The Destiny of French Catholicism

Extract

One may well wonder whether contemporary civilization does not create a type of man impervious to religious feeling.’ This sentence from the preface to M. Dansette’s book sets the general tone of the work, which is to show how this generalization applies in particular to France, and what the French Church is doing about it. Using the techniques of sociology applied to religious data, undertaken first by a professor of Canon Law, Gabriel Le Bras, M. Dansette paints a picture of a de-christianized France where there exists a Church in which old forms struggle against new ideals. Of course, Le Bras’ four categories of Frenchmen do no more than register external observances—it is only by and large that they reflect a religious mentality, and the categories themselves are very crude: ‘dissidents’ who do not belong to the Church, ‘seasonal conformers’ (those who go to church for baptism, first communion, marriage and death), ‘faithful’ who make their Easter duties and go to Sunday Mass, ‘pious’ who do more than that. Again, practice itself is often deceptive; though very faithfully observed in the eighteenth century, no one would describe that as a century of faith: ‘Un pratiquant peut être athée et un non pratiquant, croyant.’

The figures, even with the obvious reservations, are interesting. Three per cent of the French population is unbaptized; 3 per cent confessionally non-Catholic; of the 94 per cent baptized, 34.2 per cent make their Easter duties—but again this average figure is deceptive, since regional variations are so marked.