Provocateur or prophet? The French church & Bishop Gaillot.

Gallus Gallo Lupus. The French are wolves to each other. Yet the fraternal conflict engendered by the Vatican's dismissal of Bishop Jacques Gaillot of Evreux is extreme--even for France. Men and women who believe in a God of love and who strive to love their enemies treat fellow Catholics who differ in their estimate of Pere Jacques as if they were schismatics or Protestants. Unsubstantiated allegations of homosexuality, of racism and anti-Semitism, of psychosis and neurosis are thrown around by responsible and highly placed people. The Gaillot affair has dealt a body blow to the ancient eglise de France, ripping old scars wide open. Cardinal Pierre Eyt, archbishop of Bordeaux--a prelate who has Rome's ear--doubts that the Vatican appreciates just how torn apart his countrymen are. It is a sign of the times that when asked what sort of epitaph he would like to see affixed to his episcopate one day, the cardinal replies, "a traditional moderate who tried to hold onto the old Catholic liberal wing because he knew they were sincere."

The Gaillot affair has provoked more than a few reactions in the United States. Despite considerable attention in the New York Times and the National Catholic Reporter, the story has yet to receive dispassionate consideration. I spent six weeks in France this past summer trying to sort through the issues. I would be lying if I claimed that I arrived in Paris without a point of view. Subsequent researches and interviews (on and off the record), with more than twenty-five people, including most of the large cast of this French melodrama, as well as with a number of leading prelates, taught me a lesson I never seem to learn well enough: Things are not always what they seem. It is tendentious and wrong-headed to hurl abuse at the Vatican for acting (or reacting) as it did, but it is equally true that the bishop of Evreux has a great deal to be said for himself and his views. In the end, a reasonable person can understand both sides quite clearly, even sympathize with them. One's final judgment on the matter will be largely a product of what one thinks a bishop should be.

Jacques Gaillot was appointed to the see of Evreux in May 1982, at forty-six, the youngest ordinary in France. A year later he made news by supporting a conscientious objector who refused alternative service. Soon after, Gaillot was one of two (out of 110) French bishops to vote against the episcopal conference's statement on nuclear arms (approving the policy of nuclear deterrence). June 1984 saw one of the largest postwar mobilizations of French Catholicism--on behalf of parochial schools. Gaillot again took a contrary stance.

The first extended attention paid to Gaillot by the media came in January 1985 when he signed an appeal on behalf of underpaid Catholic school teachers. Among his co-signatories was Georges Marchais, head of the Communist party. "A tool of the church's worst enemies" was among the epithets flung at Gaillot by conservatives within his own diocese. The right-wing Le Figaro conducted a campaign against him. Gaillot calmly defended himself, noting, "while the church often appears allied with the Right, the gospel is not neutral"--implying that the gospel was not only not conservative, it was left-wing.

At the annual conclave of the French bishops in Lourdes the following October, Gaillot told the press he felt the bishops "remain too preoccupied by the correct functioning of the church and its structures." Instead they should be speaking out more strongly against apartheid or nuclear testing. Early in 1987, Gaillot called for voting rights for immigrants while decrying the quasi-racist political party, the National Front. Criticized for not providing clear explanations for his actions, he replied: "The role of the bishop is not to find solutions but to raise cries....His first job is to witness, not to explain....We have to break this myth of unanimity of the bishops." Gaillot also traveled to Athens to show solidarity with a boatload of Palestinian refugees (he had already publicly embraced Yasir Arafat), to South Africa where he appeared with a group of Communist militants, and to New York City where he spoke out for disarmament at the UN. He also attended a black-tie affair of the Free Masons, famous throughout France (and French history) for their anticlericalism.

During the 1988 episcopal assembly, Gaillot not only broke the secrecy of the conclave by leaking information to the press, but he spoke out for married priests and the use of condoms to combat AIDS. LeMonde's religion reporter, Henri Tincq, comparing Gaillot to "either a sniper or a prophet," wrote that the bishop "has the merit of saying out loud what many people in authority in the church think down deep." A month later, Gaillot blessed a union between two homosexuals.

1989 brought the first of many public invitations from Gaillot's French episcopal brothers to shut up. The president of the bishops, conference, Cardinal Albert Decourtray of Lyon, wrote "Cher Jacques" a confidential letter in which he confessed his "stupefaction" at seeing Gaillot break the secrecy of the bishops, meeting while taking public positions opposing the magisterium. Decourtray summed up: "Your situation is serious....With all the friendship you know I have for you, I ask you, if not to retract, then at least to cease making declarations opposed to the teachings and doctrine of the Catholic church."

A few days later, at episcopal intervention, Gaillot was disinvited at the last minute from an appearance he was to make on the French Catholic "minitel," an on-line, question-and-response hour. He called it "a serious attack on my freedom of expression." Following an interview he gave to Lui (a French version of Playboy), Gaillot was chastised by the vice-president of the French episcopal conference. The bishops voted again to censure him. Gaillot offered his resignation if the pope wished it. He also gave an interview to the leading French gay magazine, while in another venue he pleaded the incompetence of the Catholic hierarchy to judge the homosexual condition.

Then, on February 15,1989, Gaillot surprised everybody by publicly submitting. Saying "there is no mission without communion," he signed an agreement with Cardinal Decourtray in which he promised "loyalty" and even "docility" toward the pope and the teachings of the church. Hardly a week later, however, Gaillot dissociated himself from the French bishops, disapproval of Salman Rushdie for his antireligious remarks in Satanic Verses. Soon after, appearing on a TV program approximating "Meet the Press," Gaillot renewed his critiques of the "feeble state of internal debate in the church," lamenting that "the great missionary breath born at Vatican II has in part disappeared."

A month later, the Vatican's nuncio in France conveyed to Gaillot news of the pope's refusal to receive him. Meanwhile, the bishop of Papeete in French Polynesia publicly complained of Gaillot's appearance in his diocese (to condemn nuclear tests) without first informing him. On December 12, 1989, while all other bishops boycotted a civil ceremony at the Pantheon honoring a revolutionary bishop who, in 1792, accepted a position in the constitutional church that had broken with Rome, Gaillot put in an appearance, noting, "Once again the church has missed a chance to reconcile herself with the Nation and the Republic." In late October 1991, Gaillot wrote a piece in Le Monde demanding the French bishops and Rome change sides in Haiti and support Jean-Bertrand Aristide. This, and more, led the bishops, conference to censure their colleague again.

In midspring 1994, Gaillot was formally admonished by the new president of the bishops, conference, Archbishop Joseph Duval of Rouen: "It is not impossible that Rome will ask you to resign or will install an apostolic administrator with full powers [in your diocese]." The purpose of Duval's warning was to try to protect Gaillot from a Roman reprisal. Gaillot now changed his mind about offering his resignation. "I'm not seeking to hang on, "he said, "but the time to jump ship isn't when it's pitching and tossing." He later changed his mind again and threatened to resign if he were not allowed his freedom of expression. Still later he refused to resign. Henri Tincq has compared Gaillot's situation to the case of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen in the United States. But the circumstances and the outcome proved to be very different.

The climax took place this past January. "Monsignor for Others," "Monsignor Arafat," "the Red Bishop," "Monsignor Narcissus," "the Agnostic's Herald," and "l'enfant terrible" was summoned to Rome to meet with Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, head of the Congregation of Bishops. Gantin had warned Gaillot, on three occasions, about dividing his flock and isolating himself from his brother bishops. The pope himself had once waved an admonitory finger at the bishop of Evreux, telling him it wasn't enough "to sing outside the chorus, you also have to sing in the choir." Meeting with Gantin on January 13, Gaillot was offered the choice of resigning his see, in which case he would receive the title of bishop emeritus of Evreux, or being fired, in which case he would simply be the ex-bishop of Evreux. In the latter event, he would retain the rank of bishop with a title in partibus. Gaillot left the meeting, but instead of getting back to Gantin that evening with his decision, went immediately to Paris where he gave a statement to Agence France Presse saying "the blade has fallen."

The reaction to Gaillot's removal proved considerably more explosive and far-reaching than anyone, certainly Rome, had anticipated. Monsignor Jean-Michel Di Falco, official spokesmen for the hierarchy, Cardinal Coffy of Marseille, and Archbishop Duval were "visibly troubled" and surprised by Gantin's action. In his official statement, Duval said "I pleaded for patience in Rome." A fortnight later, he "regretted" Rome's authoritarianism. But in contrast to the Hunthausen affair, no French bish op publicly sided with Gaillot against Rome.

The French media spoke of little else. Gaillot's "transfer" mobilized opinion far beyond the limits of practicing Catholics (10 percent of France's nominally Catholic population). Demonstrations took place all over the country; fallout was registered in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland. Politicians and public figures of all hues spoke out condemning Rome.

But it was within the church that the major reaction took place. In Henri Tincq's words, "the very heart of French conciliar Catholicism" saw itself attacked and rose up. "The Vatican Blunders in Evreux" read a LeMonde headline, under which ran a story by the paper's noted Vatican II correspondent, Henri Fesquet, who came out of retirement to blast Rome. Forty thousand letters were received within a fortnight at Evreux, while petitions and postcards signed by scores of thousands were sent to Rome. Polls indicated that 73 percent of those questioned felt Gaillot's ouster was uncalled for. His final Mass in the cathedral at Evreux (January 22) brought out several thousand of the faithful in a pouring rain, led by the Communist mayor. Demonstrations across France often included the most active laity in parish work. Catholic media spoke with unheard-of vehemence against Rome. The official spokesman, Monsignor Di Falco, declared these reactions "very unnerving."

The Case against Gaillot

Gaillot himself attributes his dismissal to lobbying in Rome by the far right wing of the French church, especially the reintegrated followers of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre whom Gaillot feels (not without reason) the Vatican and the French bishops are cosseting. He also darkly alludes to the influence in Rome of former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, whom Gaillot attacked in a book on the immigrant problem. Yet neither of these proved as decisive as the limited but sharp, articulate anti-Gaillot opinion which has been heard since the early eighties from conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike.

The most common complaint voiced against Gaillot was his abuse of the media. He is said to speak out too often too unthinkingly. It is true he has an opinion for all occasions with which he is cheerfully ready to identify the gospel. His positions have included, inter alia, criticism of the Rota for annulling Princess Caroline of Monaco's first marriage, disapproval of the U.S. for going to war in the Persian Gulf, and imprecations against the Treaty of Maastricht for being unfair to the poor. In passing, Gaillot compared Rome's governance of the church to Stalin's rule in the USSR, Cardinal Gantin's methods to those of the Stasi, the East German political police, and called Archbishop Duval an "ayatollah" seeking to impose "ideological uniformity" on the French bishops.

Gaillot waffles about his handling of the media. He insists bishops need to spend more time in front of TV cameras, yet he "confess[es] my media sins....[I don't think] I always manage to extricate myself intact from this jungle of images and sounds....I worry about the accumulation of misunderstandings and contradictions that my interventions in the media give rise to. I try hard not to [speak out so much] but I succumb. How many times have I promised to be discreet? But sadly I fall back." He'll pause and say with disarming candor, "I know one day the media will drop me." He stresses that "of course" it is much more important to say Mass than to give an interview. Yet even admirers can point to instances where Gaillot has done the opposite. Charles Bonnet, head of the Sulpicians in France and no supporter of Rome in this set-to, wags his head in perplexity at Gaillot's canceling--at the last moment--a scheduled Mass with the seminarians of Paris in favor of an impromptu press conference. A journalist, Pierre Georges, considers Gaillot's apologies "the false contrition of an insatiable bulimic."

Then, too, Gaillot seems incapable of challenging his interlocutors, even in the face of gross anticlericalism. His personality and appearance do not serve him well in this regard. A short, slight, balding fellow with an imperturbable adolescent smile, friendly blue eyes, and a sweet reedy voice, Gaillot offers the impression of constantly being a bit astonished to be there. He speaks in choir-boy accents of God's reconciling love for the poor, of his own recent book, and then he may make one or two general points about the topic at hand, but beyond that offers no "thought" or sustained reflections. Never does he raise or answer hard questions. Rather, one senses that if Gaillot rather than Jesus had met the adulterous woman, he would speak to her of God's forgiveness while failing to tell her to go and sin no more. In our pluralistic and ambiguous world, such a posture may be seen not as compassion but as complicity and complaisance.

Gaillot's character clearly gives rise to doubts. "In all that I do, I have the need for transparency," he will say. But the statement rings hollow even to some of his close collaborators who tell disturbing stories of his hypocrisy, manipulation, and false naivete--not to mention his stubborn imperviousness to advice or correction. His vacillation about resigning as ordinary seems in retrospect to have been determined not so much by principle, or the welfare of his diocese, as by which choice would most annoy the Vatican or the French bishops. Then there was the strange matter of the Decourtray accord. Many among Gaillot's supporters took the bishop's signature to be disingenuous. He himself cannot explain why he signed, since he never intended to live up to the collegiality, not to say, the docility that the accord entailed.

Perhaps the most disturbing character issue concerns Gaillot's treatment of the man who was his vicar-general, Pere Jean-Francois Berjonneau. In 1991, Cardinal Gantin requested that Berjonneau write a secret report on his bishop's governance of the Evreux diocese. The priest agreed to do so because he thought he would take the heat off Gaillot by submitting a laudatory statement, which he did. Several years went by before Gaillot found out about the report. Though Gaillot well knew the report was friendly, he did not resist the temptation to use it to attack Gantin, informing the press in a misleading way on what Berjonneau had done. This led to headlines on the order of "Gaillot Sold out by His Vicar-General." Much of the liberal Catholic and leftwing media in France violently attacked Berjonneau, who was left to twist in the wind, all because Gaillot did not make the facts plain. A humble man, devoted to his bishop, Berjonneau did not defend himself. Gradually the press discovered the true situation but too late to rehabilitate the priest. By then the former vicar-general had fallen seriously ill with meningitis; Gaillot never visited him in the hospital.

But the gravest charge against Gaillot is undoubtedly his alleged break from "communion." This includes his defections from Vatican positions on the issues of the day--contraception, married clergy, etc. Gaillot's supporters insist that he is only speaking out in ways that Catholics of his own diocese already do. A diocesan synod of Evreux, for example, called for admitting divorced and remarried Catholics to the Eucharist and for ordaining married men. Gaillot says, "I only say out loud what many other [bishops] keep to themselves. I speak it plainly while the others use such a refined style that they end up not seeming to affirm what they have in fact said." The communique from Rome announcing his transfer said, "Unfortunately, the bishop has not shown himself able to exercise the ministry of unity that is the bishop's first duty."

Gaillot admits, "for a long time now I've been a rebel." Like the late bishop of Orleans and leader of the liberal wing of the "conciliar" church, Guy Riobe, Gaillot is the black sheep of the Gallic episcopacy. But unlike Riobe, he has never cultivated any support among the fairly large minority of "conciliar" bishops still left in France. This is also a major contrast between Gaillot and Hunthausen. The bishop of Evreux never joined episcopal committees, never networked or even bothered to be in touch with his colleagues, and never asked their permission to come into their dioceses to take positions at odds with the Vatican and the French church. He didn't bestir himself to take an active part in the bishops, meetings--thereby setting out his opinions for critical inspection--yet he went after his brother bishops hammer and tong in speeches and press conferences where no confrontation or dialectic threatened. Worse, Gaillot felt free to leak the substance of the bishops, debates, including sometimes sensitive documents, to the press. It got so that the French bishops no longer felt free to speak their minds in front of him or to send documents to him.

A leading French philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion, points out that in this age of strong national episcopal conferences, Gaillot comports himself like a bishop of the old regime. He goes where he likes when he likes, he's absent from his diocese much of the time, he takes strong positions on topical social and political questions, no matter how far removed from religion. It is "political religion," m Marion's words, and even if the content is a politically correct version of Vatican II, rather than old regime royalism, the end result is the same: the faith ends up being made to play to a range of predictable worker-priest or 1968 ideological themes. Gaillot disclaims any ambition to hold the office of bishop, yet there can be no doubt that episcopal authority not only appeals to him, it explains his great impact. He speaks of "my second birth" on becoming ordinary of Evreux, and one sees why. Until then, as vicar-general or rector, Gaillot's words and actions were as unexceptionable as they were orthodox, giving no augur of future controversies. One may ask why. Surely there were opportunities that a vicar-general might have found, as easily as a bishop might have resisted. It is hard not to conclude that what was missing in the equation is the access to notoriety that can only come in a Catholic culture from the unique office of bishop.

The Case for Gaillot

Gaillot treated his flock to their initial taste of his fix on things in the coda of his first Easter message as ordinary: "Christ died outside the walls as he was born outside the walls. If we are to see the light, the sun, of Easter, we ourselves must go outside the walls." Making it clear he was less concerned with the 10 percent of the faithful who go to Mass than the 90 percent of nonpracticers and nonbelievers, Gaillot strode resolutely extra muros: "I'm not here to convince the convinced or take care of the well. I'm here to support the ill and offer a hand to the lost. Does a bishop remain in his cathedral or does he go into the street?. . .I made my choice." Thus, as between embarking on a planned pilgrimage to Lourdes or grabbing a last-minute plane for South Africa to demonstrate against apartheid, Gaillot never wavered. Small wonder he has visited prisons more often than any other bishop. "A man is always greater than his crime," he says of those he meets behind bars, and he claims to be astonished at people who are astonished at a bishop for doing this. "We all agree the gospel must be proclaimed everywhere to everyone. But when it's a question of compromising yourself and taking a risk to do so, that's another story."

So far not that unusual. Where Gaillot parts company with other "conciliar" prelates in France is when he criticizes the church for not making the downtrodden its own power center: "The church is too linked to a certain level of social wealth," he says. "The poor are tolerated but not: permitted to take responsibility or make decisions [because] they don't have the knowledge or the diplomas....Let's gamble more audaciously. Let the poor become conscious of their rights, dignity, and citizenship in the church. Let them appropriate the gospel. They don't need us as their spokesmen."

The result of consistently making statements like this, or publishing books with titles like The World Cries Out, the Church Murmurs Back, or logging time visiting prisons and ghettoes, and generally doing battle on behalf of immigrants, gays, people with AIDS, etc., is that no other bishop in France comes close to rivaling Gaillot's reputation for solidarity with the underdog. His brother bishops grouse that Pere Gaillot claims to monopolize the cause of the poor; they charge him with dividing his flock or abandoning most of it on behalf of the few lost sheep. To which Gaillot replies with perhaps the most self-revealing statement of all: "Even though a bishop, I feel I'm the lost sheep."

Gaillot also assails the church for not tolerating criticism of itself. "I never broke the of celibacy," he says, "I only questioned it. But that's worse." A supporter told me, "As long as you do it discreetly, breaking church laws is more acceptable than questioning them." Gaillot believes this is the sheerest hypocrisy. With indignation, he notes that Cardinal Gantin "never inquired about the distress of the poor in Haiti. No, he was only concerned about protocol: whether I had informed the Haitian bishops of my visit." This hypocrisy would be avoided, Gaillot believes, if the church stopped "reacting as if she had everything to fear from an interior dialogue about herself with her faithful."

But it is not Gaillot's style and stances that isolate him from his fellow bishops. Henri Tincq has written that the hue and cry raised against Gaillot's transfer was "the revenge of a generation": The generation is those Catholics whose parents flocked to the alphabet soup of "Catholic Action" organizations (JOC, JAC, JEC, etc.) in pre- and postwar France, whose spiritual mentor was the early twentieth-century desert hermit Charles de Foucauld, who can cite snippets of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, who came of politico-religious age in May of '68, and who, above all, claim Vatican II as the foundation and origin of their sincere and very passionate Catholicism.

Such men and women have been anything but happy campers for over a decade now, since a converted Jew was appointed archbishop of Paris and launched a very self-conscious and effective backlash against them. Their dream was brilliantly and elegantly summed up by their great historian Rene Remond when he wrote in 1973 that "the church, issuing from its long Constantian night"--that is, forgoing any and all ties to this state and to power--"will succeed in dissolving itself into the mass of humankind, henceforth only to live on in the form of small communities of believers freely assembling in their common search of faith."

In the opinion of large sections of France's active Catholic population, Paris's Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger has succeeded in redefining this dream as a nightmare. At his rough hands, the remaining Catholic Action faithful have felt neglected and impotent. "We count for nothing," one of them, Francois Marin--a retired priest of the Evreux diocese--said in tears. They have heard themselves blasted for "losing the Catholic soul of France" and for being complicit or complaisant visa-vis Marxism. They have watched their catechism (Living Stores) scoffed at and thrown out. They have had their faith maligned for not placing enough emphasis on prayer, sacrament, pilgrimage, and hierarchy. Last but not least, they have undergone the nearly unendurable frustration of the prodigal son's older brother: standing by as their greatest nemesis, the integrist followers of Archbishop Lefebvre, stream back into the church to be accorded better treatment than they.

They have, with greater or lesser degrees of reluctance, accepted the spokesmanship, if not exactly the leadership, of Jacques Gaillot. They have been joined by a large number of divorced Catholic of Catholics who regularly use contraceptives or have had abortions, Catholics who live with lovers or who are homosexual or ex-priests, ex-nuns, or ex-seminarians.

Reflections of an Interested Observer

In France you hear talk comparing Gaillot to the hapless protagonist of the Dreyfus affair, a century ago. It's probably fairer to say the Gaillot matter is in certain ways a reverse of the older one. Then, an innocent officer was thought guilty by most of the population; today, a prelate of questionable views, personality, and deportment is widely seen as a martyr to the faith. "What upsets me is Gaillot's claim to have a monopoly on the gospel." The cardinal archbishop of Marseille's lament is that of most French bishops. To have let this perception persist was a serious public relations failure for both the Vatican and the French bishops. Rome's other great error is lack of due process. While the Vatican did not act with wild disregard in this case--if bishops were indeed regarded as mere "branch managers" by Rome, who can doubt that Gaillot would have been fired long before?--the Congregation for Bishops did, at the climax, upend the French episcopacy with a fait accompli. There are roughly 3,000 bishops in the universal church and it is predictable that some of them might be, or become, unfit for episcopal ministry. Yet there is no agreed-upon, uniform, and public process for reviewing such cases.

If Cardinal Gantin had been cannier, if Rome had submitted Gaillot's dossier to a searching public review, not only would the Vatican and the French bishops have fared better in the media, there is reason to think Gaillot right have failed, or at least have had great difficulty passing, the test. An open examination of Gaillot's record would have allowed the international public in on legitimate questions about Gaillot's suitability for being an ordinary.

A number of Gaillot's more articulate sympathizers--including dedicated priest-collaborators of the bishop, like Peres Berjonneau and Marin, or leading numeraries of the old Catholic Action, like Pere Jean-Francois Six of the Mission de France (the worker-priest movement), or Pere Charles Bonnet, of the Sulpicians--quickly elide the issue of Gaillot's personality in order to move directly to the smoking gun, the lack of judicial form. In passing, they readily grant that Gaillot is obstinate, unable to keep his word, to take criticism, or to view himself critically. He is a loner indisposed to working as part of a team.

It is no less disconcerting to find how coy many French media people are about Gaillot. It is easy to understand how the bishops, spokesman, Monsignor Di Falco, could complain of the bad faith of journalists who, off the record, guffaw at Gaillot's shortcomings, yet, in news reports and editorials, rail at the Vatican and the bishops. It is certainly true that a lot of journalists, including several of France's leading religion reporters, will tell you confidentially that Gaillot is manipulative but dupable, a dreamer but a fauxnaif, a megalomaniac obsessed with his image, unable to answer for himself vis-a-vis the media, and a sincerely religious man who is intellectually underendowed. Writers like Elie Marechal of Le Figaro speak of asides they've had where Gaillot comes off seeming strange, almost paranoid, while at other times he is inappropriately intimate with reporters he barely knows, presumptuously using the tu where no other bishop would dream of doing so. Others talk of Gaillot's deep "need" to be in the spotlight, to play the martyr's role, and of his inability to keep a secret.

One emerges from these interviews with characters drawn from all sides with the uneasy sensation that many who have been exposed to Gaillot seem to wonder if the man possesses anything like the inward assurance and control needed to be even an adequate ordinary.

Of course these ad hominems are far from constituting conclusive proof of Gaillot's unfitness to wear the episcopal mantle, but taken in conjunction with the charges of absenteeism, broken communion, and an all but hopelessly divided flock, they do indeed constitute reasonable cause to hold such a review. The prelate whom the National Catholic Reporter called "a bit of a compassionate maverick" has not sinned against doctrine and dogma nor committed moral turpitude, but it is legitimate to question whether his behavior is appropriate for a diocesan bishop. Pere Jacques, who calls himself "more of an awakener than a leader," could turn out, on closer study, to be a dreamer not a prophet, in sense that Jeremiah understood it ("Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully" [Jeremiah 23:28]).

Though nearly all French bishops were shocked by Rome's action, they soon returned to fretfully tugging their forelock. The call to convene an extraordinary sitting of the national episcopacy to discuss the fallout from the Gaillot matter was dropped the moment it was known that Rome disapproved. The few prelates, like Cardinal Coffy of Marseille, who aired ambiguous reactions to Gaillot's dismissal have retreated, if not repented, and are now leaning over backward to show "consensus." The respected editor of Etudes, Jean-Yves Calvez, S.J., asked recently, "Doesn't the entire church of France too often exist in an atmosphere of timidity and mistrust, a false prudence?" Mightn't her bishops be too "timorous" toward Rome? For his part the equally respected sociologist, Dominique Wolton, can only shake his head in dismay at the paradox which sees the church be bold-unto-reckless when it comes to condemning sexual behavior that "everyone practices, yet hesitate over disciplining a "flake" like Gaillot. Whence such gingerliness, he asks? What other community--surely not the army or the scientific establishment--would tolerate a maverick tearing it apart from within for a decade-and-a-half?

Wolton answers his own question: The church in France is hobbled by "institutional masochism," the product of decades of accumulated guilt over the church's past misuse of authority. He feels the time for such agonizing is gone; society has a deep need of the transcendent and the church has the tradition and faith to speak to that need. "Gaillot," he says, "is a symptom of the church's incapacity to assume its own history and its own value." And so, Wolton advised the assembled bishops whom he was invited to address at Lourdes last year: Speak out, "plainly and authoritatively."

The Gaillot affair's immediate effect on episcopal pronouncements hasn't gone in that direction, however. The general reaction among French bishops has been to assert, in the teeth of media interpretations--and, frankly, of common sense--that the Vatican's decision to dismiss Gaillot had "no political character," as an associate of Cardinal Gantin's put it. Archbishop Duval and Cardinal Coffy published a "Message to French Catholics" in the wake of the Gaillot mess, in which they asserted, "The church is not a people as the French people are a people...," rather it is a "sacred" people. One of France's leading moral philosophers, Paul Valadier, S.J., finds such statements smack of latter-day "monophysitism"--they try to spiritualize power questions.

If the French bishops are really searching for a plain, authoritative, and utterly cogent way of "Proposing the Faith to Today's Society" (the title of a report issued on their could actually do a lot worse than to read Valadier's recent book, The Church in Process: Catholicism and Modern Society. While the author is something of a critic of "the new spiritualism," a close reading of his book shows that here, as in most Valadier works, his views are not simple to slot. There are more than a few areas where the Jesuit concurs with Cardinal Lustiger, the prime exponent of papal influence in the French church, that, for example, holiness escapes statistics and the vitality of French Catholicism may be better measured in the witness of its recent martyrs in Latin America than in the latest dismal figures on Mass attendance; a rejection of the "utilitarian argument" for religion ("insisting that Christianity is necessary as social glue will only prepare the ground for atheism when it is found by many that religion isn't necessary"); a critique of Catholic Action for creating an anti-intellectual undertone in the French church; a critique of technocratic illusions and language (for example, abortion euphemized as "interruption of pregnancy"); or the importance of appreciating Judaism's unique role in laying the foundation of Christianity's message of universality and salvation.

The real gravamen of Valadier's book, however, which brings him far closer to Cardinal Lustiger than the latter may realize, is the stern rejection of the thesis--much lionized in France these days--that Christianity, while it greatly contributed to creating modernity, has seen itself exhausted by modernity. Again and again Valadier demonstrates what Lustiger asserts: How contemporary society constitutes more than ever a superb venue for Catholic action, so that "rather than stand at the dusk of religion, it might be nearer the truth to say that Christianity is the dawn of modern religion." Of course, the Catholicism Valadier presupposes is a nondefensive, open-armed, embracing one: "For the Christian faith, there is no healthy return to its sources or its roots unless these are held onto, not for their own sake, but in order to find the dynamism to go into the world." The church, he writes--and he might as well be referring to the Gaillot affair--is traversed by the same questions that rip open society, so therefore she cannot be imperturbable and massively self-assured if she would also be part of the world and helpful to the world. Rather, "she participates in the trials and processes of the world, which is why she is in a position to judge the world. This process is made up of contestations, debates, and contradictions. It is a trial without end." Finally, Valadier's wonderful definition of faith in the late twentieth century, ". . .it isn't an imperialism, a piece of armor shielding us from all uncertainty nor is it an intellectual sufficiency. It is, rather, a tenacious small bit of light that progressively reveals its force without eliminating the night which it nonetheless illuminates. Such a view [of faith] might refrain credibility for it with those people who have been understandably frightened off by [the church's] excessive certitudes, which in fact only cover up so much fear and so many weaknesses."

Postscript: Quo Vadis Jacobus?

There is nothing of the Yves Congar or Henri de Lubac about Gaillot. Not for the new bishop of Partenia, a long defunct diocese in North Africa, to work quietly and be silent until further notice. Gaillot moved directly from his residence in Evreux to living with squatters who took over a building in the rue du Dragon, in Paris's 6th arrondissement. There, he added the cause of the homeless to the long list of topics he speaks out on. Recently he traveled to Polynesia to protest the resumption of French nuclear testing. The French bishops voted to continue his salary ($1,000 a month plus living stipend), and they assigned two of their number to stay in contact with him--in the hope of discerning with him "the right" ministry. So far they have seen little of Pere Jacques. Meanwhile, the Vatican has proven coy about whether Gaillot's request to meet with the pope will be granted. It appears unlikely. The former bishop of Evreux published, this past spring, a book-length "letter" to his new flock: Chers Amis de Partenia. In it, he indicated he had the intention of going to Africa to visit his diocese in partibus infidelium. But Monsignor Piroir, the Algerian bishop in whose diocese Partenia falls, has begged the French episcopate not to let Gaillot come. Pere Jacques has agreed. In France, you can lose your job shooting off your mouth, but in Algeria these days, you can lose your life.

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