Roman Catholicism: Not Cassocks But Coveralls

The French worker-priest is back. Pope Paul VI has resurrected France’s postwar experiment in dealing with the “deChristianized” working class, an experiment once thought to have strayed so radically that liberal Pope John XXIII himself pronounced its doom.

The notion that a shepherd of souls should wear a workman’s coveralls first got important attention one evening in 1943, when Paris’ Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard, who died in 1949, picked up a book written by two of his abbes and sat up the entire night reading it. Authors Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel contended that the French working class, to a large extent seduced by Marxist ideology, regarded the church as reactionary and the Christian faith as irrelevant. The authors argued that priests should go to work in factories and live among workers’ families while preaching the Gospel.

John’s Ban. Suhard started the experiment in 1944, and at its peak in 1953 the movement numbered more than 100 priests. But from Rome’s point of view, it went sour. Twenty priests left the church to get married. Others were taking part in strikes and Communist demonstrations—for example, protesting the arrival of General Matthew B. Ridgway as chief of NATO in 1952.

Pope Pius XII thereupon prohibited the priests from working in factories more than three hours a day, forbade them to join unions, ordered them to live in religious communities. Some priests left the church, some left the movement, and about 50 stubbornly persisted in their ministry, working as truck drivers, electricians, factory-hands, farm laborers. With the ascension of Pope John, the French hoped for a more sympathetic Vatican stand, and were stunned when, in 1959, the ban was strengthened. Still, French bishops permitted the movement to continue clandestinely and persistently argued that the Vatican should give it a second chance.

Paul’s Plan. Pope Paul, who had always sympathized with the idea, has now agreed to let the movement operate on a trial basis for three years under Paris’ Archbishop Coadjutor Pierre Veuillot. To avoid the pitfalls of the past, the worker-priests will be carefully selected, then will undergo rigorous training in sociology and economics to enable them to answer the arguments of skillful Communist organizers. Worker-priests will live in religious communities, but will be permitted to join unions.

The French hierarchy is well aware that the process of drawing the workers back into the church’s fold will be long and difficult. Among French workers nowadays, according to a recent government survey, the percentage of practicing Catholics runs from 2% to 10% ; many millions can quite reasonably be called pagan.