The Case of the Abbé Barreau

Extract

If I were very irreverent, and had thoughts only of a world from which Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalier have disappeared, I’m not sure I ought to take with desperate seriousness the defection of one young clergyman from the ranks of Parisian ecclesiastics. Or is this being frivolous? In a sense, it is, because although there is something banal about the way in which the press here or in France seizes upon the marriage of a priest for a ready headline, Barreau is not just any priest. His origins, for one thing, were most unusual in a candidate for the priesthood. His parents were atheists, with those Freemasonry connections which make French Catholic hair stand on end in a Pavlovian instant; in fact his grandfather was chef de cabinet to Combes, whose anti-religious education laws under the Third Republic in the early years of this century drove the religious orders—for a time—out of French education. To cap it all, his great-grandfather was a communard, shot by the Versaillais. All in all, the number of tongues that wagged with I-told-you-so’s and what-can-you-expect’s must have been pretty considerable when Barreau announced his intention to marry one of his parishioners. But he had come to the Church the hard way. His education at the lycée Condorcet and then his studies in law at the University can have done nothing other than confirm him in the dry positivism which characterizes a good many French agnostics. For Barreau, though, there was the Christianity of the personal encounter which made all the difference. His history teacher at Condorcet was Olivier Clément, whose person and example converted him to Christianity. Not that Clément preached at his pupils. But what Barreau learned from him of the true nature of the real evangelical message—‘subversion, scandal, madness to the world’—showed him that he had been content to dismiss what was merely a caricatured Christianity, itself dechristianized.