The Bumpy Ride of the 20th-Century French Church

As some of you must already be aware, the country I come from used to boast she was “the eldest daughter of the Church,” a nation born on Christmas Day of the year 499, when King Clovis was baptized with several thousand of his axe-wielding warriors. This gave him the moral strength to take control of most of the land which the Romans called Gaul and was later renamed France, since he was the chieftain of a tribe, known as the Franks, of invaders from central Europe (now Germany).

France then became a major Christian nation, and has produced an impressive number of saints, from Rémi (the bishop who converted and anointed Clovis) to theologians like Bernard of Clairvaux and national heroes such as King Louis IX and Joan of Arc, to Jean-Marie Vianney of Ars (the model of all pastors) and countless mystics, missionaries, martyrs, and servants of the poor.

And yet, during the French Revolution, which started exactly thirteen years and ten days after the American Declaration of Independence, the Church was nationalized, then persecuted. Priests and nuns were hunted and guillotined. The faithful who tried to resist in Vendée were mass-slaughtered in a civil war. Napoléon Bonaparte, the tyrant who put an end to the chaos, like Oliver Cromwell after the English Civil War, reestablished Catholicism as theoretically “the religion of the majority of the French,” and practically as a tool to restore and maintain social order, while abducting the pope when the latter was not compliant enough. After his fall in 1815, the Church enjoyed a revival during the nineteenth century. But she was eventually discredited for supporting the successive monarchic regimes, which were overthrown by popular uprisings in 1830, 1848, and 1870.

The Republic that took shape laboriously at the end of the nineteenth century grew more and more openly anticlerical, and French Catholics had the worst of it culturally, and not only politically. Most of them did not follow Pope Leo XIII who advised them to accept a Republic, and they were on the wrong side in the Dreyfus Affair (a Jewish army captain, unjustly accused of spying for the Germans). The Napoleonic compromise was unilaterally abolished by left-leaning and liberal politicians with the 1905 separation between State and Church, after some 30,000 religious had been driven into exile. Catholics were also and more decisively overwhelmed in the ongoing cultural war, as atheistic rationalism and materialistic positivism clearly gained the upper hand in the academic and business fields, under the flags of Progress and Modernity, while Christian art produced nothing more than treacly nostalgic copies of medieval masterpieces.

To make things worse, the Church was internally affected by Modernism, especially in the realm of exegesis, when scientific studies challenged both the authenticity of biblical texts and their traditional interpretation. Several priests had to be defrocked, the most famous of whom was Alfred Loisy, who taught at the Catholic University of Paris and said that “while Christ had promised the Kingdom of God, all that his disciples got was nothing better than the petty, worldly Church.” Pope Pius X had to condemn Modernism in his encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis of 1907. The result was that Catholicism retreated into the fortresses it still controlled.

And it survived there. First, because faith was deeply rooted in still predominantly rural France, and the clergy proved to be staunchly patriotic during the First World War, which allowed an empirical reconciliation in the 1920s. And secondly, thanks to a number of writers and artists, from Verlaine (1844-1896), Bloy (1846-1917), and Huysmans (1848-1907) to Claudel (1868-1955), Péguy (1873-1914), and Maritain (1882-1973), and later to Mauriac (1885-1970), Bernanos (1888-1948), Mounier (1905-1950), and Simone Weil (1909-1943), many of whom were energetic, uncompromising converts. They proved that fiercely orthodox, obedient faith was still relevant, creative, and fruitful.

Yet this was but the tip of an iceberg—I mean there were more profound, more radical, internal renewals that generally escape the investigations of historians and sociologists, who rely on the available documents and statistics. An insider’s probe can detect two revolutionary underground breakthroughs that took place around 1900, and can account for the resilience of the French Church and also, more convincingly than the gnawing of whatever corrodes her from outside, for her current predicament.

I want to suggest that two massive, but mostly unnoticed, ambivalent innovations reshaped Catholicism in France in the early twentieth century, with effects that can still be felt today. One was the advent of spirituality. The other was the rediscovery of Holy Scriptures. I can see a few raised eyebrows, and I am fully aware that this requires careful, detailed justifications.

I.

Of course, spirituality is a reality that existed before the end of the nineteenth century. But that was not what it was called. Medieval scholastic theologians rarely used the word spiritualitas to define the quality of what is related to a spirit (divine or not), whether it animates something physical, or a person, or is totally transcendent. The adjective “spiritual” was often opposed to “temporal,” much like “religious” to “profane.” In the late seventeenth century, Bossuet and Fénelon did use the term “spiritualité.” But that meant the foolish theories of the delirious visionaries whom they had to keep under control.

Actually, what we now name “spirituality” was divided between two different things: on the one hand asceticism, on the other hand mysticism. Asceticism did not consist in just deprivations, mortifications, and penance, but rather in all kinds of pious activities, since the term comes from the Greek askesis, that is to say: exercise, training, practice. Concretely, this meant reciting or reading ready-made prayers, saying the Rosary, attending liturgical services, novenas, retreats, pilgrimages, the Way of the Cross—all sorts of formal devotions, in addition to the sacraments. That was the duty of all Christians and the guarantee of their salvation, whatever they felt or did not feel. On the contrary, mysticism was reserved to the happy few: only thanks to some exceptional individualized grace could one experience something of the presence and the strength of God. The faithful in the pews and even monks and nuns in their convents were warned by the clergy against emotional rewards, exaltations and supernatural phenomena, since these might well be illusions and diabolical temptations.

An interesting quarrel developed on the sidelines of the Modernist crisis. One amusing aspect is that the protagonists’ first names were uncommon and almost identical. On the one side was Msgr. Auguste Saudreau (1859-1946), a priest of Angers in Western France. He was chaplain to a thriving congregation of nuns and a popular preacher. He taught that consolations found in prayer can help and should be welcomed. Against him stood up a Jesuit, the Reverend Augustin Poulain (1836-1919), a former professor of mathematics and high school headmaster. He argued that heartwarming feelings must be repressed as hazardous, that perceiving no answer from God when calling out to him was absolutely normal and even sane, that psychological comfort was misleading and that one should stick to the discipline of the Ignatian exercises.

There was finally no winner. Poulain, who had been the assailer, was getting old, and Saudreau was no relentless polemicist. No one else was clearsighted enough to grasp the stakes. The theological pundits of the time—the Dominicans Antonin Sertillanges (1863-1948) and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964)—thought that subjective feelings and ritual piety mattered only inasmuch as they facilitated the acceptance of the dogmatic truths and moral rules taught by the Magisterium. So apparently nothing changed when the masses of grassroots Catholics became interested in the story of the inner lives of saintly figures and recent converts, who did not explain why they believed—in other words, they did not bother about apologetics. They rather shared their experiences of personal relationships with God, Jesus, and the blessed Virgin Mary.

The most striking example is young Thérèse Martin, a twenty-four-year-old cloistered Carmelite nun of Lisieux in Normandy, who died of consumption in 1897. Her sisters published her abundant private notes and diaries less than a year after her demise, and it became a lasting bestseller under a significant title: The Story of a Soul. Just when she was beatified and canonized, right after World War I, a biography of Charles de Foucauld made him another hero and model for the faithful. Not because of his eventful life of a former army officer and reveler turned into a hermit in the Sahara, but because of his private writings, in which he addressed Christ directly and opened up his heart to him. Like the little Thérèse, he had penned these meditations in personal notebooks as testimonies of key moments of his inner life, and they were not destined to be printed.

Of course, this literature, which renewed the faith of many, was made possible by a civilizational evolution during the nineteenth century. On the cultural side, romanticism promoted introspection and the contagious display of intimate moods. And practically, technological progress allowed higher standards of living, which in turn offered time for education, reading, and also writing—not for publication, but as an end in itself, to meet the need for a mirror of the self. Of course, these are but secondary causes of the advent of spirituality, and we must maintain that they do not rule out the primary causes of the divine Providence providing Christians with means to confront the circumstances and even seize the opportunities they offered.

Anyway, the notion and the name of spirituality emerged only slowly in the course of the twentieth century. One confirmation is that in the eleven volumes (1916-1933) of his popular unfinished study of seventeenth-century mystics, the abbé Henri Bremond (1865-1933) hardly used the word, and his work was called A Literary History of Religious Sentiment in France Since the End of the Wars of Religion. Although he is known as the inventor of what was called later the “French School of Spirituality,” he analyzed simply “religious sentiment.” Another example of the delay in acknowledging the decisiveness of spirituality is that the most widespread Catholic textbook of personal piety edited between the two world wars was A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, published in 1924 by a Sulpician, Adolphe Tanquerey (1854-1932).

Father Tanquerey was well known in the U.S., where he had taught in Baltimore (1887-1902), and the American translation in 1930 was the first retitled The Spiritual Life, with the original title as a subtitle only. But the French version remained a classic, with no mention of “spirituality” added on the cover. It was recommended in seminaries and retreats, and it carefully separated asceticism from mysticism without trying to coordinate them under the headline of “spirituality.” And although outdated, it is still used: Pope Francis recently (for Christmas 2018) offered copies to all members of the Roman Curia in their own different languages.

This has not prevented the notion and the term of “spirituality” from being more and more popular and becoming self-evident, to define personal religion, both what is believed (or not accepted) and the comportment it induces. This was not unprecedented, since it can be seen as a new combination of two aspects of the faith subtly distinguished by St. Augustine in his De Trinitate (XIII, 2, 5): he differentiates the fides quae creditur (the object or contents of the faith), from the fides quā creditur (the subjective act of faith). Quae: that which (a nominative) is believed (creditor). Quā: by or through which (an ablative) it is believed (creditor), or belief takes shape.[1] Traditionally, the fides quae conditioned the fides quā. In the twentieth century, little by little, this tended to be reversed: faith was no longer just the obedient acceptance of doctrine and the observance of the precepts which derive from it, but a matter of personal choice, freedom, and authenticity, which finally implied contempt for passive conformism.

However, spirituality was not clearly defined, and the opposition between asceticism and mysticism was not overcome until the early 1960s, just before Vatican II. The theologian who did the job was Father Louis Bouyer (1913-2004) in the Preface to the first volume of his History of Christian Spirituality (1961). He argued that theology has three branches: dogmatic (dealing with what is to be believed), moral (as a consequence of doctrinal truth), and spiritual (as the awareness of the effects of dogma and morals on the faithful’s inner lives). This amounted to acknowledging the reality and legitimacy of “religious experience” as theorized in America by William James (1842-1910) and imported in France by Henri Bergson (1859-1941). One pioneer had been John Henry Newman (1801-1890) with his Grammar of Assent (1870). Significantly, Bremond and Bouyer were fans of Newman and published biographies of the English convert. Bouyer’s book’s title was Newman: His Life and Spirituality (1950).

Another Sulpician, Henri Pourrat (1871-1957), had already published a four-volume (1918-1928) historical survey of La Spiritualité chrétienne. This had been an opening, since it granted that the varied modes of inner Christian life have some interest, and are perpetually renewed. But Pourrat still insisted that asceticism and dogmatic orthodoxy were the priorities, and that mysticism was exceptional and generally out of reach or at least risky. On the contrary, in his Introduction to Spirituality (1960, which earned him scolding from the Jesuits and especially his colleague Jean Daniélou [1905-1974]), Bouyer claimed that ascetism and mysticism cannot be separated. In his Dictionary of Theology (1963), he explained that no ascetic effort can be initiated and sustained without the stimulus and help of divine grace, and that all devotional exercises therefore have a mystical dimension. And on the other hand, he underlined that the direct perception of God is always an ascetic trial, since it cannot be complete because of human limits, and requires humble resilience and forsaking all kinds of appropriation.[2]

Anyhow, spirituality discreetly became commonplace, if not a human right, in the mid-twentieth century, even before the Council, and the frenzy (mistaken for a revival) which followed made it plain that the fides quā held sway over the fides quae. Just one illustration of the unforeseen impact of this positive intensification of personal Christian life: I keep painfully sharp recollections of parish baptisms during Sunday Mass in the 70s, during which lower-class families were forbidden to recite the Nicene Creed and forced to read out a ploddingly prepared profession of their own faith. The result was sentimental humanitarian platitudes in which Christ was an unobtrusive buddy, and nothing survived of the Redeeming Cross or the Holy Trinity.

It is clear, with hindsight, that today’s marginalization of the Church—at least in France—owes more to such a watering-down of the faith than to ideological attacks from outside or to the seduction of consumer society. If Catholicism nevertheless managed to sail through these muddy marshes, it probably was thanks to another fruitful breakthrough, which also had some negative repercussions.

II.

This second advance of more than a hundred years ago was a paradoxical benefit of the Modernist crisis. Most of the heresies there came from nitpicking studies of the Bible, launched by nineteenth-century German scholars.[3] They considered the Holy Scriptures not as God’s living Word, but as a patchy collection of texts like all others, whose origin, shape, selection, transmission, significance, and relevance must be mercilessly investigated—after which only what was found not too disturbing for intellectual comfort remained afloat.

The Bible had been well known until the end of the Middle Ages, as proved by the countless biblical scenes in the cathedrals. But since the propagation of books and the Reformation, Catholics had been warned against reading the Scriptures autonomously. They were told it was dangerous, and the proof was that doing so had led the Protestants to sink down into heresy and schism. Only priests and some monks, who were properly educated and trained, were to read chosen passages in their breviaries and at liturgical services.

Some clerics, however, realized that the Word of God should definitely not be abandoned to rabid modern iconoclasts, and that authentic faith had nothing to fear from science. One of the first to roll up his sleeves (and face suspicions) was a Dominican, Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855-1938). As early as 1890, he launched what was to become the Biblical and Archeological School of Jerusalem, which later produced a new, rigorous, and learnedly annotated but immensely popular genuinely Catholic translation of the Old and New Testaments.

After the condemnation of Modernism, the Jesuits did not want to be left behind, and obtained from Pius X in 1909 the creation of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Other religious orders also started work. Pope Pius XII blessed the scientific study of the Scriptures in his encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu of 1943, and the first modern, exegetically sound French version of the full Bible was released under unanimous applause in 1950 by the Benedictine monks of Maredsous in French-speaking Belgium.

As clerical academics, seminary teachers, and pastors grew more interested in the Holy Scriptures, many of the activities they supervised directly or indirectly in Church life became “biblical.”[4] One can identify four domains where this was obvious: theology, prayer (or spirituality), the liturgy, and ecumenism.

1.

First: Theology. Biblical studies make it plain that faith—the fides quae (what is believed) as well as the fides quā (the implementation of belief)—has a history, which is based on God’s self-revelation, first to the Chosen People and eventually culminating in the events of his Son’s Incarnation, teachings, Passion, and Resurrection. This has two consequences.

One is that belief is not based on the idea of the Supreme Being built up by man, but on the fact that God manifested himself, as only he could do. The unique, personal, transcendent God who is the Father giving up his Son and sending their Holy Spirit is not a human philosophical invention, but a Judeo-Christian contribution to human experience and thought. The result is that the comprehension of these facts is in reality the prolongation of this unfinished story, which is never complete or definitive but always instructive. What follows then is that the Fathers of the early Church are no less enlightening than medieval, modern, or contemporary theologians.

But this also implied that the philosophy of Aquinas, whatever his indisputable merits, was not the only tool available to Catholic thinkers. That went against the so-called Neo-Thomist interpretation of Aeterni Patris where Pope Leo XIII in 1879 presented the philosophy of the “Angelic Doctor” as the best means then to resist the current ideological assaults against Christianity. However, some well-meaning believers understood that Aquinas had built up an unsurpassable system, and that clinging to it would enable the Church to disregard new comprehensions and developments of her faith as well as all further onslaughts.

But Leo XIII never claimed that Christianity was based on philosophy,[5] or that Aquinas encouraged discarding his predecessor St. Augustine, or his contemporary St. Bonaventure, whose approaches were notably different. The fact that Descartes (1596-1650),[6] Kant (1724-1804), and Hegel (1770-1831),[7] each in his own way, had tried—and failed!—to re-found Christianity philosophically after medieval scholasticism had worn out did not mean that St. Thomas could have no successors, and only devotees and commentators.[8]

The “new theology” that took shape between the two world wars—de Lubac (1896-1991), Congar (1904-1995), Daniélou (1905-1974), Bouyer in France, Przywara (1889-1972), Rahner (1904-1984), Balthasar (1905-1988), Ratzinger (1927-2022) in Germany—never concealed what they owed to St. Thomas. But they were no Thomists, and some of them took advantage of the century’s two major philosophical advances, namely phenomenology (as John Paul II also did although he kept relying on Aquinas) and (to a lesser extent) analytical philosophy.[9] There have also been borrowings from the so-called “human sciences” (history, psychology, sociology, economics), and theologians adopted the secularized standards of academic research, which considers Thomism as a respectable school or specialization, but just one among many others.

Anyway, in France today, I can see that Aquinas does still strengthen the faith of some of my students. But Blaise Pascal appeals at least as much, if not more, to young people. Pope Francis had grasped this in his June 2023 apostolic letter on that mystical scientist for the 400th anniversary of his birth.

So, the reappropriation of the Bible led to a recentering of theology on Holy Scriptures, which in turn reordered the various fields in that area. This was not breaking away from Aquinas, but on the contrary following him, since he openly used the method defined by Petrus Cantor in Paris at the end of the twelfth century: legere, disputare, praedicare, i.e. start with the Word of God and then interpret it in dialogue with others who study it, the goal being to educate the faithful in the pews. It is just that the challenges of Modernity were not the same as the ones St. Thomas had taken up.

As a consequence, exegesis became no less important than dogmatic theology, which itself, as a result, no longer depended on fundamental theology, which in turn did not have any more to rely on philosophy. Another effect was that the history of theology, just like that of spirituality, was to be taken into account (de Lubac is exemplary in this respect). And ultimately, this implied that theologians do not work in an abstract, theoretical world, but strive to meet the needs of their times by tackling the ancient as well as the ambient culture, which are both permeated by Christianity and hostile to it, or distort it.

In this perspective, Balthasar’s researches are a model, with widely open cultural references and the reintegration of aesthetics in theology. The structure of the nine volumes of Bouyer’s both magisterial and modest theological synthesis is also significant: first the biblical sources, then their successive interpretations in Church and cultural history, and finally an updated conclusion that does not pretend to be definitive and honestly mentions remaining difficulties and possibly unanswerable questions.

2.

Now, the recovery of the Bible obviously had an impact on spirituality too. Basically, prayer is not just speaking to God. It demands listening to him as well, if not first. And what he says does not have to be conjectured. It can be read in print. Just as Pascal in one of his illuminations realized that Jesus had shed this or that drop of his blood for him personally, the Christian can become aware that these or those words do not hang around by chance or aimlessly on the page but are targeting him or her specifically. The Bread of the Word is no less concrete and vital than the Bread of the Eucharist.

And there is more, because the Scriptures develop a pedagogy. They do not only reveal what God accomplishes and lets us know about through his Word. They also teach us how to talk back to him and provide us with the right words to do so. There are numerous prayers in the Bible and the Gospel: not only the Psalms, but also hymns, canticles, poems, doxologies, etc.

3.

This leads to a third territory, after theology and spirituality, where the rediscovery of the Bible has been decisive: it is the liturgy. I have already alluded to the link between the Breads of the Word and of the Eucharist. It is clear that the first part of the Mass was revised to make room for more explicit use of both the Old and New Testaments, and that homilists were invited to comment on the readings of the day, from which they were to draw dogmatic, spiritual, and moral lessons.

The scientific and historical tools used for the retrieval of Holy Scriptures were then also used in the field of the liturgy as they had been to renew theology. As early as 1903 in Tra le sollicitudini, Pius X sought to harmonize the eucharistic rites in the worldwide Church through a resourcing in the most reliable traditions, and to purify the celebrations from the musical or ornamental sediments and parasitic local customs which had been accumulated over the centuries. The explicit goal was to encourage the participation of the faithful by allowing them to follow what is going on in the choir and at the altar. This reform evidently met the growing taste for spirituality.

A first “liturgical movement” had appeared in France in the mid-nineteenth century at the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes around Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875). A second movement was born just before World War I under the leadership of another Benedictine monk, the Belgian Dom Lambert Beauduin (1873-1960), his priority being popularization—rather than restoration, as had been the case at Solesmes. Louis Bouyer was one of Beauduin’s disciples and friends. The movement also found theoretical support from the Austrian Augustinian canon Pius Parsch (1884-1954) and the German Benedictine Dom Odo Casel (1886-1948).

Anyway, the liturgical renewal had already begun and was even in full swing before Vatican II. The spearheads were the National Center for Pastoral Liturgy and the review La Maison Dieu, run by the Paris Dominicans. And there were stars like the Jesuit Paul Doncoeur (1880-1961), a students’ chaplain, and the Rev. Georges Michonneau (1899-1983), the pastor of a working-class suburban parish. Louis Bouyer’s first bestseller, The Paschal Mystery (1945), was a commentary on the liturgy of the ancient Paschal Vigil, which most probably prompted Pius XII to reestablish it in 1951, in the wake of his 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei on the liturgy.

4.

The fourth area energized by the biblical revival was ecumenism. As you know, the quest for Christian unity was launched just before World War I by some Protestants and a handful of Orthodox. But men like the Lazarist Fernand Portal (1855-1926) and the Belgian cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier (1851-1926), with the younger Dom Beauduin (already cited) and Fr. Paul Couturier (1881-1953), a priest from Lyons, joined the interdenominational meetings in the early 1920s. There is no doubt that common interest in the Bible and academic exchanges between exegetes of different affiliations favored the rapprochement. In the third volume of his History of Christian Spirituality, Louis Bouyer shows that there is something to learn from Orthodox, Protestant, and Anglican mystics.[10] The “Groupe des Dombes” (between Lyons and Geneva) was formed in 1936 for dialogue between Catholic and Protestant theologians, and is still active.

It should be added that twentieth-century Catholic ecumenism opened up early to Judaism as a religion that is not foreign to Christianity. Léon Bloy and Charles Péguy (cited at the beginning) exposed antisemitism as “Un-Christian” at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Between the world wars, the Jesuit Jacques Bonsirven (1880-1958) published books pointing out all that Christians and Jews have in common. Jean Daniélou (quoted above) published in 1958 an important study entitled Theology of Judeo-Christianity, on the very first, essentially Jewish Church after Christ. Jacques Maritain (already mentioned), whose wife Raïssa (1883-1960) was Jewish, courageously spoke out against the Nazi antisemitism that was already blatant in the late 1930s.

After World War II, Catholic theologians, including the future Swiss cardinal Charles Journet (1891-1975) and the French Dominican Jean de Menasce (1902-1973), of Jewish-Egyptian origin, took part in the Seelisberg Conference of 1947. There, several Jewish Holocaust survivors led by the French historian Jules Isaac (1877-1963)[11] discussed with Christian ministers of various denominations about the means to fight and weed out the age-old Christian contempt of Jews.

Just before he died and as the Council was opening, Jules Isaac was received by Pope John XXIII, who promised a significant statement affirming the Church’s respect and esteem of Jews. That was Nostra aetate in 1965.

III.

This remarkable declaration can serve as a bridge to my next and penultimate point: Vatican II did not come from nowhere. It was said that the conciliar “spring” was an unexpected gift of the Holy Spirit. But no one can seriously claim that the third divine Person had been away on a vacation or sabbatical leave, or precisely since when! And while we are at it, some postconciliar excesses raise the question of whether the Paraclete really came back, and if he did, whether he stayed.

It must be granted that the Holy Spirit is most likely to have helped lift the blockade of Anti-Modernism. It is also plain that Pope John’s decision to gather all the bishops of the world was a personal bet and was not triggered by any crisis or direct challenge to face, or by popular demand. But before he became Patriarch of Venice and was elected to succeed Pius XII, he had been nuncio in Paris and had thus been able to become aware of the breakthroughs revitalizing French Catholicism. The most dogmatic production of Vatican II was Dei Verbum, which recalled the primacy of Scriptures in theology. The rest was considered as mostly “pastoral,” and this was in line with the advent of spirituality. Some important documents concerned the Church and its mission in the world. But Lumen Gentium was no surprise to those who had read Henri de Lubac’s The Splendor of the Church (1953). And the same de Lubac’s Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny Man (1938) did not seem foreign to Gaudium et Spes.

Of course, not everything came from France or French-speaking Belgium in Vatican II’s output. German and Italian theologians were no less influential. And it is well known that the American Jesuit John Coutrney Murray (1904-1967) played a key role in drafting the crucial declaration Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom. It is also sure that the Council was immediately perceived as a sharp turn in Church policies, even if it mostly validated and normalized a number of avant-garde advances and experiments which were meant as returns to the sources.

The most spectacular change undoubtedly was the liturgical reform and the abandonment of clerical cassocks and wimples for nuns. There was nothing revolutionary in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the document that launched the renovations. But what remains striking was the brutal excitement in implementing the Vatican’s instructions. It was experienced by many as a sharp disconcerting turnaround.

Perhaps this violent reversal can be explained through a table-talk joke of Fr. de Lubac’s which I remember vividly. “The men who used to censor me as a dangerous young progressive, he mused, are the same as the ones who now deplore my becoming a senile frightened conservative. In fact, I have not changed, and neither have they. It’s simply that the wind has turned and they are but weathercocks.” In other word, many Catholics—in the laity as well as in the clergy—had been fashioned by anti-intellectual Anti-Modernist discipline, and they remained conformists when aggiornamento became the watchword. They kept on unthinkingly toeing the line whatever direction it took. Thus, the Church was still paying the price for the Modernist crisis. The aging band-aid still stuck cumbersomely over the cicatrized wound.

Inevitably, some were led by their zeal to go too far, which in reaction prompted others (no less sincerely dedicated) to reject the whole Council as a big fatal mistake. Many of those who found the Council had been too shy quickly left the Church, and symmetrically, some of those who thought that essential truths had been sold off preferred to secede, following Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991). Today, this schism seems to resist the Vatican’s reconciliation offers, and traditionalism appeals to quite a few young people, while on the opposite side a new generation of Christian leftists and Catholic radicals manage to get sympathetic media coverage. Unlike their predecessors of the worker-priest movement in the 1950s or the Liberation Theology of the 1970s, they do not at all flirt with Marxism, but they are close to green, anti-capitalist, and LGBTQ+ causes.[12]

Overall, it looks as though Vatican II has generated, instead of a recovery, an even more weakened Catholicism that is torn between extremes. Apparently, more than sixty years later (now in 2026), for outside observers the situation is perhaps worse in France than it had been sixty years before (in 1906). In the last few decades, the Church has lost all the societal and legal battles she had to fight: against contraception, abortion, artificial procreation, same-sex marriage, and soon mercy-killing and assisted suicide. More dramatically, the numbers of baptisms and ordinations, church weddings, and funerals keep on plummeting. In France, there used to be one priest for 1,000 inhabitants. Now it is one for 10,000. On a regular average Sunday, 3% or less of the population go to church for Mass. Some historians contend that the nation’s Christian matrix has crumbled down and faded away.

Clerical sex abuse scandals make things worse, as is the case elsewhere, many of them in Catholic boarding schools. The most damaging story has been that of a priest, l’abbé Pierre (1912-2007), the unanimously admired founder and leader of charity organizations. It was discovered after his death that he had sexually harassed and assaulted countless women and girls. The shock has been comparable in France to the Epstein Affair in the U.S. No celebrities were involved, but it has been interpreted as showing that Catholic teachings are both hypocritical and unrealistic, typically in the sensitive field of sexual ethics, since chastity was proving practically impossible.

Previously, two popular figures fell from their pedestals for similar reasons. Significantly, one, Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe (1912-2006), originally a Dominican, had been an intellectual guru; the other, Jean Vanier (1928-2019), a Canadian-born layman, had been a popular spiritual guide.[13] In a way, these two are representative of the renewal and vitality, but also the shortcomings and derailments of French Catholicism over the last few decades.

So one may well wonder why the two major improvements of the twentieth century, which were authenticated and confirmed at the Council—namely the retrieval of the Bible and the advent of spirituality—failed to bear more visible fruit, and even sometimes backfired. My final point will be a tentative answer to that question.

IV.

To begin with, it can be argued that quality matters more than quantity. The insistence on inner life does reflect a deepening of the faith, a more profound commitment, as required in the Gospel and already in the Bible. It means surpassing the passive superficial obedience for which Jesus blamed the Pharisees. It also enhances human dignity, since spirituality raises man above beasts and calls upon his freedom without repressing his feelings. On the other hand, reliance on Scriptures brings about a more objective, more solidly founded and better structured understanding of belief, with tighter translations in personal and collective piety and a broader, more clear-sighted grasp of worldly, historic, and even cosmic realities.

However, such progress is undoubtedly God’s gift, and this is what must be kept in mind. Divine generosity does liberate man, but he remains fallible, subjected to temptations, and his freedom can be diverted by whims and all kinds of influences and emotions. In other words, grace is always both a benefit and a trial. And this is the problem with the advent of spirituality: faith becomes emotional; it is rooted in the heart, opening it up and making it more sensitive, but also more vulnerable, including to what classicism called “passions.” So belonging to the Church tends to depend on subjective experience: anything felt unpleasant, too demanding, or just boring may justify dropping out.

And there is a snag too with the emphasis on the Scriptures and its various impacts. Delving into the Bible, which is as dense and intricate as a jungle, requires some effort and resilience. Studying history and doctrine in order to transmit them is an investment that not everyone is capable of. The result of this selective difficulty, combined with heightened sensibility, has been that Church commitments tend to become elitist, and that Catholicism is no longer popular. Naive, formal piety has then been scorned as superficial. True believers were to be militants, fancying themselves as an avant-garde, or (to put it in biblical terms) as the “small remnant” of God’s people (Zeph 3:12-13).

To put it bluntly, this is cheap comfort. First, because it can, probably more efficiently than hostility or indifference, account for half-empty churches and closed seminaries. Regular folks, who are mere occasional consumers of sacraments, have no time for other Church activities but remain emotionally attached to their childhoods and their ancestors’ faith as an essential part of their identity. They may attend picturesque old-fashioned pilgrimages, but are incapable of proffering moving testimonies. These ordinary people do not feel like joining and imitating marginal committed Christians eager for expressionist sincerity and theological training.

More positively, faith requires a culture, an environment in which the individual finds it out through others, because he cannot conjure it all up by himself. Neither can he keep it for himself, because he really receives it and it actually transforms him only inasmuch as he shares it not only with his nearest and dearest, but as broadly, or at least as openly and publicly as possible. Faih is a dynamic in which man is absorbed, not something he can control and enjoy. It has its source in the relationships between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit whose communion achieves the absolute fullness of life in mutual total self-giving without losing anything, to which humans are offered access.

This is what Hans Urs von Balthasar explained when he launched the journal Communio in 1972. Twenty years earlier, in 1952, the same Balthasar in a short essay had prophetically called for “razing the bastions”[14]—the ones erected by Anti-Modernism. Today, some are tempted to rebuild strongholds—or, as funnily suggested by the title of a clearsighted article by the American theologian Anne Carpenter in Commonweal Magazine recently, “raising the bastions,” which means withdrawing into a few safe havens away from the world, letting it sink inevitably into the disaster it deserves.[15] Another less self-righteous, more pugnacious solution is the political fight to create a legal and institutional framework where traditional values (moral and patriotic ones) and ideals (especially the freedoms of conscience and of expression) are guaranteed, which is expected to create a socio-cultural background where religion in general and Christianity in particular are welcome, if not “natural,” even if no faith or denomination is privileged or dominant. This is clearly an alternative in America today,[16] but it is also defended in France by a small new party which gets rather good media coverage and whose leaders are non-observant Jews.[17]

Both options (elitist and political) have Catholic supporters in France, but neither seems likely to rally a majority of churchgoers or a significant number of new converts. It is clear that fleeing away from the world that Jesus came to save looks like a misunderstanding of the Gospel (see John 3:17), and has nothing to do with monasticism. But it is no less clear that, if faith requires at least neutrality from the civil authorities and worldly powers, it should not rely on them to the point of becoming dependent, with the risk of being instrumentalized and giving to Caesar what belongs to God (Matt 22:21; Mark 12:16; Luke 20:25).

This is the bitter lesson taught by nineteenth-century French history, and also at the end of the Second World War, when Charles de Gaulle marched into Notre Dame Cathedral as the nation’s liberator and started singing the Magnificat, after making sure the Archbishop of Paris would not show up, because he had condoned the Vichy régime which promoted family values without resisting Nazism. Today, quite a few Christians join anticlerical free-thinkers to strongly dislike Catholic millionaires (namely Vincent Bolloré and Pierre-Édouard Stérin) who spread allegedly conservative if not extreme-right values through the media they buy and organizations they subsidize.

French Catholics then know they have the duty to speak up freely and fearlessly, with two traps to avoid carefully. One is to imagine that if they fail to win a war they have to wage, it must be their fault. But losing can be excused, while only not fighting or fighting ruthlessly requires repentance. The other danger is to over- or under-estimate the importance of politics, money, and technological means: they certainly can make faith easier or more difficult, but they cannot and should not impose it, and they cannot eradicate it, so that indifference and blind trust are symmetrical errors.

Above all, however, Catholics have to find ways to overcome the marginalization which results from their unconscious elitism, and to make ordinary folks feel welcome among them. Liturgical or disciplinary reforms, or the restoration of traditional local festivals would not help much. Permitting the old Latin Mass would not attract crowds. Neither would women priests. These would be superficial technical answers to a much deeper and more decisive spiritual problem. Perhaps the advances of the twentieth century should and can be developed.

Greater reliance on the Scriptures is possible. It does not mean advanced biblical studies, but an awareness of the fecundity of the Bible not only in the liturgy, and also in our history and culture, inspiring probes of the textual sources, their exploration and diversified cultural by-products to feed popular imagination and creativity. On the other hand, the advent of spirituality has somehow trivialized mysticism into religious experience, and ascetism has come to be seen as constraining, if not repressive. Religious education can and should help discover that devotional exercises and so-called religious “obligations” already make up a personal relationship with God, and do broaden spontaneous sensitivity into open, thoughtful sensibility.

Finally, new breakthroughs ought to be watched out for. It is too early to predict anything, but one question is what the new thriving Churches of the Southern hemisphere will bring to the Catholic Tradition. In France now, more than a quarter of active priests come from the Third World, especially from French-speaking Africa. But one should not expect distant local traditions to revitalize European Christianity simply because they have been permeated by the Gospel. On the contrary, these uprooted priests can hardly bank on their pastoral experience, and have more or less awkwardly to adjust to a foreign context. As a result, the best they can offer is the basics of the faith, stripped of the dressing of their country of origin, but immune from old Europe’s distortions and contortions.

This can be refreshing. It is obviously an arduous task, but it is not impossible. So let me conclude with a query which you may take as a joke: priests from former colonies coming over to re-evangelize the colonizers who had sent the missionaries who baptized their ancestors, is this not a similar story to that of the descendants of immigrants from Europe sending men back there after a while, in order to clean up the mess and rekindle the ideals their forebears had brought along across the Atlantic?

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally delivered as the Thomas Lecture on Philosophy and Theology at Saint Meinrad Archabbey, March 26, 2026.

Church Life Journal | Articles

Tags: 20thCentury Bumpy Church French Ride