French letter: Are the French losing their religion?
The murder last Sunday of a Catholic priest in the Vendée, south of Nantes, has got me thinking about the present state of what was for centuries known as the fille aînée de l’Église, the First Daughter of the Church. I was looking across from the newly-built terrasse of Les Marronniers, one of our local cafés, towards the gigantic pile that is the Église Saint-Laurent, consecrated in 1892 to replace the more modest Notre Dame de Botmel, these days a picturesque ruin. Serving a town with less than 3,000 inhabitants (down from 5,000 fifty years ago), it is truly vast, reflecting the fact that France at the time was on the up and ready to splash out, even in far-flung Brittany.
Today, though, it attracts only a trickle of worshippers, mostly women, most of them elderly. I asked a Marronnier regular this morning who the priest was. She had no idea. Neither had the barman. Nor, I suspect, would any of his customers. He turns out to be a young man, Breton-born, who has a responsibility not only for St-Laurent but also for seven other parishes, which he serves in monthly rotation from his base in Guingamp, thirty minutes drive to the north. Needless to add, I have never set eyes on him, though his clerical collar would surely be a giveaway.
Priesting can be a rough old trade. A decade or so ago, I was unreliably informed, back in the dark days before the present enlightenment; a young curé was despatched to the parish who turned out to be gay, causing some of the less progressive community members to poke fun at him.
As the story goes, he was too upset to continue and was transferred back to head office, to be replaced by a large, more muscular priest who, in spite of what you might fear was the disadvantage of being black, commanded instant respect. I hope that is true (the latter part, I mean), but it could just as easily be made up. You can never tell.
The decline of our parish is mirrored across the country. If the Church of England thinks it has problems, it should thank God that it is not the Church of France. Attendance at mass has declined dramatically since the War. More than a quarter of those who describe themselves as Catholic (roughly 90 per cent of the population) only turn out on an occasional basis. Of those who bother, just 2 per cent are regular attenders. One in eight never cross the threshold of their local Church, and a whopping 59 per cent only put in an appearance at weddings, funerals and christenings.
These days, more funerals are conducted on a purely secular basis, as was the case this week when our neighbour Jean-françois said goodbye to his father without the benefit of clergy. The same is true of weddings. When two friends of ours got hitched last year, it was the local mayor, wearing his sash of office and surgical mask, who conducted the ceremony. It was all done and dusted inside of 15 minutes, at which point we withdrew to the Café de la Place, where our request for champagne all round resulted in the presentation, in an ice bucket, of a bottle of sparkling white wine of uncertain provenance.
The Church in France, in which Cardinals and bishops frequently invoked Joan of Arc as if she were a reincarnation of the Virgin, had had a good run. But as the Reformation lost impetus, followed by the long wars of religion, the old certainties were increasingly questioned. However, the Revolution, erupting a century after the revocation by Louis XIV of the Edict of Nantes, did the most lasting damage. The authors of The Terror took a dim view of men in vestments claiming to speak for a higher power. They ordered churches to close and exiled some 30,000 priests. Hundreds of those who remained were executed.
Even so, with the reintroduction of the Christian calendar and having survived the anti-clerical spasm of the Commune, the Church slowly regrouped so that by the late nineteenth century, in however sclerotic and bourgeois a fashion, it was once again at the centre of national life.
Perhaps the seeds of its current decline were planted during the seemingly senseless slaughter of the Great War. “Whose side was God on in the trenches?” was a commonly asked question on all sides of the conflict. Alternatively – or as confirmation of a trend – it could have been the Liberation in 1944 that pushed things along, when it became clear that it was the nominally Protestant armies of America and Britain, assisted by some one hundred thousand résistants, that threw off the Nazi yoke, without help from the Pope.
Whatever the explanation, there was to be no second recovery. France in 2021 is actually, as well as constitutionally, Godless. The Church is shrunken, with few new ordinands coming through to take the place of 14,000 veteran priests, with an average age of 72, who are steadfastly moving to a better place.
And yet and yet, when the Cathedral of Notre Dame was struck by lightning in 2019 and almost lost, France held its breath. I remember how still and silent the people of Paris appeared as they watched the flames burn through the medieval roof timbers until they toppled the spire. They were horrified. Three years earlier, when Father Jacques Hamel was stabbed to death by an Islamist extremist in his Church in Normandy, the crime was regarded as particularly foul, as was the murder last week of Father Olivier Maire by a deranged asylum-seeker who had been placed in his care.
Somewhere, buried deep in their consciousness, the French remain attached to their Catholic heritage and the values it espouses. But the relationship is becoming increasingly attenuated. When even the long-term natives of my local town cannot name their priest, who these days mainly celebrates mass in his sacristy, not in the Church, where the words of the Eucharist would echo in the emptiness, it may be that the remaining faithful are clutching at straws.
Enjoyed this letter? Read the rest of Walter Ellis’s letters here.