society or the creation of a culture, but was, in fact, about nothing more or less than the love of God for each yearning soul.