“Now, less than one in two French people say they believe in God. 49% according to Ifop. All faiths combined. And the decline is rapid, since it took 64 years to go from 66% (in 1947) to 56% (in 2011), but only ten years to arrive at the present situation. “Our challenge is to live like the Remnant of God”, commented Bishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, on September 6, in La Croix. In addition to the fact that the formula is theologically debatable, it does not take into account the consequences of this situation in French society: we have very largely emerged from a society in which the vast majority of members thought of themselves and of the world through a religion. This resulted in a system of values ordered to a supernatural, omnipotent presence, judging each one and rewarding him according to whether he acted well or badly during his life.
The more or less hidden grammar of our relationship systems
Such a way of being in the world and together has shaped “Christianity” for centuries, including where one does not “believe” in God. It underpinned many political messianisms, but, much more broadly, it was in a way the more or less hidden grammar of our systems of relations, of our vision of progress, of our quest for the good and of going beyond. She had a unifying effect, making for better and for worse – and there is enough to take a severely critical look at part of what she produced – of the common.
This common, now, is lacking. Since the figure of a God who watches over human destiny and judges it fades away, each one no longer has to answer except to himself and to the group with which he identifies, whether by gender, by geographic or ethnic origin, by the affects that inhabit or cross it, etc. Identity and values become fluctuating, uncertain. The links are loosening. The coherence of the whole – the “communion” – weakens, collapses.
Forms of extremism resurgent of a frustrated aspiration
But the reference to “God” was also a way of expressing a vital drive that Pascal had magnificently summed up: “Man infinitely passes man”. It reflects, even today, a deep aspiration to go beyond, to infinity. However, this aspiration does not disappear with the retreat of belief. What is lacking is the means of recognizing it, of naming it and finally of expressing it in order to make a living from it. The various forms of extremism, radicalism, transgression, rupture that we observe today are all resurgences of this frustrated aspiration.
Because the Church did not know how to hear this aspiration behind demands and behaviors that it rejected, an increasingly large part of society has turned away from it. Instead of opening up, of finding behind its rites, its language, the great inner, mystical movements of the human soul, Catholicism fell back on a discourse and a moralizing posture, on forms of piety which accentuated the break with the men and women of his time.
If “the meaning of God” has been lost, it is because the way in which the clergy express it has finally become a dead language for many. The publication in a few days of the report of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church is not going to improve the situation. For the next Synod of Bishops on “synodality” (on the way in which the Church dialogues within it), the work of which will begin next month in the dioceses, to be useful and fruitful, it will therefore be necessary to put an end to “the boxwood tongue ”.
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