Then all will be right with the Catholic world...

Obviously, I'm just caricaturing.

But this was the tenor of some of the comments that began circulating after the success of the traditionalist Chartres Pilgrimage over Pentecost weekend and the publication of La Croix's survey of young Catholics going to World Youth Day, who indicated enthusiasm for more classical forms of their religion.

The truth is, for the past 25 years we've been hearing the same thing, and in almost the same words...

One generation, the "conciliarists" or the famous "Vatican II generation", has failed to maintain Catholicism at its current level.

And so we need to return to more traditional celebrations, even in Latin, and to a more interior, less "social" practice of the Catholic faith.

Movements encouraged under the pontificate of John Paul II

Between 1990 and 2000, this same Vatican II generation was already being pitted against what was then seen as the "future" of the Church in France - groups such as the Saint-Jean Community and the Community Beatitudes, which were more traditional in their dress, theology, and liturgical practices.

It is not a matter of criticizing these movements today.

But they were presented as the solution at one time, and now we must admit that they were no more so than other groups.

In some cases, they have even been painfully called into question because of their abusive behaviour.

Meanwhile, Catholics of the Vatican II generation - those "conciliarists" who are accused of being the source of all evils - are mostly past retirement age.

Most of them have already died, while those still alive have not been at the helm of the Church for a quarter of a century.

So, if we really must point the finger at someone, we need to be consistent and say it's "the fault" of all these movements born with John Paul II.

An anthropological rupture

Except that doesn't make any sense at all!

It's really nobody's "fault"... or at least, not in that way.

The obsession to blame one segment of the Catholic Church - and let's face it, over the last thirty years, the conciliarists have taken their share of it - is the best way of refusing to see the problem.

The Church should welcome those Catholics who have a rather traditional outlook and remain faithful to regular religious practice.

But we must admit that they do not represent the French population as a whole, and realize that French Catholicism is in danger of becoming a "monocolored" minority.

The culprit, if there is one, is the considerable anthropological rupture we experienced from the 1950s onward, which completely overturned our relationship with the Divine, the human body and the institutions.

The model of an ecclesial institution focused solely on liturgical celebrations on Sundays and the major moments in life (birth, marriage, death) no longer holds up in our secularized society.

Or, it can only attract a small part of the population.

The vast majority of young people - and the not-so-young for that matter - don't fit in anymore.

This does not mean that it isn't important for Christianity to still find a means of expression, of transmission, and that the Gospel continues to be read and prayed.

On the contrary!

But without a doubt, we need to accept other ways of praying, gathering, coming together and getting involved.

Rather than embroiling ourselves in mutual and sterile accusations, we need to be creative - as Benedict XVI theorised - and dare to be different, diverse, without a single model, putting aside labels such as "reactionary" or "progressive" Catholics.

Because what is at issue here? Having a Church that "works" well or one whose members are collectively more faithful to the Gospel?

• Isabelle de Gaulmyn is a senior editor at La Croix and a former Vatican correspondent.

He said the State would help villages and municipalities throughout France finance the upkeep and restoration of their empty churches.

As part of his commitment, the president intends to launch a new protection campaign: today, of the 50,000 religious buildings dedicated to worship (42,000 of which are Catholic), only 10,500 are classified or registered as historic monuments, which gives them greater access to subsidies. He also explained that he wants to use the national subsidy tool again, as was the case for Notre-Dame de Paris.

A necessary and popular measure

Very well. Since 1905, towns and villages have owned places of worship built before that date, the vast majority of which are Catholic churches, and are struggling to finance the restoration and upkeep of their bell towers.

It is, therefore, a necessary move.

It's also a popular measure, since, as all the polls and surveys show, the French people are extremely attached to their churches.

As soon as one of them is sold, converted into a hotel, a gym or whatever, the whole neighbourhood cries scandal...

Of course, but with less than 3% of the population attending Sunday worship, what's the point of these restorations?

To preserve a closed heritage?

We all know how difficult it is, in a number of villages, to get hold of the precious key that allows you to enter and admire an altarpiece or a painting that are hidden away in a place that is hardly ever used.

How long will the French be willing to pay (because we are the State) for buildings that have become ghosts of the past?

It's a delicate question.

On the one hand, our fellow citizens value their churches.

On the other hand, religious use is far from being the primary purpose for these locales.

The Catholic Church, as the benefactor of the buildings, has a say in how the properties are used.

It can therefore accept or refuse hosting other events, often concerts.

The difficulty today is that each steeple has its own parish priest, and so there are many different responses to requests.

It is undoubtedly in the interest of the institutional Church to allow "shared uses" of church building, or, as the bishops put it in a more restricted sense, "compatible uses".

A church can be used for Mass once a month, concerts or theatre, as well as a place of remembrance, education (heritage and history training), a space for artistic creation, or even charity work, such as a community grocery store or a day shelter for the homeless.

Fewer priests

With a little goodwill, there are a thousand ways of imagining these other services.

The institutional Church still needs to renounce this parochial conception of its organization, which dates back more than eight hundred years.

Since the Gregorian reform, the parish-church has been considered a sacramental space, under the authority of the parish priest.

In short, without the priest, there is no church... But this is no longer possible, simply because the number of priests is falling, and it is physically impossible for them to "hold" all those churches.

When a priest says "my" parish and has to manage 48 church buildings, it's quite complicated!

It must be recognized that the entire community is concerned about how these churches are put to use.

If the mayor's office is restoring a church, it's normal that city officials will want to see how it can be of service to society.

One thing is certain, and this should reassure the bishops who are apprehensive on this subject: the only way to ensure that these church buildings continue to serve the common good and are not privatized is for the Church to remain the lessee. Few, if any, want to dislodge it. We might as well rejoice...

• Isabelle de Gaulmyn is a senior editor at La Croix and former Vatican correspondent.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

It may sound like a strange question, given that he was canonized in 2014. But it is one that some people are asking after a Polish television broadcast an investigative report that criticized the late pope for his alleged mishandling of clergy sex abuse cases from 1964-1978 when he was archbishop of Krakow.

Is this enough to call into question John Paul's holiness?

Perhaps we should distinguish between the levels.

After having long denied the importance of sexual abuse in the Church, the Polish bishops are just beginning to take into account the extent of this phenomenon and its systemic character.

We must therefore wait for real judicial, ecclesial and historical work to be carried out.

That Cardinal Karol Wojtyla minimized the seriousness of the events and sent criminal priests from parish to parish in the 1970s is symptomatic of his generation, subject to other elements that might be discovered.

Can a pope be a saint?

In reality, to be a saint does not mean to be perfect or without defects.

Religious history has amply demonstrated this...

But the question remains whether the Polish pope should have been canonized so quickly, without respecting the normal waiting period. And that is for other reasons beyond the way he ran the archdiocese of Krakow.

The question is whether popes should be canonised.

At the very least, the Church should move with caution.

To declare that someone who managed and became the incarnate reality of the Holy See is a saint, necessarily mixes politics - and even ideology - with holiness.

Over the past century, it has become a "fashion" to canonise popes.

Before that, the phenomenon was relatively rare.

Deciding whether or not to canonise a dead pope is always a matter of politics that is linked to his living successor.

Thus, when Pope Francis canonized Paul VI in 2018, he did so to reinforce the message of Vatican II.

Of course, the Church canonizes a person, not a pontificate. And John Paul II was a remarkable personality. But it is still difficult to separate the two, and there are pressure groups in the Vatican that seek to capitalise on the beatification/canonization of this or that pope for reasons that are more political than spiritual.

Manipulation of the sainthood process

More broadly, the trend towards papal canonisations is a sign of both the papacy's increased power since the end of the 19th century, and a more recent lack of confidence in the strength of Catholicism.

The rush to canonise popes is all the more paradoxical since saints were originally proclaimed by popular devotion. And the Vatican has even imposed strict protocols (such as diocesan inquiries, waiting periods, the proof of miracles..) to avoid a manipulation of the sainthood process.

Today, we should probably also look at Catholicism's tradition of declaring saints, but not in order to suppress it.

Having saints is a beautiful heritage of popular Christianity, a way to help the "people" feel more connected to an institution that is sometimes too distant by incarnating it in a form of human proximity.

One is not a saint by what he or she does, but by the qualities of faith that person has manifested.

However, if there is a connection between sexual abuse and holiness, this is undoubtedly where it lies: the crisis we are going through reveals in an acute way the danger of wanting to create "superheroes" in Catholicism according to a faulty understanding of holiness.

We desperately seek out"pastors" and blindly follow "founding fathers", at the risk of losing all critical thinking.

The resulting infantilization has undoubtedly been one of the causes of the phenomena of control that we have discovered in recent years.

So, saints, yes... as long as we remember that this is what we are all called to be!

• Isabelle de Gaulmyn is a senior editor at La Croix and a former Vatican correspondent.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

It's a fascinating question.

A couple of recent articles in France have contemplated the so-called resurgence of left-wing Catholics, who are identified as young, ecologically sensitive, and - some of them - even very left-wing. They are also distant from their rather conservative Church.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are those who say we must pay more attention to young Catholics who go to church, those who are more sensitive than their elders to rituals, sacraments, prayer, and who are nostalgic for tradition.

This weekend, this second group will be the main participants in the Pentecost Chartres Pilgrimage, known as the "Pilgrimage of Christendom", organized by traditionalist movements.

Once again, people will boast about how many people attended this pilgrimage, arguing that this is the kind of conservative Catholics young people long for.

They pray, but differently

In a recent article published in La Croix, Father Pierre Amar underlines this divide between "young" and "old Catholics", a divide that also emerges in all parishes from the debates on the synod.

The "old" are more attached to involvement in society, the young more to prayer and liturgy, without abandoning charity work.

By the way, imposing opposition by explaining that the "old people" are not concerned about prayer and liturgy is silly.

The graying generations are the ones that fill the pews at Sunday Mass. And as far as I know, they are going there to knit! So they pray, but differently.

Basically, these questions reveal two things.

On the one hand, young people are very diverse; which we already knew. On the other hand, and above all, there is the anxiety - and even panic - that Catholics feel in the face of the strong and brutal reduction in the religious practice of young people.

Wondering for hours if young Catholics are more to the right or more to the left is like trying to find out if the handful of Trotskyites are more Lambertist or Frankist!

The truth is cruder: there are almost no young people left in the Church. And we can endlessly argue about their political and liturgical choices...

Our concern should not be about the political views and liturgical preferences of the few young people who actually come to Mass on Sunday. Rather, we should ask where all the others of their generation - the majority - are.

Do young people feel at home in a Church with so many moral norms?

For a long time, the finger has been pointed at parents, guilty of not having passed on the faith. This is a bit reductive.

Such a massive trend cannot be explained by the inability of parents to transmit their values and what gives them life.

After all, in other areas, they manage to do so quite well.

We must have the courage to ask ourselves certain questions: do these young generations, who are concerned with a great deal of tolerance towards all life choices, feel at home in a Church with so many moral norms?

Can young women, who have grown up in a feminist culture, feel part of the liturgy as it is currently celebrated?

Then again, is the language of the institution and of churchgoers accessible, understandable, and, above all, relevant to the young people?

The Gospel message is anything but bland. Yet it elicits, at best, only polite indifference among the youth.

Instead of endlessly arguing about the young people we already find in our churches, perhaps it's time to take a greater interest in all those who don't come.

• Isabelle de Gaulmyn is a senior editor at La Croix and a former Vatican correspondent.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

After the recent resignations of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin of Lyon and Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris, and then the controversial legacies left by Archbishop Jean-Pierre Cattenoz in Avignon and Bishop Emmanuel Lafont in Cayenne (French Guyana), as well as the severe sanction that forced the Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon to postpone the presbyteral ordinations planned for the end of the month, one wonders who's next...

Certainly, these cases cover different situations. But they all show how difficult it is to be a bishop in France today.

No wonder it is becoming increasingly difficult to find candidates who are qualified or even willing to accept an episcopal appointment.

This is a cause for concern, given the pastoral role of the bishop as the foundation of the institution and guarantor of the Catholic unity.

This is not just a Church crisis, but it's more generally a lack of confidence in institutions.

Politicians are not spared either! Those who accept public responsibilities find themselves on the front line of criticism.

In an increasingly "archipelagic" society, where social media is a formidable accelerator of division, it is clearly no easier today to "make society" than to "make Church"...

It is also true that bishops have been extremely weakened by the CIASE report on sexual abuse in the Church, which was published last October.

The liberation of victims' voices greatly destabilized priests. But the abuse report also directly affected the bishops.

Indeed, there should be no doubt about this: for some, it was a cause for deep soul searching; for others, it was something impossible to hear.

In speaking of a "systemic crisis" of abuse, the authors of the CIASE report clearly blamed the institutional Church for concealing the truth. And thus, those at the head - the bishops - were also blamed.

The 20th Century made the bishop the strong man of the Church. Everything rests on him, which was not the case in the past, when princes, lords and other canons were involved in governing — and controlling — religion.

Today, the bishop alone embodies the institution, for better or for worse.

Vatican II took note of this evolution, without providing for more collective forms of governance.

The result is an excessive centralization of power that isolates them and makes them vulnerable, all the more so in a period of crisis. We have passed from a generation of builder bishops at the beginning of the 20th Century to a generation of exhausted prelates who manage a crumbling patrimony.

In the eyes of public opinion, they are quickly becoming the first to be held accountable for a situation of which they are not guilty.

How can this be remedied?

Through synodality, answers Pope Francis. A synodality that consists in putting all Catholics in a position of responsibility. The goal is to move from a Church of people obeying a leader, to a Church where everyone is a witness to the Gospel.

It would still be necessary for Catholics to agree to take their part... And for bishops to be capable of allowing a form of creativity and initiative to be expressed outside themselves, while ensuring the coherence of the whole.

Basically, this is not surprising.

We feel the same need to find new forms of citizen participation in politics. And the business world is also well aware that management is no longer the same as it was in the past, but that creating a network requires skill.

The same is true for the Church.

It is necessary to rethink the training of managers, to diversify their profiles, to foresee procedures for collegiality, to have places where all believers can speak, and to have bodies for regulation, evaluation and control.

Plain and simple, Church governance has to be brought into the 21st Century.

• Isabelle de Gaulmyn is a senior editor at La Croix and a former Vatican correspondent.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

As the author of a book on the Preynat scandal (Histoire d'une silence) who was seeking to understand how the Church managed to remain silent and in denial so long, the answer is undoubtedly, yes.

The reason is because the verdict holds the institution accountable and forces prelates to now consider the pain of victims, including in historical matters.

Secondly, it is because it concludes the long pathway of several ex-scouts, who dared to expose their wounds to public opinion by taking up this battle in an effort to ensure that their own children will never experience anything similar.

A lesson in humility

When I started writing my book, my objective was certainly not to obtain the resignation of the archbishop of Lyon.

As a journalist, and also as a Catholic from Lyon, my aim was to analyze the mechanisms behind the cover up of crimes, the complicity of successive hierarchies, the cowardice of several priests, the irresponsibility of parents and the subservience of the faithful.

I admired the determination of the victims and their legal battles even though I knew that their persistence was difficult for many Catholics to accept.

Thanks to them, I came to appreciate that the Church would never overcome this crisis on its own.

That is exactly what the court's decision last week has just confirmed. Catholics finally began to budge only because they were criticized, heckled and even abused by people and outside bodies.

The Church does have something to offer to the world. However, it must first listen to the world. So this has also been a lesson in humility.

The silence of the criminal

As an ex-scout myself who knew Father Preynat, when I started writing my book, I began to ask questions.

What kind of misery lay behind the vaguely scornful grin of the person who terrorized us even as we simultaneously admired him? The man who was an educator for some but an executioner for others?

Now that media attention has turned towards Cardinal Barbarin, I think of this ex-scout chaplain, who is no doubt staying somewhere in Lyon but who has still never expressed himself publicly.

Yet he is a man who has jolted the whole French Church and dismayed the whole Diocese of Lyon.

The action of the Parole Libérée (Speak Out) group has brought an end to the Church's silence. Except in the case of one person, namely Father Preynat, the criminal, whose trial we are still awaiting.

Isabelle de Gaulmyn
France

• Frist published in LaCroix International.
• Image: LaDepeche.fr