For G. Cuchet, the decline of French Catholicism, if it began in the XIXe century, accelerated abruptly during the 1960s, paradoxically driven by the modernization of the clergy which nevertheless wanted to adapt to modernity.
Paul Veyne, in a famous work, had tried to show how, under Constantine, the Roman Empire had become Christian. In his latest work, Guillaume Cuchet wonders how our world, in this case France, ceased to be Christian. The hero of his story is “Canon Boulard”. This priest of the diocese of Versailles coordinated statistical surveys of religious practice for the bishops of France, from the 1930s to the 1970s. He was one of the founders, with the jurist Gabriel Le Bras, of pastoral religious sociology. Developed for the purposes of reconquest within Catholicism, it paradoxically experienced its rise shortly before the fall of the practice in France during the 1960s.
Understanding the break in practice in the 1960s
Since the XIXe century, there is a wealth of analytical literature on the decline of French Catholicism. In the aftermath of the Revolution, Lammenais was already concerned about religious indifference. In the 1940s, the essay France, a mission country? Fathers Godin and Daniel sounded the alarm for a whole section of the clergy in the face of the return to the pagan state of certain parts of the territory. If since the 1990s, the Catholic Church has internalized the impossibility of a reconquest with, for example, the attempt by Bishop Albert Rouet The Chance of a Fragile Christianity (Bayard, 2001), it must be acknowledged that the process is slower than expected or feared. The resurgence of Catholics in recent societal debates shows that, despite everything, there is a sociological Catholicism that can still demonstrate its capacity to mobilize.
In this book, Guillaume Cuchet proposes to perform an autopsy of the moment when, despite everything, a real collapse of religious practice took place: the mid-1960s. Before the collapse, the vast majority of French people were still baptized Catholics and 20% of them still went to mass regularly. Some regions, such as certain cantons of Vendée or the Massif Central, still show rates of practice close to social unanimity. The year 1965 was a pivotal date. From then on, all practices collapsed.
The historian uses Boulard’s work to “see what, in the Catholicism of the 1950s, could have prepared or provided the way for the rupture of the 1960s” (p. 27). The rupture of the 1960s was not unknown to the pastoral actors – Boulard included – of the time. Only in view of the magnitude of the changes undertaken by the Vatican Council II and in order not to feed the conservative camp, the results were not commented on. For Guillaume Cuchet, the Boulard surveys of the time were nevertheless very formal: it was indeed the young people who, traditionally had constituted the public most supervised by the practice, who were dropping out the most.
The rehabilitation of this turning point allows Guillaume Cuchet to distance two dominant interpretations in French Catholic memory. If, in the conservative pole, the rupture is associated with the upheavals of May 68, in the progressive pole, it is the ban on Catholic couples using chemical contraceptives by Pope Paul VI in the encyclical Humanae in 1968 which is used as the major explanation. For the historian, the rupture is upstream of 1968 which only accelerated a dynamic that was already launched: he proposes “a scenario of double rupture (…). A first level occurring in 1965 would have been followed by another in 1968” (p. 98).
The decline of the practice is said to have begun earlier than its perception by Catholic leaders, before 1968, when the Vatican Council II (1962-1965) began to be applied in France.
A new look at the conciliar years
The work bears witness to a current intellectual moment. The one where the Vatican Council II and the ” catholic crisis » that follows can be understood in a more complex way and with a much more freed perspective from Catholic controversies. Professor at Sciences-Po Paris, Gerd-Rainer Horn recently published a book on “the spirit of the Vatican II ” This expression nevertheless constitutes an integrist theme par excellence insofar as the forces of openness have been reproached for having perverted the council by a “spirit” which betrayed its letter. In the same way, Guillaume Cuchet rereads the internal quarrels of Catholicism anew.
The enterprise of modernizing the Church, if we follow him, would have paradoxically accelerated a disengagement that social and cultural changes would have, in any case, engendered. The historian does not overwhelm the French clergy. Sincerely engaged in its pastoral renovation, it was nevertheless able to feed, in spite of itself, the dropouts. If, constantly, Guillaume Cuchet rearticulates religious causes to broader social and cultural causes, he nevertheless takes the risk of giving fuel to conservative, even fundamentalist themes.
Several detailed analyses support the thesis of a clergy acting in its own downfall: the religious supervision of youth, the relationship to death and confession. Before the 1960s, the religious practice of children was strong from first communion or private communion (at the age of reason) to solemn communion (around 12 years old). Then, young people moved away from the sacraments. The fact remained that the Catholic Church accompanied children towards a rite of passage that affected a large part of an age group. The transformation of solemn communion into a profession of faith, requested by a part of the modernizing clergy, had a paradoxical effect. The conciliar priests wanted to raise the degree of sincerity of 12-year-olds by asking them to write a text to publicly express their faith. But by excluding those who were driven by social usage rather than sincerity, the Church may have deliberately widened the gap with the baby boomersThis is part of the context of the Berthoin Decree (1959) which raised the age of compulsory schooling to 16 years of age. The old rite of passage to adulthood, desacralized by the school and the Church, gave way to this more diffuse time of adolescence.
In this “anatomy of a collapse”, Guillaume Cuchet also analyses the relationship to the “last things” (heaven, hell and purgatory) and to the confession that is articulated there. Here we find the interest that the historian has shown for several years now in the sacrament of penance. More than attendance at mass, he sees in the collapse of confession, “the nuclear explosion of French Catholicism” (p. 206). By losing the hearts of frequent penitents, the clergy would have lost the public with the greatest capacity for action in society. He identifies three main reasons for this loss. The end of the culture of compulsory confession is again motivated by the clergy’s concern to increase the quality of penances. Similarly, in a context of theological optimism, priests have put across the idea that heaven was more accessible and have agreed to the faithful taking communion without having confessed beforehand.
Beyond institutions
Guillaume Cuchet’s work is stimulating in the avenues it opens up, but his work, like any good work, can raise questions. The documentation left by the Boulard investigations, as the historian himself acknowledges, does not really allow us to address more qualitative reasons for the dropout. However, this would help to tone down a narrative that places great emphasis on the unexpected and surprising nature of events. The abandonment, for example, by the clergy of a pastoral insistence on the last ends, is in fine presented by Guillaume Cuchet as an inconsequential choice of religious actors. It is perhaps above all an inability that they had to maintain inherited methods. Discourses and practices become little credible or effective in a changing society where, moreover, the laity, far from being passive and lacking autonomy, distance themselves from them consciously and not because the clergy induces them into this choice.
Generally speaking, the rupture of transmission is a valid problem from the moment we accept the idea — which is, after all, very ecclesiastical — that it is the passage to the identical, from generation to generation, which must characterize it. What changes and evolves in religious practice can occur outside the sacraments and the perimeter of the licit delimited by the ecclesiastical authorities. The experiences around collective celebrations of penance are, for example, treated here from the doctrinal texts of Rome which regulate the evolution of penance from the Council to the 1980s. The question is little addressed, in reality, by the motivations of the actors in the field or the theologians who thought them up at the time. Forbidden under John Paul IIthis type of ceremony has in fact marked the end of an age of Catholic penance since the faithful have never returned en masse to what existed before them. However, these celebrations had, at the time, received a favorable echo which testified to a future that the institution did not subsequently validate.
Guillaume Cuchet’s work actually rules out the possibility of thinking of a non-institutional and more sociological Catholicism. This is an interesting methodological bias. It allows us to situate ourselves in a very comprehensive approach to Boulard’s sociology and the ecclesiastical concerns of his time. It perhaps struggles more to think of other, yet crucial, developments of the sixties. Spiritual changes can also take place outside the scope of established religion and the historian may not necessarily have to see them as immediately invalid.