Religion: End of the Worker-Priests

The French worker-priest movement, one of the century’s most exciting and most debated religious experiments, finally died last week after long illness.

To win back France’s Communist-led, largely unchurched working classes, the French cardinals in 1943 founded the “Mission to Paris.” Specially trained young priests began to take jobs in factories to pursue their evangelizing mission more effectively; wearing overalls, they held fulltime jobs, said Mass and performed other pastoral duties during off hours. By 1953, it was obvious that something had gone wrong: of almost 150 worker-priests, some 20 had married and left the church while others had joined Communist unions or Redline causes. Pope Pius XII sternly limited les prêtres-ouvriers to three hours of factory life a day, but only a handful submitted; others left the church, and only 25 continued in their mission, eventually won limited approval from their bishops.

De-Christianized? Last spring Maurice Cardinal Feltin, Archbishop of Paris, asked permission from the Vatican’s Holy Office to revive the worker-priests under strict controls. Back from Rome came a firm no. Last week, as French cardinals and bishops met in Paris to discuss the situation, the Holy Office’s confidential directive was published in Le Monde (after an obvious leak, perhaps from a disgruntled French prelate).

Speaking for the Holy Office, Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo agreed that the church must try to recapture the French workers’ allegiance (although he noted stiffly that men who received the “sacred and indelible mark of baptism” could not be considered totally “de-Christianized”). But, continued Pizzardo, “it is above all through words that the priest must testify, and not by manual labor accomplished among workers as if he were one of them . . . Work in factories or shops is incompatible with a priest’s life and aims.” Even if a worker-priest could find time to say Mass and perform his other duties, he would still spend time “on manual labor that should be devoted to sacred studies; he is also plunged into a materialistic environment harmful to his own spiritual life and often dangerous to his chastity. He is made to think like his fellow workers in union and social matters and becomes enmeshed in the class struggle.”

Upside Down? In place of the worker-priests, the Holy Office recommended the formation of secular institutes composed of priests and laymen. Under the instruction and guidance of the priests, said the letter, the lay apostles could carry on the mission in the factories.

There were signs that the French hierarchy, traditionally jealous of its independence from Rome, was disgruntled by the sharpness of the Vatican’s order. “Rome could tell us to stand on our heads and of course we would,” said one church official in Paris, “but even upside down we would hold fast to our own view on what is at stake here.”