A French Catholic on Church and State

Extract

As Vicar-General of the diocese of Nimes in southern France, as founder of the Assumptionists, and above all as helper, adviser, and often guiding spirit of nearly all the great religious enterprises of his day in France, Fr. Emmanuel d’Alzon was one of the most influential leaders of French Catholicism in the XIXth century. His Writings, with their frequent allusions to contemporary events, would serve as a penetrating and supremely interesting commentary on the passing of the Third Republic. Thus, in 1835, writing to a friend, he crystalised his thoughts on the Church’s part in politics :

... I assure you, have made up my mind about politics, my most intimate conviction being that Christianity must be separated from parties . . . in order to dominate them all by spreading through society the so often stifled seeds of justice, order and charity. Christianity is destined to be the foundation of society : belonging to no particular fraction of the body, it must embrace them all, link them together, and force them to forgive one another.

In the light of this principle, the co-operation of the spiritual and temporal powers for their mutual benefit, he would almost certainly have welcomed the fall of the Third Republic, whose rise he watched wistfully for ten years before his death : much as he, the descendant of some of the noblest families in France, would have regretted the circumstances of that fall, he would, as a far-sighted, optimistic, and Christian thinker, have considered the actual passing of the Rousseau-inspired system, which had so largely betrayed the Catholic traditions, the ‘soul ‘of France, as a providential stepping-stone, a link in the long chain of historical events, from the worst threads of which God is forever weaving greater good.