The Pope's questionable lesson in secularism

Fuit of the singular history of the emancipation of the State in relation to the Catholic Church, the French conception of secularism is difficult to grasp for many foreigners. The Pope, supreme guardian of the Catholic faith, is obviously not in the best position to promote it. But we could expect him to give a fair reading of a principle and legislation designed to allow the cohabitation of all forms of belief and disbelief, and which sanctions any attack on the freedom not to believe but also that of believing.

By choosing Corsica for his third trip to France, François confirmed his preference for the “peripheries” and his complex relationship with our country. After the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 2014, he visited, in September 2023, “in Marseille but not in France”according to his expression. Sunday December 15, a week after the reopening ceremonies of Notre-Dame de Paris, to which he refused to attend despite invitations from the Elysée and the diocese, the sovereign pontiff spent the day in Ajaccio at the opportunity for a conference on “popular religiosity in the Mediterranean”.

The choice of this theme and of an island where 90% of the inhabitants say they are Catholic, and where religious practice remains fervent and intertwined in political life, ensured the success of a visit marked by an open-air mass followed by more than 17,000 people. But it was also intended to convey a message of distrust towards the French secular model. Pleading in favor of a “healthy secularism”which is not “neither static nor fixed, but evolving and dynamic”in short flexible “Corsican style”, Pope Francis thus reiterated, in an attenuated form, the criticism that he has already expressed of French secularism in the “coloring inherited from the Enlightenment much too strong” leading, according to him, to presenting religions “like a subculture”.

A vector of freedom

That secularism is a subject of debate and is the subject of caricatures, abuses and political exploitation is a reality; that representatives of religions can have a critical vision of it is obvious. But Pope Francis, by immediately positing the secular principle as a fixed dogma, tends to reinforce the proponents of the conception he intends to denounce, that which makes secularism an anti-religious weapon and not a vector of freedom for everyone, essential to living together.

Rather than appearing, contrary to Corsica, to link the dechristianization of France to its secularism, the pope could question the way in which the populations, Catholics included, perceive his recent remarks – in Belgium, on September 29 – assimilating doctors performing abortions “hitmen” and essentializing women (“woman is fertile welcome, care, vital dedication”), moreover still excluded from positions of responsibility in the Church, its silence on sexual violence in the Church, in particular the refusal of the Vatican to make public the archives on Abbot Pierre.

Highly respectable and powerful, the humanist messages of Pope Francis, his preference for minorities and those left behind, his sensitivity to the question of migrants, his allergy to exclusionary nationalism – expressed explicitly in Corsica – would be carried with more force if the Church which he embodies knew better how to recognize its own errors, learn from them, and live more with the times.