New light under the old bushel: what's happening in the French Church?

"The only thing that could unite, or ever has united, us Europeans," Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, recently told a rapt audience of scholars and intellectuals at New York University, "is not our language or culture but our common history in Christianity." One knows what Lustiger means: there was a time, around the ninth century, when Europe (well, Western Europe) was united, sort of, in the Roman church. Still, one is more impressed with how disunited Catholic Europe has been (let alone Christian, or Christian/Jewish/Moslem/ unbelieving Europe), is now, or perhaps ever more shall be. France's own "common history" in Catholicism has proven far from unifying, as even the last few years have shown. "The [French Catholic] clergy has been irresponsible in following too blindly the devices of the society of our time and not being true to their apartness," Lustiger told the NYU meeting. He may have a point--the clergy has certainly been hoist on the petard of "relevance." Then again, "apartness" carries its own risks. The French church has recently conjured with both demons.

Famous for its clergy-baiters, France has also known her clergy-manipulators. In 1943, a young man from Chambery named Paul Touvier was named to an important post in the paramilitary French militia. This unit was a semi-Fascist Pretorian Guard that reported directly to Vichy premier (and archcollaborator), Pierre Laval. Under the command of Joseph Darnand, soon to be Vichy minister of order, the Milice amounted to a French counterpart to the German SS, whose protection and sympathy it enjoyed. It filled crucial and distasteful political functions, systematically employing torture, denunciation, and assassination on French citizens. The organization's aim was to turn Vichy from a merely authoritarian into a totalitarian state, which would stand side by side with the Reich in the new Nazi Europe. In his capacity as head of "information" for the militia throughout the entire Rhone Valley, Touvier participated directly in crimes and repression, including ordering (and probably personally assisting in carrying out) the execution of resisters as well as of Jews.

After liberation, Touvier fled justice, narrowly escaping trial and hanging for his role during the war. Though he would always have important sympathizers in government (notably in the interior ministry, which controls the police), Touvier's principal protectors and allies were Catholic clerics: monks, priests, abbots, bishops, mothers-superior, men in parochial, diocesan, national, and international office, all gave him asylum and succor. Catholic Aid, the French equivalent of Catholic Charities, paid him a monthly stipend until 1989. For a brief time the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel stood by him. Undoubtedly Touvier's greatest paladin, who "literally adopted Paul Touvier and his family," was Msgr. Charles Duquaire, secretary to Cardinal Jean Villot, Vatican secretary of state (196979), who successfully rallied the unusually cautious Villot to campaign for a presidential pardon for Touvier.

This grace proved slow in arriving. Charles De Gaulle stubbornly believed Touvier deserved no better than "twelve bullets in the ass." But De Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou, hoping to stanch disaffection among liberal Catholic voters by recovering conservative ones, signed the pardon in 1971. Pompidou's action proved bittersweet for Touvier and his supporters, who had hardly broken out the champagne before public indignation (2,000 articles in under six months) engulfed their celebration. The Touvier matter became an "affair" that has lasted till now, one that has unquestionably tarnished the image of the French church.

In an effort to cleanse the church, and possibly to further loosen it from any antimodernist and pro-Vichy associations, in 1991, Cardinal Albert Decourtray, the remarkable archbishop of Lyon, took Lustiger's advice and assembled a group of specialists in French wartime history, led by the distinguished scholar and lay Catholic, Rene Remond. Decourtray gave them free run of the archdiocesan archives and instructed them that "Truth, whatever the cost...is preferable to rumor. I continue to believe that a well-documented and publicized wrong, admitted in truth and courage, is preferable to suspect innocence."

Le Monde called Decourtray's initiative "unique in contemporary French history." The commission's report, published last year as Paul Touvier et l'eglise (Fayard), is reasonably well done. Contributors complained of having too little time to research and write their respective sections, let alone integrate them harmoniously, and believe that this has prevented the volume from achieving the kind of lasting academic merit they and the cardinal had wished for it. The report's best feature is its unflinching portrait of Touvier: a man who remains to this day (at age seventy-eight) unrepentant for his wartime actions, who has never sought anything less than complete vindication, and who has demonstrated an uncanny knack for engaging clerics in his cause. The report is clear: Touvier was no mere felon on the lam but a consummate artist of the clerical confidence game.

The volume is marred, however, by a tone of self-congratulation and a tendency to employ apologetic arguments. It won't do, for example, to put the wartime militia's deeply held anti-Semitism on the same footing with its late bouts of anticlericalism (it threatened a few unsympathetic bishops), and then to stigmatize both as "improperly Catholic ." (In other eras, they certainly were regarded as "proper" by a host of Catholics, in and out of Roman collars.) Equally annoying is the report's ostentatious grapplings with the question of clerical motive: "the true mystery lies in puzzling out the reasons why a man, whom nothing recommended for church benevolence, who in no way made the church his debtor, could so easily and enduringly, win the trust and active sympathy of numerous ecclesiastics from a wide variety of religious institutions and orders .... engaging on his behalf their reputations and compromising the church's good name.... We confess that we have not completely plumbed the secret [of why]."

While it is true, as the report claims, that some of the aid proffered Touvier (mainly of a basic human son: shelter, food, etc.) surprisingly sprang from clergy active in the resistance, the great brunt of active collaboration and solidarity came from conservatives who, in virtually all instances, were out of sympathy with prevalent forms of French republicanism. It is thus disingenuous for the report to try to explain away the political content of actions of certain clerics by calling them "dolorist and apolitical" or by saying that in them "devoutness replaced intelligence." It was not simply "mistrust of politics or naivete" that led Msgrs. Julien Gouet or Duquaire to abet a Touvier, of staunch right-wing Catholic past and family, and not a Communist or an anticlerical republican on the lam. The fragility of French Catholics' democratic education, as of their commitment to the Republic, were familiar political realities in pre-1945 France. "Apolitical dolorism" may well be, and often was, an effective form of politics.

While much has changed since then, the specter of Vichy still has the capacity to torment the French. When, last spring, Touvier appeared before a court to learn if he would be tried for crimes against humanity, the three judges quashed the case on the wholly questionable grounds that the state Touvier served (Vichy) was not, technically, a totalitarian regime nor did it systematically persecute people for religious, racial, or political reasons. Vraiment? Jews, Communists, and sundry resisters might demur. The case has been appealed and may be revised.

Meanwhile, a new embarrassment to the French bishops has arisen with the publication last month of a book by Msgr. Charles Molette, archivist of the Eglise de France. The work is a study of the wartime "martyrs" of the Service du Travail Obligatoire (French citizens shipped off to forced labor in German World War II factories) whose Catholic faith led them to underground activism and sabotage inside Germany. Molette produces some disturbing evidence to show that the largely pro-Vichy French episcopacy gave little or no sympathy or support to STO Catholic activists.

While most Frenchmen, including Catholics, would probably not be surprised by Molette's findings nor wish to see Touvier escape conviction, the problem of Vichy no longer preoccupies the Eglise de France as it once did. Catholicism in France has come a ways since Villot wrote Pompidou on Touvier's behalf. The Vatican II "revolution," though being rolled back in many areas, has changed French Catholicism once and for all. The French episcopal conference today freely denounces causes like Le Pen's while taking a radical stand on such hot social issues as immigration. (The French clergy is even further ahead of its flock on many questions than the American bishops are ahead of theirs.) This said, John Paul II's neoconservatism has unquestionably made itself felt in France, as everywhere else. The traditions, sodalities, and individuals that are lumpable under the rubric "Catholic Action"--meaning church immersion in the world, epitomized by the worker-priest movement--are still present but are no longer the defining force of the French church (not least because too many priests of the 1960s, the so-called "lost generation," have left the cloth).

Center stage in France has, for some time now, been hosting a highly visible spiritual rebirth. Words like "repentance," "continuing conversion,""spiritual formation," "evangelization," and "charismatic renewal" describe the new emphasis. Strongly backed by France's leading cardinals, Decourtray in Lyon and Lustiger in Paris, the benefits of this sort of renewal include a slight upswing in Mass attendance and vocations (Lustiger ordained twenty last year, a bumper crop), and a quite spectacular groundswell in degree and vitality of lay involvement in church life at all levels. There are many examples of this, but perhaps the most "mediatique" [media-attracting] has been the resurrection of France's youth movement, in part a response to a direct appeal from Pope John Paul. Colorful pilgrimages to St. Jacques de Compostelle, Chartres, and elsewhere have stunned the bishops for their youthful zeal and magnitude.

There is a growing sense in many French Catholics that certain familiar and demoralizing statistics (e.g., Mass attendance below 3 percent in numerous dioceses; deaths exceeding ordinations to the point that in thirty years there will be 8,000 priests in a country where there are now 25,000, etc.), don't reflect the reality, which is that a "greened" French Catholicism is alive and well. Nor have outsiders failed to see the new light under the old bushel. A lay associate of Cardinal Lustiger's said recently, "Lapsed Catholics and nonbelievers are no longer so hostile or suspicious. On the contrary, they seem to be saying to the church, 'We're genuinely interested in your message. Don't disappoint us; be good. Live up to your words. We might follow.'"

Undeniably, the inimitable archbishop of Paris stands at the center of this renewal, though he is the first to give the credit to Lyon. (Decourtray's misfortune is to be of the same generation as Lustiger; in any other era, he would be France's leading churchman.) These days, however, Lustiger is away a lot. I doubt this is so because he is more uncritically appreciated abroad than at home, though that is true; rather, his role in the international arena has increased steadily over the decade. Lustiger continues to stand in the small handful of the pope's closest cardinal-advisors, in which capacity he takes important parts both on and off stage--e.g., the decision to remove the Carmel from Auschwitz or his role in the newly organized colloquy of Western European bishops. (Perhaps because of derisive criticism, Lustiger and the pope no longer speak of "Europe" in the faintly medieval terms of respublica christiana; the conference is now more like an informal club whose main purpose seems to be to make its members aware of the problems and opportunities of Eastern Europe.) There is a strong likelihood that Lustiger could have been named Vatican secretary of state a year or so ago, but he turned it down for several reasons: his work in Paris is still in medias res; he's a lousy administrator, and knows it; and, above all, he would find a curial job too removed from human contact. ("He'd never get used to saying private Masses," said his priest-secretary.) In short, Lustiger is coming to know himself, his strengths and his limitations. None among the former is greater nor potentially more significant than the sort of prophetic witness he gave recently as Chubb Lecturer at Yale.

In a speech titled "Let My People Go," this convert who still considers (and occasionally calls) himself a Jew, talked about the Judaism he finds implicit in Christianity, and vice versa. The address was a kind of contranationalist tract for our time, studded with erudite references, in which Lustiger made one of the strongest statements yet offered by a churchman of his rank on the topic of the Jewish-Christian relationship. Analyzing what he sees as the universal--not the familiarly tribal-core of biblical Judaism, Lustiger argued that the supposedly singular story of the Jews' continuing reemergence from bondage lies at the heart of that other great biblical faith, Christianity. Where the "good news" is proclaimed, the Jew is present. Anti-Semitism for the Christian is thus a form of self-hatred. As a coda, Lustiger noted that the Jewish story is present in "the lot of the black Africans in the New World." "In a way, by becoming Christians, [African-Americans] considered themselves as Bene Israel, children of Israel. And this may be why American Jews and African-Americans have had so much in common for so long."

Crucial as Cardinal Lustiger's ideas are for setting the course of the French church, he is not the only pilot on the bridge. Peter Hebblethwaite was right when he singled out the vision of the Jesuit, Paul Valadier, to be one of the most searching and interesting theologies in the contemporary world. While more profoundly conciliar in his optimistic take on church and society than the cardinal, Valadier is an extremely subtle man whose thinking is wonderfully unpredictable. His latest ideas do not permit the facile and provocative contrasts with Lustiger's which the French press sometimes like to draw. (The cardinal, for his part, continues to deny taking any role in Valadier's ouster, some years ago, from the editorship of Etudes.) Clearly, Valadier approves some of the archbishop of Pans's stands, including perhaps Lustiger's recent reassertions of the church's right to sit in judgment of government and its actions. In his latest work, Lettres a un chretien impatient (La Decouverte, 1992)--a book urgently deserving of translation into English---Valadier produces a strikingly original rereading of the "Syllabus of Errors." Arguing that Pope Pius IX in some regards foresaw and, as it were, foredenounced the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Valadier writes that "when the church rises up against the limitless pretentions of the state, it is not necessarily because it aims in its turn to lay hands on the state in a totalitarian manner, but rather to show that an authentic state, true to its real nature, must accept not to be everything." Consider, he quietly concludes, our justified outrage when the church loses its courage to judge the state (e.g., Pius XII on the Jews).

More may be said about the strange meeting ground of these two highly learned, so-French clerics. Lustiger, the antimodernist prophet, shares with Valadier, the postmodernist intellectual, a mutual critique of modernism. This latter theory--fashionable in Parisian circles since the publication of Marcel Gauchet's Desenchantement du monde (1986)--holds that Christianity has emancipated the world from any need for religion, including itself. Valadier makes mincemeat of Gauchet, systematically demonstrating in two long "letters" how the faith of Christ is far more at home in contemporary, pluralist, consumerist, secularized society than it ever was in the mercifully departed days of "decoratively Christian society" (Maritain's phrase) which Gauchet takes as the norm. "If, on the contrary," the Jesuit writes, "one agrees to look closely and with goodwill at the values and principles that structure our contemporary world, he will see that they furnish the bases for a Christian renewal," even as that very renewal will prove critical and transformative of those values and principles. On Valadier's reading, pluralist society stands "more than ever in need of minorities of conviction" (Maritain called them, "minorites de choc prophetiques") to criticize its idolatries and mythologies.

Where Lustiger and Valadier differ profoundly is in their orientation to the world and the church's role in it. In the last analysis, the cardinal cleaves to a pessimistic and rather old-fashioned notion of church-against-the-world, while the Jesuit evinces great confidence in the gospel's continuing pertinence and strength as leaven in secular society. Valadier mistrusts a Catholicism that "seeks to project its identity and specificity in a marginalism raised to a proper characteristic." The church, he argues, is neither self-sufficient nor, still less, a perfect society. It should not therefore see itself as a countersociety, measuring its success according to how well it manages to "disqualify the world" or to envelop society and government, as in Carolingian times. Both projects, on Valadier's reading, lead to "questionable, to say the least," developments.

Reviewing the Touvier matter and the recent spiritual renewal in French Catholicism in light of the above, one may say that whether or not the Remond volume succeeds in distancing the church from the ghost of Vichy--and I would say on the whole it does--the mentality that permeates the book nevertheless to a large extent remains the apologetic one of us-against-them that is so reminiscent of pre-1945 French Catholicism. It is a stance and a temperament one also finds alive and well in some (by no means all) of the evangelizing and spirit-raising initiatives going on in France today. Valadier writes of the latter that many are legitimate "sites of spiritual invigoration [ressourcement]," but that others not only show signs of gnosticism and antisocial illuminism, they also fall politically close to Lefebvre-style integrism, and to that extent risk recreating the old dualism and antimodernism which have served the church so badly. The charismatic element, he adds, often leads to religion as a show, as football, with its own stars and stadiums. It appears modern, it imitates modernity in certain regards, but at bottom it sets itself up as a rival to the modernity that it hates and mistrusts. As such, it is unbiblical.

Notwithstanding this caveat, I would repeat in closing the words with which 1 closed an earlier profile of Cardinal Lustiger (Commonweal, April 25, 1986): for a Catholic, Paris (and indeed France in general) is an exciting spiritual place to be.

STEVEN ENGLUND is a free-lance writer who specializes in French history and culture. He lives in Waupaca, Wisconsin.