L'EGLISE DE FRANCE: Being Catholic in the Gallic way
Englund, Steven
L'\'EGLISE DE FRANCE The church in a postreligious age Steven Englund One of the reassurances of writing about French Catholicism is that nothing is ever new. You know what the categories...
...It is a matter of choice...
...It has appeared on the bestseller list, an unusual tribute for a scholar-author, even in France...
...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 former is liberal, intellectual, Gallican...
...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...
...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 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...
...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...
...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...
...and a handful of the older diocesan bishops who are without national influence and rather like to keep it that way...
...Seventy-one percent agreed that "in our day, each must define his or her own religion independently of the churches...
...The latter is mystical, fideistic, evangelical, and Roman, into pilgrimage, procession, chant, and punctilious (often Latin) liturgy...
...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...
...World Youth Day in Paris, in 1997, the debate provoked by I'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...
...Still, traditional ("classical") Catholicism certainly accounts for a significantly larger percentage of Catholics-in-the-pews than does the new brand of neoclassicism...
...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...
...An aspect of both its decline and its popularity is the proliferating epiphenomenon of religion's popularity as circus...
...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...
...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 antiChristianity is the relentless march of secularization...
...Gauchef 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...
...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 14 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...
...II Incredibly, Gauchet's new book, like his earlier one, ends up pleasing (or at least not dismaying) most Christians...
...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...
...Paradoxically, a flight to conversion is a common response to history's structural "exit" from religion...
...People other than the devout Remond agree the church is getting something of a raw deal these days...
...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...
...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...
...But even Gauchet the theoretician is not understood...
...The author was Ren£ Remond, a Catholic and France's leading historian of politics...
...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 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...
...The young de Lubac, for his part, was fascinated by Proudhon's torment and fascination...
...Gauchet advocates a greatly increased use of the laity, but particularly of women, in all church ministries...
...I think the players miss the old days, too...
...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...
...Put with brutal economy, we might say that Christianity has done itself out of existence...
...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 know about doubt within themselves and within their flocks, as about vast and suspicious indifference without...
...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...
...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...
...He agrees that this is indeed the point...
...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...
...Even Le Monde, a newspaper founded by Catholic liberals, has evolved to a slight antidericalism, capable of a catty headline, such as this one for World Youth Day ("JMJ," in its French acronym): "Illusions of the JMJ...
...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 humanrights declaration...
...He could easily have been named Minister of National Education in a moderate government...
...The "new structure of social time" has, as one of its leading hallmarks, the fact that many people become religious...
...But most people haven't the faintest clue or much interest what the church is, one way or the other," he said...
...Gauchet's postmodern world is not one whit less postreligious for all that it may be—often is—"in continuity with religious man...
...But then people don't ask for truth so much as they ask for meaning (pace the First Things crowd...
...As for Catholicism, Gauchet examines what he calls a second "Copernican revolution" in religious consciousness...
...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...
...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...
...A recent poll showed that 78 percent of French people aged eighteen and over do not believe "any one religion is the true one...
...At least our enemies take us seriously and know who we are...
...Finally, Gauchet examines the church's return to the stage in its new role of aggrieved, declining star...
...Now things are different, and it makes me miss the old days...
...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...
...He is certainly right...
...Remond is not alone in his despond...
...His path-breaking The Disenchantment of the World made a huge splash when it was published fifteen years ago...
...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...
...they know, in a word, about postmodernism...
...Paul Valadier, the leading Jesuit philosopher...
...It gave rise to a faith that turned against the self-subjugation that all religion classically is...
...We can imagine the extreme of a society comprised entirely of believers, yet beyond the religious...
...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...
...Di Falco and others here are well aware that "the tides of history" may be, probably are, against them...
...Thus the agnostic philosopher Marcel Gauchet wrote recently in a muchcited article, "the Catholic minority is the only persecuted one, culturally speaking, in contemporary France...
...But thaf s for later...
...Religion in Democracy delivers another sheaf of finely wrought examinations of individual religiosity in a late age...
...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...
...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 VHumanite to a front-page article in Le Monde, from train stations to airports...
...Until now...
...At fifty-five, he is director of studies at the prestigious School of Advanced Studies in the Social Science...
...Religion's decline," he writes, is temporarily making it "popular" again, as a topic of news, entertainment, and debate...
...JeanLouis Schlegel, the active Catholic editor (and a former Jesuit) at the prestigious French publishing house of Seuil...
...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...
...it is into social action and intellectual debate...
...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...
...One can only wonder what he would have to say today...
...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...
...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 Steven Englund, an occasional contributor to Commonweal, lives in Paris where he is writing a biography of Napoleon...
...Such an attitude is a welcome relief in a France where brutal and ignorant forms of anticlericalism still flourish...
...But their insatiable thirst for a (social-religious) "identity" keeps them going to Mass...
...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...
...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...
...nor whether it needs to be reformed: reforms in matters of faith are proof of religious vitality...
...Let's start at the latest beginning...
...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...
...The "autonomous self" we now inhabit must be "constituted," for it is no longer "presented...
...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...
...Some months ago, a book appeared with the provocative title of Christianity Accused...
...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 disquiets 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...
...See my "The Force of Cardinal Lustiger," Commonweal, April 25,1986...
...Yet they persist, and they constitute "a real Christianity, not just the vast sociological phenomenon of former times...
...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...
...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...
...It is the only one which gets to the bottom of things...
...The author spends much time complaining about familiar—one almost wants to say "good oldfashioned"—unofficial antidericalism and generalized antireligious prejudice...
...Finally, Catholicism in France all too often sees the secular press reduce its entire doctrine and witness to the magisII terium's stand on mores, moral individualism being the litmus test par excellence for one's "modernity" in France...
...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...
...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...
...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 might have mentioned how small-minded the Jospin government can be with certain Catholic institutions—military chaplaincies, for example—about budgeting and licenses...
...You know what the categories are—ultramontane, gallican, liberal, integriste, laicite, anticlerical, etc.—they were virtually invented here, and they never change...
...Those are the words of the great historian, Jean-Marie Mayeur, professor at the Sorbonne...
...Adept at historical analysis, Gauchet also has a gimlet eye for the present...
...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...
...Though himself a liberal ("classical") Catholic, he is yet proud of Lustiger, as he is proud of John Paul II...
...16...
...No surprise this...
...Au contmire, the philosopher is widely appreciated for a "generous" analysis of religion that readily grants Christianity the status of fans el origo of Western society, for showing how this religion suffuses contemporary social language, values, and institutions...
...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...
...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...
...Eh bien, pourquoi pas...
...Pardonnez-moi, monsieur, mais je ne suis pas desenchante," Monsignor Di Fako told me, while granting in the next breath that yes, perhaps Gauchet was right about "the times...
...The new bet on mysticism, fideism, and orthodoxy" (JeanFrangois Six's phrase) is not one that Marcel Gauchet would make...
...Until now...
...The latter, however, are younger and have a strong edge with their local bishop, with Rome, and with the media looking for "new" stories...
...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...
...They are led by bishops, most of whom know their Gauchet but who don't let that stop them...
...And de Lubac...
...Jean-Francpis 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...
...Some may elect a generalized spirituality, some a devout form of orthodox practice (which they may then "de-accession," and move on to another...
...it has since been translated into many languages, including English...
...but whether, that religion, so long reputed to be the protector and mainstay of [society's] morals, is equal to its task...
...It is an unquestionably fascinating point of this story that so few, if any, attack Gauchet by name...
...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...
...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...
...Besides being a member of I'Academie frangaise (touted as this literary nation's club of top forty writers), Remond is a familiar face on French television, especially during elections...
...But there are Catholics who have read their Gauchet and "got" him...
...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...
...Meanwhile religious doubt has come out of the closet and now stands fully acknowledged...
...The former counts among its adepts most of the remaining intellectual forces of the French Catholic church: Remond himself...
...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...
...homeland...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Familiar complaints aside, what is poignant in Remond's book, making it more of a cri de coeur than a brief, is its tone...
...Jean-Louis Schlegel, for instance, an opponent of neoelassicism 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...
...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...
...Lustiger remains controversial here but has, in a very forceful and long—twentyyear—episcopate more or less imposed his leadership on the entire French church...
Vol. 128 • May 2001 • No. 10
