The old cardinal entered the ancient former Carmelite convent on the Rue d’Assas in Paris and paused on the stone stairway. Here, on Sept. 3, 1792, a howling mob of the Revolution had hacked to pieces 114 bishops and priests, thrown their dismembered bodies into the Seine. The cardinal uttered a short prayer for the peace of their souls, then went on up the “stair of the martyrs” and entered the Salle des Actes, smiling and gesturing with slender hands. Before him, four cardinals, 20 archbishops, 90 bishops—most of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in France—rose in silent respect to Achille Cardinal Liénart, Bishop of Lille and, at 73, their ranking prelate.
So last week began the third plenary assembly of the French Catholic Church since World War II. Except for the microphone on the table in front of Cardinal Liénart, where he presided with his fellow cardinals (Feltin of Paris. Gerlier of Lyon, Grente of Le Mans. Roques of Rennes), the scene might have been one from the church’s potent medieval past. But St. Louis IX of France (1215-70) would have been saddened by the three grim problems before the French hierarchy : 1) the growing shortage of priests, 2) the defiance of the Worker Priests, 3) the crisis of religious education.
Priestly Handymen. France today has only 56,700 priests v. 71,300 in 1901, when separation of church and state became law. This deficit is especially serious in the parishes; more and more young priests are entering orders rather than the secular priesthood, and there were 16,000 priestless parishes in 1950 v. 4,772 in 1903. One reason is the appalling poverty of the average country cure. Dependent upon handouts for food and fuel, he often spends the winters in near-starvation, and it is becoming increasingly common for parish priests to solicit odd jobs in the neighborhood—house-painting, plastering, milking or shoe-repairing—to supplement the meager dole of the church. U.S. Catholic parishes are accustomed to supporting their priests, but the French, whose government paid the priesthood until 1905, have been conditioned to thinking of this as the responsibility of the state and keeping their hands in their pockets.
The priest-shortage problem was ably presented to the hierarchy by tall, gaunt Louis-Marie Fernand de Bazelaire, 64-year-old Archbishop of Chambéry, but the solutions he had to offer seemed nothing more than restatements of the problem: a revival of faith, an appeal to the generosity of laymen, and the request that Catholic parents encourage their children to become priests or nuns.
The New Gallicanism. Next, the assembly turned to the Worker Priest problem, which was far from ended by the Pope’s order to disband as of March 1, 1954. Of some 100 priests, only about 25 have submitted; the rest stubbornly continue to preach and say Mass. Cardinal Feltin’s office tells them only that “we can give you no written authorization to perform your priestly functions.” But no serious attempt has been made to stop them. (Some 20 priests who have married and live openly with their wives no longer attempt to perform priestly functions.) There has been no public denunciation of the Worker Priests’ defiance, and there probably never will be. Only the expressed wish of the Vatican brought the issue before last week’s plenary assembly; the French church seems tacitly to have agreed to act as though the situation did not exist.
The Worker Priests’ apostasy spotlights a larger situation that is responsible for many a restless night at the Vatican. The body of French Catholicism is feverish with a Red virus. Open resistance to the authority of Rome is preached in the vociferous and well-financed left-wing Catholic press. This movement joins Gallicanism, the traditional independent and anti-Rome feelings of French Catholics, to more recent charges that the church is allied with “the rich.” and in its anti-Communist zeal has abandoned the working class. Most middle-road French churchmen are ill equipped to fight back in this propaganda battle, partly because France’s old-fashioned svstem of seminary education provides no training in political and economic questions.
Reporting on this state of affairs to the plenary assembly, hearty, pink-cheeked Joseph Lefebvre, 65, Archbishop of Bourges, could say only that the remedy was to “throw light on the essential teachings of the church in contemporary affairs—political, social and economic.” But on how this was to be done, no prelate had anything to say.
Without an Inkling. Ascetic, 52-year-old Charles de Provenchères, Archbishop of Aix and president of the National Commission on Religious Education, addressed himself to the third major problem of French Catholicism: the growing religious illiteracy of youth. State-supported schools have traditionally provided a “chaplain professor” to train children in the catechism, but this practice is being discontinued in the new schools on the grounds of economy. Thus an increasingly large proportion of French youth is growing up without the dimmest inkling of the Christian faith.
The answer, said Provenchères, is for parents to take over the responsibility for seeing that their young are trained as Catholics. But few of the prelates who heard him could have returned to their dioceses last week with confidence that anything could be done about it. The church’s eldest daughter, rebellious through the centuries, seemed in no mood—or condition—to change her ways.
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