French Opinion

Extract

The Algerian war has left so deep a wound in French life that it is rarely realized in this country that the end of the war would be by no means the end of the story. The problems of conscience created by a revolutionary war are scarcely going to be resolved by a particular armistice, and a recent issue of Informations Catholiques Internationales provided concrete evidence of the effect of the war on many of the young Frenchmen who have served in it. An enquiry conducted by priests of the Mission de France, themselves concerned with the pastoral care of soldiers serving in Algeria, underlined the appeal of the Cardinals and Archbishops of France last October for a recognition of the absolute rights of conscience in refusing to co-operate in positive evil. And the ‘reflections’ of a young Catholic, on his return to France after two years in Algeria, under the title ‘A Clear Teaching to Deaf Ears’, provides impressive evidence of how little effect even official ecclesiastical condemnation of torture and other excesses of repression can have when ‘many no longer reason in terms of “Catholics” but in terms of “Catholics of the Left” or “Catholics of the Right”, as though it were a question of two Churches anathematizing each other, and who only select from the Church’s teaching what happens to coincide with their own principles’. It is significant that a recent number of Jacques Soustelle’s Vhitis sur I’Algerie publishes a letter from an officer serving in Algeria which attributes the Declaration of the French Bishops to the propaganda of ‘progressive’ priests,