Voice in France

The strength of Christianity is paradoxical. In France, which is generally anticlerical, and which counts a fourth of its population as Communists, Catholicism is more alive and creative than elsewhere in the modern world. As a further paradox, some of France's Catholic leaders are viewed askance, as flirting with heresy, by the Vatican itself.

One sign of French Catholic vitality is the movement called Mission de France (TIME, Feb. 27, 1950), which sends its priests into the world to live, work and dress as ordinary laborers and peasants. One of the leaders of the Mission de France is Father Andre Depierre. Something of his story is told in the Protestant quarterly, Christianity & Crisis.

He lives in a strongly Communist working-class district of Paris. As a priest, he worked as a ragman and a factory worker, only began to perform his priestly duties full time when his congregation asked him to. Writes Father Depierre:

"Believers or unbelievers, young or old, Communists or humanists, we are discovering our unity and our truthfulness with ourselves ... as we are put to the erection of the same brotherly city, beyond our divisions and easy denials. For we are the beginning of a renewal of the world . . . the modern world is not yet, and it will seek itself until the Face and the Smile of God, through the dynamic and active presence of Christians . . . have led it in its yet misshapen and scattered search. The modern world will create itself progressively when the Church, forgetting its limitations of the past, stripped of its clothing from the Middle Ages, reinvigorated by the Evangelical Vision, will have assumed it, transfigured it, unified it . . ."

Social radicalism, Father Depierre feels, should have no terrors for Christians.

"Mankind, by its genesis, is revolutionary; mankind redeemed by Christ is ceaselessly storming original sin and the sin of the world whatever it may be ... Redemption is a perpetual fight, a perpetual effort of mankind against the inner evil that strangles it. Then why have these songs of joy and deliverance, started maybe a bit clumsily by the great socialist leaders, met only with condemnation amongst us, contented hearts and closed minds that we are? ... Why have we, who are living no more the lot of the poor, lost the meaning of the word 'Saviour'? . . .

"Why blame the Marxists for their thirst of an earthly paradise, as if God had not made the earth a Paradise first, as if the Saviour had not torn out the sin of the world, as if we were not saved, redeemed by Him. . . ?"

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