Beyond the fractures, dialogue despite everything

He ended up turning off the sound on his phone. For several weeks, notifications have been multiplying and Father Stéphane 1 is on edge. Email, WhatsApp, Facebook, on all the discussion “threads” the political question is agitating Catholics. Like Internet users, they are becoming more and more aggressive in their exchanges and tensions are exacerbated through interposed screens.

In the parish of this priest in the Paris suburbs, everyone defends their own camp. “We look at the other either as a fascist or a Nazi, or as a Trotskyist,” he despairs. Sometimes, the priest is called to help arbitrate. Which he refuses to do. He even simply avoids broaching the political subject. “There is so much hatred, our communities are tearing each other apart,” he notes worriedly. On the steps of a nearby church, Véronique, in her sixties, adds: “We have the impression that today, it’s everyone’s life, everyone’s chapel.”

Several hundred kilometers away, in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Isabelle and Ludovic 1 , until then, embodied the exact opposite. Involved in various associations helping migrants, but also defending life, this dynamic retired couple never hesitated to express, without complex, their positions, to the point of getting involved in a political party. But today, they keep their opinions to themselves. “We are cautious,” they confide. “Covid had already deeply divided us, between the “provax” and the “antivax”, and we were very saddened by it.” Concerned about reconciliation and unity, “a priority of the Church”, they say, these believers have decided to avoid sensitive subjects.

Keep quiet so as not to divide

Have Catholics become more radical in their positions? Polls published by the daily The cross the day after the European elections show that they are not immune to a change that concerns the whole of French society. While practicing Catholics are more resistant than other voters to the temptation of the extreme right – 18% of Catholics who regularly attend mass say they voted for the National Rally (RN) in the second round of the European elections, compared to 31.37% of French people – they are nonetheless increasingly fewer in number voting for centrist lists. The movement of the faithful towards the extreme right dates back to the mid-2010s. The failure of La Manif pour tous gave rise to the feeling among some Catholics that they were not being heard, to which was added the succession of Islamist attacks (Toulouse and Montauban in 2012, Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan in 2015, etc.). For Catholics as for the rest of the population, the subject is no longer so much that of the divide between left and right as that opposing the center to the extremities of the political arc.

One ideal continues to bring them together, however: the search for the “common good.” This is at the center of the Church’s social thinking., but everyone interprets it according to their own values ​​and draws from it the priorities that they consider legitimate: for some, it is the reception of the stranger, for others, the absolute defense of life. “Everyone sticks to their positions in the name of a certain reading of social doctrine, and all of this is sterile, regrets Father Bertrand Auville, priest in Plessis-Robinson (Hauts-de-Seine). We cannot escape the stigmatizing words, which hystericize the debate. I fear that we have become like everyone else: specialists in postures, very little receptive to opposing arguments.”

Sitting at a table with other young people at the Christian café Le Simone in Lyon, Gwenaëlle, 27, no longer knows what to think of her conversations with her friends: “As a Christian, I have a hard time positioning myself. In a few days, I heard: if you follow the social doctrine of the Church, you can’t vote for the RN. And the same argument was used for the New Popular Front.” Everyone looks in the Gospel for the elements that justify their position, and the conversation turns into a dialogue of the deaf.

In small groups

Exchange remains possible in groups where the “other” shares more or less the same reading of the social thought of the Church. Small circles are formed around a community that is chosen not for its geographical proximity but because one feels good there, in affinity with the profile of the other faithful and the liturgical practices. Every Sunday, Margaux and Benoît, parents of three children, thus travel forty minutes by car to attend mass at an abbey in the region. “It is more lively and joyful,” they explain, “and then, there are more families like us than at the one in the village next door.” This polarization is not recent, recalls the sociologist of Catholicism Josselin Tricou, but, for many, it remained taboo. “As Catholics become a minority in society, the reduction of the masses into small groups reveals the differences, which are now asserting themselves,” he explains. The researcher, assistant professor at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), goes so far as to mention the formation of parallel Churches, “schismatic within themselves”, a reality that the Church, according to him, has difficulty in grasping.

A Christian responsibility

However, more and more voices are being raised, warning of this danger of fragmentation. “There are already not many of us left, the survival of the Church depends on it!” warns Antoine, a thirty-year-old from Angers.

The numerous letters received by the editorial staff of Pilgrim confirm this growing concern. Thus Laurent writes to us: “There is no point in further accentuating the divisions between Christians! Even if it is difficult. We must accept each other and live together whatever our differences.” In a text with strong words, inserted in the parish bulletin of Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Belleville, in Paris, Aline even utters this cry from the heart: “Beyond ideas, what troubles me the most is this climate of deep dissensions between us.” Betting on unity within the Church which represents the “body of Christ 2” is “anything but sentimentality,” she continues. “Our faith obliges us.” “The challenge is not to all agree and to politically support the same project, but to consider the other as one’s neighbor, despite the differences,” explains Father Laurent, priest of a working-class parish in Yvelines. This means putting aside judgments to listen to each other. And to start thinking together.

This is the project of Victor, known on the YouTube network as “the Catholic on duty” and followed by 32,600 subscribers. On June 28, the young man published a video on his channel entitled “How to vote in a Christian way”. “The goal was not to say who to vote for, but to ‘give keys’, he explains. It is emotions that are expressed the most, particularly on social networks, to the detriment of arguments.” This “Catholic on duty” invites Internet users looking for answers to ask themselves the essential questions. A 2.0 maieutics that works, since many Internet users post their comments.

In “real” life, new spaces for dialogue are emerging within the associative world; in scouting, solidarity cafés or other Christian places for example. The Scouts of France recently invited unit leaders to organize times of sharing with young people in order to discuss current issues, by offering them educational tools to facilitate dialogue. On the institutional side, interesting initiatives are beginning to emerge, even if many parishes remain cautious in the current political context. In Limoges (Haute-Vienne), the deanery offers evenings of meeting and debate on current issues, based on the expertise of a parishioner. “We always come out of them feeling better, it helps us to gain perspective and to educate ourselves,” assures Father Vincent, one of the organizers of these meetings. In the diocese of Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), the last two evenings organized by Father Auville, where recognized political figures speak, were sold out. “Young people, old people, Catholics from the right and the left are mixing together,” rejoices the priest of Haut-Clamart. A timid impulse, but an impulse nonetheless.

1) The first name has been changed.

2) First Letter to the Corinthians, chapters 1 and 12.

For a century and a half, the social doctrine of the Church as a compass

The Church “tells kings to devote themselves to the people, she tells the people to submit to kings, thus showing that all men do not have all the rights, but that charity is due to all and injustice to no one.” When Leo XIII takes up these words of Saint Augustine in his encyclical Diuturnum, It is 1881. The text is published just a few weeks after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the painful end of the Papal States. This troubled end of the 19th century forces this very young pope to provide some keys to the relationship between Catholics and the political world of the time. The pattern is still classic, rooted in the faith of the first Fathers of the Church who invited Christians to show great respect to authorities in order to be better able to proclaim the Gospel to all.

Ten years later, this same pontiff echoes the even more radical social changes of his time, marked by industrialization and the emergence of the working class. Denouncing both the socialist collectivist ideology and the capitalist materialist excesses, the encyclical Rerum novarum will initiate a theological process that will give flesh to the social doctrine of the Church.

With its essential pillars: intrinsic dignity of all human life, subsidiarity, solidarity, sense of the common good. A doctrine that has enlightened the commitment of many faithful for decades, as much in the political as in the union, associative, and activist fields. Should we therefore defend certain social priorities to the detriment of others? The risk is then great of reproducing political divisions within Christian communities as the last elections have shown. Relentlessly inviting Catholics to conceive of new ways of dialoguing together, Pope Francis recalls that in the social doctrine of the Church, “everything is linked”. A way of getting out of the ruts when, in the name of the same teaching, Christians end up opposing each other head-on in the political field.