A tale of two prelates: an ecumenist & a schismatic.

That day in the cathedral in Yaounde, Cameroon, one of the two choirs accompanying a solemn Mass sang Gregorian chant; the other, Cameroon songs. A procession followed; when then-Archbishop Leon Etienne Duval of Algiers appeared, someone in the crowd called out, "Long live Muhammad Duval!" and others took up the cry, to general applause.

Recalling the episode in an interview after he had been named cardinal in 1982, Duval said he relished the nickname Muhammad, even though it originally had been bestowed on him by the French residents of Algeria hostile to his policy toward the Muslims. For Duval its adoption by Muslims indicated that the church was not a ghetto, whereas to pieds-noirs of his own diocese - the longtime French residents of Algiers - use of the nickname expressed their belief that Duval was a traitor to France.

The life and career of Cardinal Duval, who died in Algiers in May 1996 at age ninety-two, offer a striking and illuminating contrast with a better-known figure, the archconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, his contemporary at the French seminary in Rome in the 1920s. Both were posted to Africa after serving in their home dioceses in France; both reached high office in the church. Both took part in Vatican II, but they responded to the council in diametrically opposed ways.

A key to the differences between them seems to have been their attitude to the Action Francaise movement, launched in the last years of the nineteenth century and the focus of much controversy in the first half of the twentieth. Action Francaise was initially a promonarchist movement nostalgic for the prerevolutionary alliance between throne and altar. Gradually the monarchist ideal was displaced - any strong, authoritarian rule would do - but restoration of the traditional church-state alliance remained the goal. At a time when many French Catholics found their government to be programmatically anti-Catholic, the movement had strong appeal, even to some in the hierarchy.

Lefebvre was a sympathizer, and typical of those who wanted to impose order in society and orthodoxy in religion by a renewed church-state alliance. Duval opposed Action Francaise because he did not want to tie the faith to a sociopolitical system. But Duval did not favor a church confined to the sacristy, a sort of private religion; rather, he favored a vital civic role for the church. Ultimately, their differing conceptions of the proper relationship between faith and culture may have been more important than their theologies, although the two aspects obviously interacted.

When the two came to the French seminary in Rome in the early 1920s, the rector was a prominent supporter of Action Francaise, which also had influential supporters within the Vatican, who saw the movement as an antidote to "the poison of liberalism." But when Pius XI received the students of the French seminary, he reminded them that they were "Romans," that they should not be divided between monarchists and republicans but must devote themselves to the universal church. In December 1926, Plus prohibited Catholics from professions of allegiance to a movement that "puts religion at the service of politics." Action Francaise publications were put on the Index and the rector of the seminary resigned. But the antidemocratic and authoritarian spirit of the movement remained a factor in French history and, in contrasting ways, in the lives of both Lefebvre and Duval.

After ordination both men served in their dioceses in France. Duval was involved in pastoral work and teaching before becoming vicar general in Annecy; in World War II he showed himself sympathetic to the French Resistance and wary of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Lefebvre did pastoral work in his diocese of Lille for a year, after which he joined a missionary order and was sent to West Africa, where eventually he became rector of a seminary in Gabon. In 1947, Duval became bishop of Constantine in Algeria, then a French colony thought of by his countrymen as "France-across-the-sea." Catholics were but 10 percent of Algeria's population. Lefebvre was named vicar apostolic of Dakar, Senegal, and, in 1948, apostolic delegate for all French-speaking Africa. In 1955 he became the first archbishop of Dakar. In these years Lefebvre, a good organizer, built many schools and churches and encouraged the emergence of a native clergy; he provided well for his priests and seemed destined for a brilliant ecclesiastical career.

Algeria had been a colony since its conquest by France in 1830; the pieds-noirs and their allies in France wanted no change. Duval's See city was the cradle of the Algerian nationalist movement, with its motto: "Arabic is our language; 'Algeria our country, Islam our religion." As tensions rose, Duval's response was reminiscent of his stance toward Action Francaise. To fulfill its true mission, he felt, the church in Algeria had to break its identification with French nationalism and culture. As a bishop he considered himself heir to an older tradition, that of Augustine and Cyprian when North Africa was one of the most vital centers of the church. Like them, he felt a responsibility toward all the people of the region and advocated social justice. Some Catholics, including major landowners, objected to his involvement in what they felt were purely economic issues. But he received support from the papal nuncio to France, Angelo Roncalli, the future John XXIII.

In February 1954, nine months before the Algerian independence movement became a revolution, Duval was appointed archbishop of Algiers. The location of his cathedral, part of it built on the site of a former mosque at the very edge of the casbah, symbolized the situation exactly. Zealots of the Algerie Francaise movement, including many of his clergy, could not understand why he advocated peace and social justice when rebels were strangling French residents or exploding bombs in restaurants. They said he was defending Moscow-manipulated terrorists and Muslims who hated the Christian West. Though in fact he denounced Islamic terrorists, he was the first European to deplore the use of torture by those in the French army who detested the thought of losing again as they had in Vietnam; some of the paratroopers in Algeria had arrived there directly from the catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

The Algerian struggle became the centerpiece of French politics in the 1950s. After Charles de Gaulle took power in 1958, hawkish generals based in the colony made an unsuccessful attempt at a coup d'etat. Duval, who saw the aim of the revolt as the eventual transformation of France itself into an authoritarian, pseudo-Catholic state, immediately condemned it and was publicly supported by John XXIII. The failure of the coup made Algerian independence inevitable.

Lefebvre was, predictably, on the other side. He had opposed decolonialization in Senegal, fearing it would mean the replacement of Christianity by Islam and/or communism. He took the same stance toward the independence movement in Algeria, but his viewpoint clashed with Vatican policy, and in 1962 he resigned as archbishop of Dakar. He was assigned to the small diocese of Tulle in France, where he publicly supported a sort of replay of Action Francaise called Cite Catholique, even after the French episcopacy had condemned it.

Both men carried their histories with them when the Second Vatican Council brought them to Rome in 1962. By this point in his life Duval looked ascetic: narrow-faced, lean, lanky, bald, and bespectacled. Lefebvre was short, compact, fair-complexioned, cordial if somewhat paternalistic.

Lefebvre had served on the council's Central Preparatory Commission, presided over by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. Like others on the commission, he was dismayed when the Council Fathers more or less junked its proposals and replaced them with others. After the council his reservations about its decisions turned into sweeping criticisms and then into condemnation. For him the move toward collegiality in the church was a start toward collectivism, ecumenism a synonym for indifferentism, liturgical reform an acceptance of Luther's principles, any change a threat to Catholic tradition. Instead of converting the world, the church had been converted by the world, and this had to be the work of Satan. Becoming yet more vehement, he called the new liturgy a "bastard rite," and condemned the council as the AIDS of the church. Finally, in 1988, by consecrating his own bishops, he broke with Rome and set up altar against altar. In the political sphere he was equally radical, proposing in 1975 the murderous regime of Argentina's General Vidal as an example of the rule of God in civil society: "Here is the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

At one point Lefebvre's onetime confrere Duval tried to bring him back from the brink. In a confidential letter written in August 1976, Duval had asked Lefebvre to submit to "the successor of Peter." By doing so, Duval said, Lefebvre "would reassure those Catholics who suffer from the division of the disciples of Christ, would enlighten those who hesitate to accept the Second Vatican Council and those who abuse the council by refusing the values of tradition and by generating disorder in the liturgy, discipline, and spiritual life." But Lefebvre would not heed calls for moderation; he had become convinced that salvation lay only outside the church grouped around the pope. He once charged that John Paul II had put himself outside the true church by visiting the synagogue in Rome and holding an interreligious meeting at Assisi.

After years of dealing with Lefebvre in gingerly fashion, Rome finally excommunicated him in 1988 for ordaining bishops without papal authority. Though some of his followers returned to Roman obedience, others persisted in schism, and Lefebvre himself died unreconciled in 1991.

As his letter to Lefebvre showed, Duval was not uncritical of certain consequences of Vatican II, and he harbored reservations about the Roman curia. But he was propapal because, in his words, "without the pope, third-world Christianity would fall under the influence of the churches of the rich countries, which could be fatal for the world Catholic community." On the whole, he welcomed conciliar innovations and acted on them, perhaps most notably the decree on ecumenism. After Algeria gained independence, he returned his cathedral to the Muslims and it became a mosque again. When he was made a cardinal in 1982 he took Algerian citizenship. Duval served for fifteen years as president of the North African Bishops' Conference. He was an interlocutor with the Islamic world (Iran invited him to visit the hostages held in the United States Embassy in Teheran at Christmas 1979) and a spokesman for the church of the third world.

But though Duval, in contrast with Lefebvre, made all the "right" choices, his last years, even after he resigned in 1988, were difficult. If Lefebvre's life indicates that for some Catholics the church's past has not been reconciled with its present, Duval's shows that a conciliar-reinforced willingness to read the signs of the times is no guarantee against disappointment.

After independence the number of Catholics in Algiers dropped drastically. Catholic schools, which had educated many non-Catholics, were nationalized. The secular, socialist, modernizing impulses that inspired the independence struggle have been followed by a fundamentalist upsurge. In 1992 the Islamic Salvation Front's success in the first round of national elections was thwarted by a military coup. A simmering civil war continues, causing deaths that some estimate at hundreds weekly. After his retirement in 1988 Duval continued to live in the Algeria he had made his own, but found himself facing an alliance of religion and society, though under Islamic auspices, that he abhorred.

A final irony: One of Duval's achievements during the independence struggle had been the revival of a Trappist monastery, Our Lady of Atlas (the Mountains), by French monks whose only external work was to give medical assistance to their neighbors. A group of Muslims attended it regularly for prayer and dialogue. But in May 1996 all of its seven monks, who had been kidnapped by fundamentalists, were killed. Duval reportedly said that news of the killings was a crucifixion for him. He died immediately. His funeral took place with that of the monks.

Desmond O'Grady, longtime Rome and Vatican correspondent for English-language publications around the world, is the author of eight books. The most recent - The Turned Card: Christianity before and after the Wall - will be published by Loyola University Press (Chicago) in April. It has been translated into six languages.