This part of the Languedoc is green, rolling and quiet. A big city is one with 5,000 people. Most have 2,000 or fewer.

In many of the small towns scattered among the vineyards a visitor cannot expect to find a restaurant or even a bakery.

But every town with even a dozen buildings will have erected a Roman Catholic church a century or four ago.

Usually it is the most impressive building in the town, one with centuries of history, and one that dominates the town’s skyline with its tower and occasional pealing bells.

But few of these dozens and dozens of churches are open. None conducts regular services. The French are no longer a church-going people, and priests are hard to find.

The local church authorities have come up with a system that rotates Sunday mass among a dozen towns — and the ville where we live had never hosted a service while we were in town.

Until today.

Most of the local churches are a grand resource going unused. A large building, in the historical center of town … locked up 48 days out of 49.

The French approach to this seems to be to work around the stately building in the main square. From the outside, many of the churches look smallish, stained by centuries of weather and appear to be crumbling around the edges — which gives them a sort of creepy and sinister air. When, apparently, many of these churches are quite impressive, inside.

They threw open the doors to the local church today, a church which appears to be dedicated to the Catholic saint Perpetua … and what a fine and ornate interior it has — once we got past the splintering wood of the front door.

It is a building mostly of stone, but of brick in some of the arches, and brilliantly lit by half-a-dozen pieces of stained glass. At the eastern end of the building, behind the altar, are three tall and striking examples of stained glass, which were gloriously lit by morning sun.

One of them appears to show Perpetua, a young woman who was killed for her beliefs in the year 203, in the Roman province of Africa. She has a halo around her head, and Roman soldiers at her feet (perhaps astonished at her beatification?), and stands next to a bearded man, presumably one of those killed in the arena, along with Perpetua, for refusing to recant their beliefs.

The church has 15 rows of chairs, 10 narrow seats to a row, and a standing area in a balcony. I’d guess at least 130 people were there, most of them on the high side of age 65, but also a few children. It was an impressive turnout.

The alcoves to the left and right include statues of Mary with the infant Jesus as well as Perpetua. Worshipers had spent a euro each to light several dozen candles in front of the Perpetua statue.

Even the floor is impressive, with small tiles that give it almost a mosaic look.

We are told many members of the former local royals, the Carreon-Nizas family, are buried beneath the church, consecrated in 1703, but we could find no sign of this.

The service went off with quite a bit of help from lay people. One woman led the congregation in singing, another did a scripture reading and a third played a small organ. Ahead of communion, two young men — altar boys they would have been, in an earlier age — carried in the wine and bread.

During communion, a teen girl played “Ave Maria” on a flute and a man of about 70 helped distribute the wafers.

The priest was impressive to behold, in his vestments, a tall man in his late 40s with a fringe of hair and a no-nonsense style. He had a bit of an odd accent; we guessed he was Spanish.

Nizas presumably was chosen to host the service today because the feast day for Perpetua is tomorrow.

And as we exited, it struck me again that small-town France is wasting a resource — these large buildings, which are so much warmer inside than out, which could contain meetings of clubs and worshipers if only they could keep the places open more often.

I would guess that the churches, still owned by the Roman Catholic church, to my knowledge, are seen by Rome as investments that should not be left open to locals and the risk of defacement. While, meantime, attendance does not warrant more priests — even if they were to be found, and the towns do not have the budgets to oversee more secular uses of the churches as meeting places or even shelters.

I can see why the church would be resistant to do that, and maybe the people, too, who may prefer, in their midst, the old building that is nearly never used, leaving the rest of us to gaze at surprise at what is inside those old, sooty walls.