Editor’s Notes

Behind Enemy Lines
12 September 2008

Today Benedict XVI begins an apostolic journey in what is arguably the most secularised country on Earth. More than 9,000 security guards will protect the Pope during his four-day visit to France. It's likely they will spend quite a bit of their time containing noisy protestors enraged by the presence of the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church in their secular republic.

The protests underline the political dimension of Benedict XVI's 10th foreign trip since his election in 2005. The original plan was for the Pope to travel as a humble pilgrim to Lourdes to mark the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous. But the itinerary was expanded after French President Nicholas Sarkozy visited the Vatican last December and invited the Pope to visit the French capital.

Benedict XVI will be welcomed in Paris today as a sort of super head of state. In a significant break with French protocol Mr Sarkozy and his first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, will meet the Pontiff as he arrives at Orly airport. Normally the French prime minister welcomes a head of state while the president awaits him in his official residence, the Élysée Palace, for the welcoming ceremony. In greeting the Pope at the airport Mr Sarkozy is following the example of President George W Bush, who met Benedict XVI at Andrews Air Force Base at the start of his American visit on April 15. Mr Bush wanted to demonstrate his personal esteem for the Pope. Mr Sarkozy wants to show that he esteems Benedict XVI every bit as much as his American counterpart.

Both in America and France there is a rigorous separation of the Church and State. But while in the United States it is fairly uncontroversial for a president to laud a pope, in France it provokes uproar. To understand why, we need to look at French history.

The fall of the eldest daughter

In the year 496 Remigius, the Archbishop of Reims, baptised Clovis I. Clovis, the first king to unite all the Franks under one ruler, proclaimed Catholicism as the state religion. The King of France was subsequently known as "His Most Christian Majesty" and France itself was called "the eldest daughter of the Church".

The French Revolution dramatically interrupted the alliance between Church and State. Until 1789 the Catholic Church was the largest landowner in the country. But a law passed in 1790 ended the Church's right to levy a tax on crops, removed clerical privileges and confiscated Church property. Further laws abolished monastic vows and required that clergy take an oath of loyalty, effectively making the Church a department of the French state and clergy state employees. The pope refused to accept the new dispensation, as did many French priests, who were viciously persecuted for refusing to swear the oath.

The arrangement did not last long. In 1801 Napoleon Bonaparte agreed to a Concordat which recognised Catholicism as the majority religion in France (but not the state religion). The French government agreed to subsidise the Catholic Church, as well as Judaism, Lutheranism and Calvinism. The state built churches and synagogues from taxes levied on the entire French population.

That agreement was torn up under the Third Republic when the Chamber of Deputies passed the Law on the Separation of the Churches and State on December 9 1905. This decreed that the Republic "neither recognises, nor salaries, nor subsidises any religion". In response, Pius X issued the encyclical Vehementer Nos ("Our soul is full of sorrowful solicitude"), which denounced the French law of separation. The Pope insisted that the notion that Church and State should be separated was "a most pernicious error".

Pius X correctly understood that, while the lawmakers' overt intention was to make the state neutral towards religion, the likely result was that Catholicism would be driven from French public life. Hence, the rather colourful language of his encyclical.

"You know the aim of the impious sects which are placing your heads under their yoke," he told French Catholics, "for they themselves have proclaimed with cynical boldness that they are determined to 'de-Catholicise' France. They want to root out from your hearts the last vestige of the faith which covered your fathers with glory, which made your country great and prosperous among nations, which sustains you in your trials, which brings tranquillity and peace to your homes, and which opens to you the way to eternal happiness."

But it didn't quite turn out that way. While the Church was driven to the margins of French society, a significant number of French people continued to identify with the Church. According to the Pew Forum, today only 11 per cent of the French say religion is "very important" in their lives. But there are officially 46 million French Catholics out of a population of approximately 64 million. Superficially, at least, France remains an overwhelmingly Catholici country.

The rise of Sarkozy

The absolute separation of Church and State is an article of faith for most French politicians. This explains the uproar in 2004 when a rising political star published a book entitled La République, les religions, l'espérance ("The Republic, Religions, and Hope"), which argued for public funding of religions. The author, Nicolas Sarkozy, criticised the "negative" nature of secularism in France and called for a "laïcité positive" (commonly translated as "positive secularity").

Mr Sarkozy's presidential election victory in May 2007 raised hopes in the Vatican of a possible rapprochement between the French state and the Church. On December 20 2007 the president visited Rome to accept the title of Honorary Canon of the Basilica of St John Lateran. The title dates back to the kings of France and many French presidents have declined it for fear of raising secularist hackles. Mr Sarkozy used the occasion to make a speech challenging the secularist status quo in France. It is worth quoting at some length.

He said: "Laïcité is to be affirmed as necessary and opportune, but laïcité should not mean negation of the past. It does not have the power to eliminate from France its Christian roots. It has tried to do so, and it shouldn't have.

"Along with Benedict XVI, I believe that a nation which ignores the ethical, spiritual and religious inheritance of its history commits a crime against its own culture, against that blend of history, patrimony, art and popular tradition which deeply impregnates our way of life and our thought.

"To take away those roots means to lose meaning, to weaken the cement of national identity and to further fray social relationships that need symbols of memory. For that reason, we have to hold together the two ends of the rope: accepting the Christian roots of France, while also valuing and continuing to defend a laïcité which has reached maturity.

"I profoundly wish for the emergence of a healthy laïcité, meaning a laïcité that, while protecting freedom of thought, the freedom to believe or not, does not consider religions a danger but rather something positive. It's not a matter of modifying the great balances of the law of 1905. The French don't want that, and the religions aren't asking for it. It's a matter, rather, of seeking dialogue with the great religions of France, and of having as a guiding principle the goal of making the daily life of our great spiritual currents easier rather than more complicated."

The speech set Rome abuzz (and infuriated secularists back home). Vatican officials realised they had a friend in the Élysée Palace whose thinking on secularism closely mirrored that of the contemporary Church.

Rome and Paris converge

Throughout the 20th century Rome carefully refined its view of the Church's role in secular states. Its thinking arguably crystallised in a letter that Pope John Paul II wrote on February 11 2005 to the French bishops marking the centenary of the law of separation of Church and State.

Fr Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said this week that the letter was key to understanding the message Benedict XVI is bringing to France. In the letter, John Paul II recognised a legitimate division of Church and State based on Christ's invitation to his disciples: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mt 22:21).

He told the French bishops that "the principle of secularity to which your country is extremely attached, if well understood, belongs to the social doctrine of the Church". Clearly the Church's teaching had undergone intense development since the days of Vehementer Nos.

Benedict XVI took up the same theme shortly after his election. On December 19 2005 he received the credentials of the new French ambassador to the Holy See, Bernard Kessedjian. The Pope recalled the 1995 letter and urged France to become an "example of healthy secularity". He explained that secularity was unhealthy when the State was antagonistic to the Church and excluded it from social life. It was healthy when Church and State worked together for the good of citizens, while duly respecting their distinct roles.

Looking West

Benedict XVI spoke of "healthy secularity" and Mr Sarkozy of "laïcité positive". But it was clear that they broadly agreed on the role of religion in public life. And if they were pressed to name the country where this ideal secularity is best lived out there is little doubt that both would point to the United States.

The theologian George Weigel expressed the difference between America and France pithily this week when he said: "French secularism - laïcité - and American secularity are two very different things. French laïcité was a movement against the Church; the institutional separation of Church and state in the United States was meant to foster the free exercise of religion."

In other words, France has what one might (with apologies to Fr Richard John Neuhaus) call a stark naked public square, completely stripped of religiously inspired convictions. Both the Pope and the President think this is disastrous because it reduces politics to the bare exercise of power without any coherent moral underpinning. Public life is drained of the spiritual energy that was at the root of many major social advances, such as the abolition of slavery and the American civil rights movement.

Mr Sarkozy and Benedict XVI hope to use the papal visit to nudge France away from the antagonistic secularity of its past and towards the more accommodating secularity of the United States.

The response to the Pope's visit among French opinion formers will show if they have any chance of success. France has always been ambivalent towards American imports, embracing some while firmly rejecting others. We must wait and see if the French adopt "healthy secularity" as eagerly as they have jazz, basketball and Woody Allen, or treat it with the same disdain they show for Disneyland, shopping malls and the Big Mac.

Luke Coppen, Editor