france religion

L'EGLISE DE FRANCE : The church in a postreligious age - French catholicism

One of the reassurances of writing about French Catholicism is that nothing is ever new. You know what the categories are--ultramontane, gallican, liberal, integriste, laicite, anticlerical, etc.--they were virtually invented here, and they never change. I have been talking with French Catholics, often the same ones, for more than three decades, and they are fighting the same battles and saying (largely) the same things.

Until now. Now things are different, and it makes me miss the old days. I think the players miss the old days, too. The battle is still, as ever, an intra-French one (with Rome occasionally weighing in on one side), but these days it is mostly a losing struggle between Catholicism and what appears to all sides to be the relentlessly incoming tides of history.

But that's for later. Let's start at the latest beginning. Some months ago, a book appeared with the provocative title of Christianity Accused. The author was Rene Remond, a Catholic and France's leading historian of politics. Besides being a member of l'Academie francaise (touted as this literary nation's club of top forty writers), Remond is a familiar face on French television, especially during elections. He could easily have been named Minister of National Education in a moderate government. (Commonweal readers will recall him as the scholar named by Cardinal Decourtray of Lyons to head a panel of investigators into Paul Touvier's role during the Occupation.) Remond is, in sum, a product and a cherisher of institutions, an octogenarian known for his moderation and evenhandedness, a man whose serenity has probably not been ruffled since the war. Until now.

It was thus worthy of comment when a new book under his byline--a short work, written in Q&A format with an editor at a Catholic publishing house--betrayed genuine inner turmoil and chagrin over the fate of Christianity in his homeland. The book also makes a few "radical" suggestions to Rome--giving priests renewable contracts, granting formal clerical status to all "ministers," including women, etc.--and has been discussed everywhere, from the Communist daily l'Humanite to a front-page article in Le Monde, from train stations to airports. It has appeared on the bestseller list, an unusual tribute for a scholar-author, even in France.

The author spends much time complaining about familiar--one almost wants to say "good old-fashioned"--unofficial anticlericalism and generalized antireligious prejudice. He inveighs against Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's elimination of any reference to Christianity or Europe's Christian heritage in the European Union's recent human-rights declaration. (He might have mentioned how small-minded the Jospin government can be with certain Catholic institutions--military chaplaincies, for example--about budgeting and licenses.)

It also gauls (pun intended) the author that Catholic membership and practice are held to expectations that no one would apply to trade unions or political parties. He is certainly right; any of the latter would consider that it had died and gone to heaven if it could field once a year what the church draws for its weekend Masses. Even Le Monde, a newspaper founded by Catholic liberals, has evolved to a slight anticlericalism, capable of a catty headline, such as this one for World Youth Day ("JMJ," in its French acronym): "Illusions of the JMJ." Remond is right to ask if any other religion or movement had brought together a quarter of this crowd of over a million people, "Would [the headline writer] have considered speaking of illusion?"

So yes, French Catholicism is a minority, he agrees, but it is still the largest organized one in the Republic, and why is it the only one to be judged on its past not its present? The church's sensitive dealing with immigrants, its genuine openness to other religions, and the bishops' penitence for church inaction in the war have all gone un- or under-reported. Finally, Catholicism in France all too often sees the secular press reduce its entire doctrine and witness to the magisterium's stand on mores, moral individualism being the litmus test par excellence for one's "modernity" in France.

People other than the devout Remond agree the church is getting something of a raw deal these days. Thus the agnostic philosopher Marcel Gauchet wrote recently in a much-cited article, "the Catholic minority is the only persecuted one, culturally speaking, in contemporary France."

Familiar complaints aside, what is poignant in Remond's book, making it more of a cri de coeur than a brief, is its tone. He acknowledges that "the peaceful face of the Buddha fascinates people more than the face of Christ crucified," and that "Jesus appears to young people as a 'loser.'" What dis-quiets this public intellectual's soul, leaving him restless and sad, after a career that should make him fulfilled and serene, is the fate he senses in store for his church. While she may be insulated against ultimate destruction, she is by no means guaranteed survival as a significant public presence in the land of Joan of Arc and Therese of Lisieux.

Remond is not alone in his despond. I had a frank exchange with Monsignor Jean-Marie Di Falco, an assistant bishop for Paris, who admitted that what concerns him more than the admittedly revived anticlericalism or even anti-Christianity is the relentless march of secularization. "At least our enemies take us seriously and know who we are. But most people haven't the faintest clue or much interest what the church is, one way or the other," he said.

His lament brings me back to Marcel Gauchet, the most lucid philosopher-critic of religion to emerge on the French scene since Jean-Paul Sartre. At fifty-five, he is director of studies at the prestigious School of Advanced Studies in the Social Science. His path-breaking The Disenchantment of the World made a huge splash when it was published fifteen years ago; it has since been translated into many languages, including English.

A four-hundred-page study of nearly infinite complexity (Gauchet's prose can be impenetrable but it rewards the effort), the book limns the now classic view of Christianity as "the religion of the end of religion." Put with brutal economy, we might say that Christianity has done itself out of existence. It gave rise to a faith that turned against the self-subjugation that all religion classically is. The Christian God liberated people from the ancient world's omnipresent gods, but the growth in freedom led to the modern state of affairs wherein religion as the great refusal (of freedom) is seeing itself refused.

Adept at historical analysis, Gauchet also has a gimlet eye for the present. In his view, the high, arid, over-oxygenated plain onto which we moderns have debouched from our five-thousand-year trek through "religion" is at once painful, disequilibrating, and exhilarating. The "autonomous self" we now inhabit must be "constituted," for it is no longer "presented." Perhaps his most brilliant insight--if underappreciated and certainly unanswered (and not just in France)--is the distinction he draws between religion as personal faith and religion as the designing structure of society (the word "culture," after all, comes from "cult"). Gauchet's postmodern world is not one whit less postreligious for all that it may be--often is--"in continuity with religious man." The "new structure of social time" has, as one of its leading hallmarks, the fact that many people become religious. Paradoxically, a flight to conversion is a common response to history's structural "exit" from religion. "We can imagine the extreme of a society comprised entirely of believers, yet beyond the religious." It is a matter of choice. Some may elect a generalized spirituality, some a devout form of orthodox practice (which they may then "de-accession," and move on to another).

The foregoing is all by way of preface to Gauchet's new book which came out in 1998 and is indubitably part of the culture Remond is reacting against. Religion in Democracy delivers another sheaf of finely wrought examinations of individual religiosity in a late age. Gauchet is particularly strong in considering "the great spiritual event of the end of the century"--the collapse of various world-historical ideologies (notably communism, but also "the religion of art").

As for Catholicism, Gauchet examines what he calls a second "Copernican revolution" in religious consciousness. People now have (and are aware that they have) an insistent need for "sense," for meaning which has outstripped the capacity of any given religious institution or doctrine to deliver "truth" in a form plausible to postmodern culture. But then people don't ask for truth so much as they ask for meaning (pace the First Things crowd). Meanwhile religious doubt has come out of the closet and now stands fully acknowledged. (In Gauchet's language: "The authenticity of disquiet is stronger than the firmness of conviction as an exemplary form of belief, even in established churches.")

The average person (even the few remaining in the pew) has, in sum, internalized so much of the prevailing critique of religion, especially that of religion's academic experts, that he or she knows perfectly well it isn't "true." (A recent poll showed that 78 percent of French people aged eighteen and over do not believe "any one religion is the true one." Seventy-one percent agreed that "in our day, each must define his or her own religion independently of the churches.") But their insatiable thirst for a (social-religious) "identity" keeps them going to Mass. "Believing without belonging," a phrase made famous by the British sociologist of religion, Grace Davie, has given way across the Channel to "belonging without believing."

Finally, Gauchet examines the church's return to the stage in its new role of aggrieved, declining star. "Religion's decline," he writes, is temporarily making it "popular" again, as a topic of news, entertainment, and debate. An aspect of both its decline and its popularity is the proliferating epiphenomenon of religion's popularity as circus. World Youth Day in Paris, in 1997, the debate provoked by l'Humanite's "Jesus" issue, the high ratings of a television series on "Christ," and the popularity of religion as an academic field are all good examples.

Incredibly, Gauchet's new book, like his earlier one, ends up pleasing (or at least not dismaying) most Christians. It is an unquestionably fascinating point of this story that so few, if any, attack Gauchet by name. Au contraire, the philosopher is widely appreciated for a "generous" analysis of religion that readily grants Christianity the status of fons et origo of Western society, for showing how this religion suffuses contemporary social language, values, and institutions. Such an attitude is a welcome relief in a France where brutal and ignorant forms of anticlericalism still flourish. Gauchet's occasional readiness to note or applaud the church's efforts on behalf of the poor or the marginal, or to speak out on Catholicism's behalf when it is belittled, has all but endeared him to individual Christians, none of whom--even his intellectual critics (here or in the States, I might add)--has come close to offering a full-dress refutation of his views.

This is more so in the case of Gauchet's new book because French Catholics are delighted by the deadly accuracy Gauchet brings to examining the decline of the very laiciste (anticlericalist) culture which has traditionally made life hard for Catholics. Catholicism and its archenemy (French Republicanism) are both going the way of the small street cafe in France, but their advocates so hate each other that they take pleasure in one another's pending demise.

The historical state of affairs limned by Gauchet is further attested to by the church's truly wretched financial state (the average French diocese makes do with a fraction of what is available to its American counterpart) as well as the relentless attrition in the rates of even the "seasonal conformities" (baptism, marriage, funeral) that were thought to unchangingly characterize French Catholics' participation in their faith. The French church's response to this crisis has been to stage a generalized repli on Rome and tradition--a "falling back" led mainly by the extraordinary archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. (See my "The Force of Cardinal Lustiger," Commonweal, April 25, 1986.) Lustiger remains controversial here but has, in a very forceful and long--twenty-year--episcopate more or less imposed his leadership on the entire French church. No surprise this. Historically, rallying to the papacy kept the eglise de France alive in the Revolution when the guillotine set achoppin', and arguably kept it stronger than it might otherwise have been throughout the long nineteenth century, in the teeth of semi-official anticlericalism.

This "strategy"--if that term be adequate to capture something as debated, nuanced, semiconscious, and reflexive as the public position(s) of an institution of 95 dioceses and 19,462 parishes--was recently dubbed "Catholic neoclassicism" by the theologian Henri Bourgeois, writing in Etudes, France's respected Jesuit review. Bourgeois examines the contrast--which, despite his bland prose, soon emerges as a deep dichotomy--between old-fashioned ("classical") French Catholicism and the new melange ("neoclassical") imported from Spain, Italy, and the Vatican. The former is liberal, intellectual, Gallican; it is into social action and intellectual debate. The latter is mystical, fideistic, evangelical, and Roman, into pilgrimage, procession, chant, and punctilious (often Latin) liturgy.

The former counts among its adepts most of the remaining intellectual forces of the French Catholic church: Remond himself; Paul Valadier, the leading Jesuit philosopher; Jean-Louis Schlegel, the active Catholic editor (and a former Jesuit) at the prestigious French publishing house of Seuil; Jean-Francois Six, a writer and leader in the Mission de France (the French worker-priest movement, launched to great huzzahs in the 1950s, but now mal vu by church authority here and in Rome); and a handful of the older diocesan bishops who are without national influence and rather like to keep it that way. These people amount to a small, but proud remnant of the glory days of French intellectual Catholicism when Mauriac, de Lubac, Maritain, Congar, Bernanos, and many others flourished on the public scene. Still, traditional ("classical") Catholicism certainly accounts for a significantly larger percentage of Catholics-in-the-pews than does the new brand of neoclassicism.

The latter, however, are younger and have a strong edge with their local bishop, with Rome, and with the media looking for "new" stories. They have in Lustiger a phenomenon of a leader of whom they are terrifically proud (as are most of the "classicals," for that matter) and are staunchly backed in their daily struggle to be the church in France by the Vatican, reinforced by frequent papal visits (there are very few nations that John Paul II has visited more often). They do, in fact, count some intellectual lights among them, including France's leading younger philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion, of the Sorbonne and the University of Chicago. But the intellectuals around Lustiger curiously do not speak out as public Catholics, the way the liberals noted above do, and so do not play the role they might otherwise.

"The new bet on mysticism, fideism, and orthodoxy" (Jean-Francois Six's phrase) is not one that Marcel Gauchet would make. In a frank interview (of the sort I doubt he would give to the French press), Gauchet noted that the policy of "tightening the ranks" of a dwindling phalanx of orthodoxy will "only bring quicker eradication." He urges the bishops instead to "go with the flow" of Vatican II--that is, put a damper on proclaiming kerygma (a la Cardinal Ratzinger) while reaching out beyond the church's regular membership, engaging in community-building with immigrants of all (but not usually Catholic) faiths, lobbying more effectively for political clout, as do other social groups, taking a hand at the "ritualizing of important life moments"--funerals without formal Masses, devising rituals for nonbelievers or for ex-, nonpracticing, or angry Catholics.

Gauchet advocates a greatly increased use of the laity, but particularly of women, in all church ministries. In sum, he feels, were the French Catholic church "to play a psychologically and socially sensitive role in French life," were it to "be catholic with a small c," then on his telling there would be no "reason for absolute pessimism." The latter is the case, says Gauchet, in England, where the Established Church may as well pack in its crosiers and call it a day.

The foregoing suggestions would be labeled suicidal or insane by the "neoclassicals" (and probably a few "classicals" as well), if any of them were aware. But even Gauchet the theoretician is not understood. When one hears the cardinal-archbishop of Vienna suggest, from the pulpit of Notre Dame, that large attendance at the (British) National Gallery's exposition on "Seeing the Saviour" offers serious argument against "the disenchantment of the world," or when a French diocesan bishop writes a book inveighing against (among much else) the practice of Halloween--not because it is an American importation, but because it is pagan and diabolic--then one does wonder if they "get" what Gauchet is saying.

But there are Catholics who have read their Gauchet and "got" him. Jean-Louis Schlegel, for instance, an opponent of neoclassicism and a staunch believer in French Catholicism's return to a public intellectual stance, concluded an influential article with words hauntingly reminiscent of both Gauchet the theoretician and the counselor: "the conviction of having a sense of, or being in, 'Truth' has never preserved anyone from meaninglessness. It is only in accepting the weakness of belief itself, in institutions without strength, that European Catholics will regain the possibility and the desire to express themselves--and perhaps [regain] their credibility, too."

Protestant Jean-Paul Willaime, a prominent sociologist, argues in the final chapter of Christianity's Great Inventions (1999, edited by Rene Remond, of course) that Catholicism should become "otherly religious"--that is, in addition to thoroughly declericalizing itself and demythologizing its doctrines, it must strive to "permit men of the third millennium to live, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to say, 'without God'" while yet living "before God and with God." These are remarkable statements for sincere Christians to make, and while some might say they are throwing out the babies with the holy water, or concocting the religious equivalent of marriage without sex, love, or commitment, yet no one could deny that they are views which resonate to the times.

Cardinal Henri de Lubac, S.J.--a most orthodox thinker (except when he was deemed not)--found time and reason during the long German Occupation of France to ponder an even greater atheist thinker than Marcel Gauchet--indeed a true "antitheist": Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the writer who out-did Karl Marx in influence as a "father" of French socialism. The business-like and academic Gauchet displays none of Proudhon's anger and unrelenting, tormented fascination with Christianity (in that, Proudhon was truly a nineteenth-century atheist). The young de Lubac, for his part, was fascinated by Proudhon's torment and fascination. The future cardinal isolates one observation of Proudhon's:

   A religion's hour has come when a troubled conscience puts to itself the
   question, not whether that religion is true: doubts about dogma are not
   sufficient for the downfall of a religion; nor whether it needs to be
   reformed: reforms in matters of faith are proof of religious vitality; but
   whether, that religion, so long reputed to be the protector and mainstay of
   [society's] morals, is equal to its task...

Proudhon, in short, is agreeing with Gauchet in the latter's judgment that a religion departs from the historical scene when it can no longer provide a systematic social structure to inculturate values. And de Lubac? He agrees that this is indeed the point. "That objection," and it alone, writes the future cardinal--not without some fear and trembling, one suspects--"is the only one, it seems to me, which is worth anything. It is the only one which gets to the bottom of things." One can only wonder what he would have to say today.

Meanwhile, in the trenches, the church's core of "classical" and "neoclassical" believers--this vibrant and energetic, if tiny, minority of around 2 million people ("but that's still a lot," one can almost hear Professor Remond remind us)--sticks to its last. They are led by bishops, most of whom know their Gauchet but who don't let that stop them. "Pardonnez-moi, monsieur, mais je ne suis pas desenchante," Monsignor Di Falco told me, while granting in the next breath that yes, perhaps Gauchet was right about "the times." Di Falco and others here are well aware that "the tides of history" may be, probably are, against them; they know about doubt within themselves and within their flocks, as about vast and suspicious indifference without; they know, in a word, about postmodernism.

Yet they persist, and they constitute "a real Christianity, not just the vast sociological phenomenon of former times." Those are the words of the great historian, Jean-Marie Mayeur, professor at the Sorbonne. Though himself a liberal ("classical") Catholic, he is yet proud of Lustiger, as he is proud of John Paul II. He is proud to be an active member of a "small minority" that knows and lives its faith better than did the millions in the era when the church (and the monarchy) ran the show.

One could close with Wallace Stevens's line, "The final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction, there being none other," but to do so would not be fair to the practicing minority. So let economist and philosopher Joseph Schumpeter put a similar thought with more prosaic, but more applicable, eloquence, "To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian."

Eh bien, pourquoi pas?

Steven Englund, an occasional contributor to Commonweal, lives in Paris where he is writing a biography of Napoleon.

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