Therefore, the Permanent Council of the Conference of Bishops of France appears to have been content with a strict minimum, by proposing on the occasion of the legislative elections only a prayer and not a declaration explicitly taking a position on the issues and proposals. parties. Certainly, we can consider that begging the patron saints of France to make it “a land of freedom, justice, fraternity and lives up to its role in history” is a way of discreetly devaluing certain options – look to the right, at the back, over there… But is it any wonder that the disagreement is so euphemized?
Because the bishops have no choice: they must draw the consequences of the change in balance underway within the Catholic electorate. From the moment when nationalist parties and not conservative or centrist parties are in the lead among Catholics who voted, and even among practicing Catholics, which is a novelty, it becomes very complicated to take clear-cut positions. The episcopal situation is already difficult enough, between the partial loss of credibility linked to the more or less efficient treatment of questions of sexual assault, the accelerated reduction of staff, the decline in the number of faithful and the trend reduction in resources, not to wanting to add a problem to others.
Calls to prayer
In short, to take Michel Audiard again, “when child protection (assume the Ciase report) coincides with the personnel crisis (the emptying of the priestly body)we need to understand more, we need to pray ». Including action: the bishops call for prayer. It doesn’t eat bread anyway, and it hasn’t been shown to harm anyone yet. The Permanent Council would therefore act like Lacordaire at the Constituent Assembly in 1848, by choosing ” the ceiling ” rather than right or left.
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However, being at the ceiling is not that insignificant, and does not mean that the bishops are as politically incapable as the restorer of the order of preachers in France (who resigned after fourteen days in office). The episcopal ceiling has in fact always been political, like that of the popes, the political subtext of their statements often being quite easily understandable.
And that is indeed the case here. Because few elections have given rise to calls for prayer rather than press releases, and this is not only due to shifts in the Catholic vote. It should be noted that the Permanent Council press release judges the situation in France very harshly. No one is spared: the dissolving president, the politicians responsible for part of the situation, the citizens unable to blame their leaders whatever they want. The questioning goes as far as that of the very structuring of society, by indicting the primacy of economic rationality and social disaffiliations.
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And, what we hadn’t seen for a long time, finally emerges “the erasure of God in the common consciousness”. In cauda venenum : one would think one was reading Leo XIII at his best, or all the Pius of the 19th and 20th centuries, from number VI to number XII, without forgetting Leo XII, Gregory XVI and Benedict XV, all of whom never ceased to hammer home in all forms that the occultation or social and institutional negation of God leads to collective and individual misfortunes.
Return of intransigence
There is here a form of return of intransigence (this contestation of political, philosophical, economic, cultural liberalism, etc.), and in its decadentist slope, which we cannot fail to note, if only because it leads to the more or less explicit fear of a fragmentation of the nation giving rise to physical violence, even civil war.
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But we must qualify the idea that this would be an absolute novelty. In fact, the Permanent Council of the CEF has been developing this critical and worrying music since 2016. No doubt we have forgotten, the declaration “2017, election year: some food for thought” and the long reflection “In a changing world, rediscovering a sense of politics” were just as severe on French developments.
Without the tone being apocalyptic, vindictive, vituperative, vaticinating or incisive, the analyzes were in fact acidic and disenchanted. The press release of June 20 only summarizes them abruptly, considering that nothing has fundamentally changed, which is in fact an implicit way of judging quite negatively the results of the Macronian exercise of power.
Primacy of the spiritual
Behind the elliptical call to prayer is therefore a questioning of those in power, and ultimately a way of abandoning modern politics to itself, to its compromises, its inabilities, its violence, to the pettiness of its issues in the light of eschatological hope. Everything is done in the name of politics, of which the Church once again presents itself as the best guarantor: the service of the common good, social friendship are here opposed to politics, as in 2016, and always in the name of “the hope of the reign of God”.
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This press release is therefore very intransigent, which discreetly but clearly claims the primacy of the spiritual. There is undoubtedly a real novelty here: the confirmation of an inflection already at least seven years old – the age of reason… -, which shows that the confrontation with liberal modernity, growing since the fall of the USSR, is becoming more and more explicitly the basic logic of the institutional Church in France – for the faithful, that is another question: but that is not new at all.
