![\"576px-StPeter_Regensburg\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/455\/2013\/06\/576px-stpeter_regensburg.jpg\")
<\/a>Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u2019s The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe\u00a0<\/em>is a real treat. \u00a0There\u2019s nothing like seeing the familiar, in this case Catholicism, from an eccentric standpoint. \u00a0It\u2019s a roller-coaster ride where the memoirist \u00a0simultaneously plays the role of Catholic insider and outsider. \u00a0T\u00f3ib\u00edn frequently rubs me the wrong way with his pronouncements about Polish Catholicism (which I partially registered here<\/a>).<\/p>\n His speculation that John Paul II would not even know how to fathom the profound depths of Bultmannian demythologization in the watered-down secondhand version T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u00a0got from the first-rate second-rate<\/a> theologian Norbert Brox is (hopefully) unintentionally comical. \u00a0Note the Dowdish<\/a> bathos (again, comedy?) when he obliquely references Hamlet<\/em> in \u00a0his evaluation of Brox vs. Wojtyla:<\/p>\n \u201cIt struck me that these new ideas [of gnostic provenance, only about 1900 years older than\u00a0Bultmann<\/a>\u00a0(my own interjection)] were being fostered once more in the fertility of the German mind, and were so far from what is dreamed of in John Paul II\u2019s philosophy that he probably would not know how to counteract them.\u201d<\/p>\n These revelations are usually followed in the memoir by serious (wink, wink, nudge, nudge<\/a>) reluctance to submit to Catholic discipline and mysteriously combined with mind-numbingly uncritical acceptance of Primal Scream <\/a>therapy along with a heavy dose of ketamine.<\/p>\n I\u2019m having too much fun here, but he does get serious and insightful:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Protestants one, Catholics nil,\u2019 I said to myself as I went to midnight Mass the following evening in the Catholic cathedral in Regensburg. But then I thought about it: they won on music and sheer, solemn style, and their churches were charming and pretty and neat. But their churches were small. Our Catholic cathedral in Regensburg, on the other hand, was a big soaring, shadowy Gothic structure, by far the most imposing building in the city. \u00a0They had Bach; we had buttressing<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n [Video courtesy of Fr. Joseph Koczera, SJ who runs a respectable and noteworthy blog \u201cThe City and the World.\u201d \u00a0Give it a spin here<\/a>.]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n