The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589-1989
Englund, Steven
ments to giving this complex story its proper context. No less important are Bartoszewski's formidable skills of analysis. For anyone interested in understanding contemporary...
...With those words, Father Jacques Jallet greets a delighted "Commons," as the Third Estate's representatives have come to be called...
...This is an immensely satisfying book...
...Yet are they...
...Another major theme that emerges clearly from Ravitch's fine study is the French episcopacy's systematic choice of other stars to steer by than Lamennais or Sangnier...
...One would be hardpressed to isolate a more critical moment in the launching of what presently came to be called the French Revolution...
...Led by the irrepressible and brilliant archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Made Lustiger, a growing number of French bishops and clergy are lashing out against and suppressing many of the forms of Catholic action (clerical and lay) associated with Vatican II--modalities which they consider to be submissive, weak, complaisant...
...Three Poidevin priest-deputies of the First Estate decide to accept the standing invitation of the Third Estate for the orders to unite...
...His article "Solidarity Endures a Crisis of Conscience," appeared in the September 28, 1990 Commonweal...
...On almost any telling, but surely on this author's, the evidence leaves one doubtful...
...Hence, when I received Faith's Freedom, I approached it with considerable expectations...
...As if that were not merit enough, here, in addition, is a scholar and believer who writes with verve and conviction...
...For anyone interested in understanding contemporary Jewish-Catholic relations, this is a singularly important book...
...One gradually discerns a passionate and personal meditation underlying and guiding this work, which is dedicated "in loving memory" of the author's young son...
...I / CONSTANT CACOPHONY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE FRENCH NATION, 1589-1989 Norman Ravitch Routledge, $54.95, 214 pp...
...As one would expect, he explores the issue of prayer and its possibility and modes for those not engaged in the professedly "contemplative life...
...A converted Jew with a Sorbonne (secular) education, he makes no effort to disguise the fact that he is standing in for the pope, whom he happily compares to Gregory VII...
...So one does not know where it will all lead, but one certainly hopes that Professor Ravitch will keep watching...
...Happily, it does not disappoint...
...Looking back, it is hard to see how priests like Jallet could have long deceived themselves about Mirabeau, et al., but what is even more curious is that their tendency to self-delusion has been transmitted to posterity...
...It satisfies, first, because it is so solidly based upon the church's written "constitution": the Scriptures of the New Testament...
...We come, Messieurs, preceded by the torch of reason, moved by love of the commonweal, to take our places at the side of our fellow citizens, of our brothers...
...Jallet, above), and to walk hand in hand with the stridently sovereign "National" Assembly...
...Thus a two-fold exegesis is required: an exegesis of the scriptural text, but also an exegesis of the contemporary experience of faith...
...It would be hard to see how even a liberal or radical curg-patriote like Jallet could have effected a harmony between the Third (or Fourth) Republic and the church...
...The Catholic Church and the French Nation is a wonderful instance of balanced and complete, yet at the same time highly interpretive, history...
...but, more remarkable still, one who reads the Scriptures with a keen sense of their faith perspective and concern which continues to nurture the life of discipleship...
...In subsequent days, the priests' action precipitates a hemorrhage of defections among representatives of the clergy and the nobility (the First and Second Estates), thus contributing signally to justifying the Third in its breathtaking pretension to reconstitute itself as the National Assembly of France...
...Yet as Ravitch is surely aware, recent years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful reaction against conciliar liberalism...
...Ravitch is a Catholic of Mennaisian and Silloniste (that is to say, Commonweal) sympathies, but with no illusions about the possibility of a longterm alliance between the French Revolution and the church...
...My one regret is that the author closes his work with the supposed liberal transformation of French Catholicism (or at least of the clergy)--as if the story ended with the early Fifth Republic...
...The "lay" character of Johnson's vision of spirituality is manifest in the themes of part 2 of the book: "Connecting...
...Robert P. Imbelli few y e a r s ago I chanced upon Luke Johnson's wonderfully helpful book, The Writings of the New Testament...
...Hence the quest for a spirituality both classic and contemporary, ever ancient and ever new...
...The antinomy between church and revolution goes to the very core in France...
...Can Christians believe their Saviour that the power of evil will not triumph over the church," he asks, "or should they seek to buttress the church by allying it with conservative forces and institutions...
...Steven Englund ersailles, June 13, 1789, a choice moment in the annals of irony...
...And yet we now know that scores of "curg-patriotes" were from the outset having to suppress second thoughts and inner doubts as they gaped into the abyss separating their own true motivations from those of their secular revolutionary compatriots...
...One can infer from Ravitch's analysis that leopards and spots may finally be separated...
...He shows himself in that work to be not only a fine student of the New Testament...
...If the French view is finally changing (and it is), this is largely thanks to the work of English and American scholars such as Maurice Hutt, Timothy Tackett, and now Norman Ravitch...
...Key to his understanding is the New Testament concept of teleios: faith come to mature measure in a person...
...On the other hand, Ravitch might have posed more directly than he does the question: Would it have made any difference if the church had followed a Lamennais or a Sangnier...
...The French episcopacy, as Ravitch remorselessly documents, invariably elected the conservative strategy, with the result that time and again, culminating with Vichy, it had to abandon embarrassing positions and alignments that only sullied the church and traduced the faith...
...442: Commonweal clericalism...
...Ravitch's is thus a depressingly cyclical chronicle--until, that is, the 1960s and '70s, when the French church, profoundly affected by the catastrophe of Vichy and by the changes wrought by Vatican Council II, shed its traditional reflexes at roughly the same time that the repubhc shed its antiREVIEWERS MARK O'CONNOR is assistant director of the honors program at Boston College...
...ROBERT E IMBELLI, a priest o f the Archdiocese of New York, is director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College...
...It satisfies, further, because it recognizes that for Scripture to live it must be heard and received anew in the living experience of the church...
...But he ranges well beyond this expected theme to take up nettlesome, yet crucial, issues of power and possessions, of anger and sexuality, of evil and suffering...
...To that end, they were prepared to speak a very untridentine language of "enlightened" reason and patriotism (cf...
...French historians of the revolution generally recoil at postulating any prophetic and ineluctable clash ab initio between Catholicism and revolution...
...From Aulard to Lefebvre to Plongeron they have strained to see the growing schism as contingent, unnecessary, deplorable...
...Having, in the post-Vatican II era, aban12 July 1991:443...
...Five weeks of fractious infighting have brought the French Estates-General to a stalemate...
...Moreover, its intentional objective is to read those Scriptures "whole": allowing the many voices of the New Testament canon to be heard...
...Rather, he speaks of "misunderstanding" at the beginning of the Estates-General (1789) that perpetuated itself through the Year II--i.e., till 1794, when even the rump "national" church (the constitutional church) was destroyed by the very (revolutionary) forces that brought it into existence...
...It satisfies, finally, because an "argument" is mounted which is both personal and rigorous: one that seeks to outline a genuinely "lay" spirituality to be lived not in the monastery, but in modernity with its peculiar promise and peril...
...On one side stood tridentine clerical reformers, eager to purify the Eglise de France and return it to the full glory of baroque Catholicism...
...Lustiger delights in speaking delphically and is therefore hard to slot...
...Another characteristic feature of Johnson's approach is his conviction that spirituality is faith "seeking depth and maturity...
...Thus there is a comprehensiveness to Johnson's vision of life in the Spirit--all too rare in discussions of spirituality which frequently roam between the rarefied and the sentimentalized...
...STEVEN ENGLUND is a freelance writer who specializes in French history and culture...
...They "cross over...
...He has lived and worked in Poland...
...On the other side stood deeply secular revolutionaries who intended not only to finish the absolutist monarchy's policy of perfecting state-control of the French church but also to reduce dramatically Catholicism's role in the life of society...
...FJ FAITH SEEKING DEPTH FAITH'S FREEDOM Luke T. Johnson Fortress Press, $8.95, 188 pp...
...I put that euphemistically, which is not this author's style...
Vol. 118 • July 1991 • No. 13
