The Evolution of a Mission

Extract

It is now little over five years since the worker priest crisis in France provided the world press with a first-class story. For the vast majority in England (whatever may have been the case in France) the disciplinary action of the Holy See and the storm it aroused were, indeed, the first intimation that for several years a number of priests had abandoned the security of presbytery and religious house to work at the dock or in factories and share in every respect the living conditions of the working class. But even for those Catholics in England who were already aware of the movement and sympathetic with its aims, the Roman condemnation came as a bolt from the blue. They found themselves, in fact, singularly ill-equipped to find any answer to the inevitable accusation that the Church had shown itself to be incurably distrustful of any new methods of evangelization and indissolubly wedded to a ‘bourgeois’ outlook and way of life. Their embarrassment was only sharpened by the outcry which broke out in Catholic circles in France. Was there, in fact, danger of a split in the French Church or of the rise of a new and more bitter Gallicanism? Here at any rate was M. Mauriac talking darkly of a new concordat (not that many of us in England at least made much of what that might mean).

Looking back at all the furore from these five years’ distance, what perhaps is most surprising is the silence that has succeeded the storm.