Monday, Mar. 01, 1954
A Question of Authority
"France is the eldest daughter of the church," a wit once observed, "but she's the youngest daughter when it comes to getting into mischief." The mischievous daughter was fairly vibrating with volubility this week over an old question: the parental authority of Rome.
The immediate issue was the future of the worker-priests--a vexed question especially dear to the hearts of Catholic liberals and leftists. Nobody paid much attention in 1950 when the Pope went out of his way (in the encyclical Humani Generis) to blow a warning whistle on
French theologians who showed signs of straying from traditional Thomism. But priests in overalls are different, and the Vatican's recent decision to withdraw them from their factories and filling stations set off a foofaraw of petition-drafting, letter-signing and complaining that the church was abandoning the worker.
Conspicuously active among the protesters were a number of French Dominicans. Their tonsured heads and white habits made a medieval anachronism at workers' meetings and on committees of manifesto makers. But their attitude toward Rome's authority smacked strongly of the Gallicanism of 300 years ago.
A Concordat? Out of the Rome express at Paris' Gare de Lyon one drizzly morning fortnight ago stepped the Master General of the Dominican Order, the most Rev. Emanuel Suarez. He slipped into a waiting car which drove straight to Dominican headquarters in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore and a nervous welcome.
The nervousness was justified. Within 48 hours, mild-looking Father Suarez had replaced three provincials of the order in France, exiled four other priests from the Paris area, and sternly cautioned the assembled monks to stop agitating for continuance of the worker-priest movement (ten worker-priests are Dominicans).
This purge produced a hubbub on the Catholic intellectual left that for a while drowned out the clamor over the worker-priests themselves. One Catholic review hinted that "the influence of Cardinal Spellman and his friend McCarthy" was responsible. In another Catholic journal, a priest wrote that "we are not obliged to believe that Rome's decisions are made out of pure and lofty motives." Gaullist Senator Edmond Michelet demanded that Foreign Minister Georges Bidault "call the attention of the Holy See to the regrettable consequences which our country's prestige might suffer throughout the world ... as a result of this assault on a world . . ." Novelist Franc,ois Mauriac took two columns in Le Figaro to empty the vials of his wrath on the papal nuncio to France as one "who wields on French soil more power than that of any member of the government." Mauriac blamed the situation on the separation of church and state. A concordat with the Vatican, he suggested, could limit the church's authority and give the state "another right than that of keeping still."
"Is It True?" At week's end, as Paris throbbed with meetings, arguments and suggested solutions, 31 worker-priests addressed a letter to Cardinal Feltin, Archbishop of Paris, protesting their loyalty but begging him "not to betray the missionary effort of France." Perusing this petition last week, an abbe called a visitor's attention to its opening words: "You know we have always recognized your authority as a bishop . . ."
"That," said the abbe, "is the root of the whole matter. The only question is: Is it true?"
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