Gov. Romney was right about the empty churches of Europe

The Romney speech is getting pretty good reviews. Time will tell whether it will be enough to get him nominated or elected.

Yet, Gov. Romney said something that we should think about this weekend as we visit our places of worship:

""I'm not sure that we fully appreciate the profound implications of our tradition of religious liberty.

I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe.

They are so inspired ... so grand ... so empty.

Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer."

We have written about this before. Secularism is running high in Europe and its consequences are all over, such as pathetic birth rates.

George Wiegel wrote:

"To put the matter directly: Europe, and especially western Europe, is in the midst of a crisis of civilizational morale....the most dramatic manifestation of Europe's crisis of civilizational morale is the brute fact that Europe is depopulating itself.

Germany will lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany; and Spain's population will decline by almost one-quarter.

Europe is depopulating itself at a rate unseen since the Black Death of the fourteenth century." (The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God by George Weigel)

Beyond our politics, Gov. Romney's message is more than "Faith in America".

It should have been titled "Faith in the West".

I hope that our European friends listened because they need faith more than anyone else in the West!

Europe has many problems, such as an overvalued euro and a welfare state that can't be financed any longer.

Yet, the root problem are the empty cathedrals.

Europe will never rise again until it fills the cathedrals and rediscovers its Judeo-Christian heritage.