c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Great scholarship, like great art, makes one see and forces one to consider a reality as though for the first time.

Such scholarship is found in the new book”The Barbarian Conversion”by Richard Fletcher of England’s University of York. An elegant stylist and skilled storyteller, Fletcher’s account of the conversion of Europe from the 5th-15th centuries makes fascinating reading and challenges us to rethink the spread of Christianity.

There are four conclusions I draw from his book:

First, Fletcher suggests that, if anything, Thomas Cahill understates the same case in his best seller”How the Irish saved Civilization.”Not only did the Irish save civilization, it would not be unfair to say they created Europe.

I have to presume Fletcher is not Irish and has no reason to be prejudiced in their favor. Yet the Irish monks, wandering as far east as present-day Ukraine and as far south as Sicily spread not only the faith but the Roman heritage _ as they had reshaped it _ to the farthest corners of the unruly post-imperial world.

Fletcher says St. Patrick was the first missionary, the first bishop to set out to preach to those who weren’t Roman, the first Christian leader to think”barbarians”might be converted to Christianity. By the time St. Gregory the Great was sending missionaries to the Anglos and the Saxons in Britain (circa 600), the second generation of Irish missionaries had already worked their way through the remnants of Europe and St. Columbanus had founded the monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy.

My second conclusion is that many conversion efforts from 500 to 1100 were not violent. The Irish style was to settle somewhere, found a monastery, open a school, and charm the kings and the nobles into the faith.

Gregory’s style was one of accommodation, gradualism, and patience. The two styles complemented each other nicely. Rarely were people forced into Christianity at sword point, save when the Franks forced the Saxons (in what is now Germany) to become Christians. Martyrs died but infidels were rarely butchered. Some barbarian leaders asked for monks. Many people were already partially familiar with Christianity and welcomed the missionaries. Only when the”crusade”spirit and the military orders (like the Teutonic Knights) came to Europe after 1100 did the spirit of the Irish monks and Gregory fade.

Along the Baltic seacoast from northeast Germany to Latvia, the barbarians were given little choice _ accept the cross or die. Before that time, however, Christianity triumphed because it was attractive _ politically, socially, economically, culturally, and religiously.”Conversion”didn’t mean, as it does today, an intellectual decision at the end of a long and sometimes tortuous spiritual path. Rather, it meant the embrace of a new”rite,”a new set of customs and traditions, a new culture, along with permission to retain much of the older culture.

My third conclusion is that any comparison between the”Christian barbarians”of a millennium ago and us today is foolish. I have often argued against those who say secularization is driving religion out of existence and who believe the ordinary people of early Christendom were pagans with a Christian veneer.

That position is overstated. All one should say is that they were Christian in the context of their time and place, even if being a Christian meant only the ability to make the sign of the cross. We, too, are Christian in the context of our time and place. Our devout and highly intellectual faith is no better than theirs was; their simple and symbolic piety was not worse than ours.

Finally, as I read Fletcher’s book, I was impressed how attractive Christianity seemed to the barbarians _ at least until the 12th century. I wonder if it is as attractive today as it was to those to whom Patrick and Augustine of Canterbury and Columbanus preached 1,300 years ago.

Or are we still treating people the way the Teutonic Knights treated the Wends of northeast Germany and the Latvians? If we are, might it not be time to stop? Might we not need more of the charm of the Irish missionaries and the common sense of Gregory the Great?

DEA END GREELEY