Priest to the People

The room in the poor, teeming Paris suburb of St. Denis was bare and cold. There, before only two kneeling couples last week, a young priest celebrated his Sunday Mass. When it was over, he changed his vestments for a workman's grubby overalls, and left with one of the men to meet some friends in a workers' cafe for an aperitif and a cheap lunch and, later, a football game. His companions through the day never thought of him as a priest at all, and that suited him well enough, for he was a member of the Mission de Paris.

In Paris there are 16 other priests like him; in the similar Mission de France there are some 140 who earn their daily bread in factories or farms or trades, side by side with the people to whom they minister. These priests celebrate Mass in tenements or farmhouses, and in their "spare time" give help and advice to those who ask for it. Not much is known of them, in France or elsewhere. While not secret, the work of the Missions is kept discreetly quiet, to avoid attracting undue attention from the Communists, and because their priests' unorthodox activities sometimes offend strait-laced Roman Catholics. But on no other front is the church working any harder to reclaim its lost sheep.

Karl Marx & Movie Stars. First guiding spirit of the Mission de Paris was the late Abbe Henri Godin, a shy, intense parish priest who decided that a pastor was virtually helpless in reaching those who did not come to church. He proposed that the church set up a mission to work among Frenchmen with the same dedicated zeal that sends missionaries to spend their lives in hardship in heathen lands. Paris' late Cardinal Suhard and the French archbishops set up the Mission de France in 1941; the Mission de Paris was founded in 1943.

In the war-shattered Normandy town of Lisieux last week, kindly Father Louis Augros was hard at work in an ugly brick seminary, training the 150 new candidates for the Mission de France and Mission de Paris. "The purpose of the training," said Superior Augros, "is, first, to return to the original Christian message, second, to integrate Christian truth with the preoccupations and intellectual scheme of the modern world."

To reach the first objective, Mission students concentrate on the study of the Bible. For the second, they are encouraged to occupy themselves also with the things of the world. In their crowded dormitories are pin-up pictures of movie stars and sports figures; their bookshelves contain volumes by Karl Marx, A. J. Cronin, Saint-Exupery, and Communist Poets Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. From the chapel come the strains of Old Folks at Home and Negro spirituals with new French words. Such music is considered to be "in touch with the mass suffering of our times. It is full of the plea of peoples who have lost touch with Christ."

Madame Lulu & God. Back at Lisieux for a refresher course while waiting reassignment is shock-haired, dark-eyed Father Georges Baudry, 31, who has spent the last four years working in the Communist-ridden Normandy parish of Saint Andre. He is not at all discouraged by the fact that in one village of 100 inhabitants he was able to increase the number of regular churchgoers only from one to three. Much more important, he thinks, is that through him the greater part of the village has lost its hostility to the church and is increasingly dubious of Communist propaganda. A typical example of Mission de France work is Father Baudry's conquest of Lulu's bistro.

Madame Lulu, formerly well known in Montmartre, was famed for her hatred of priests. When Baudry took over the parish and got a job as a garage mechanic, he made Lulu's bar his first stopping place, dressed in his greasy work clothes. After his third visit, barflies agreed he was "un chic type." As he was leaving, Baudry mentioned casually to Lulu that he would be back soon, "but I have a lot of work in my parish, you know--I'm the new local priest." When his bar friends refused to believe him, he made his next visit to Lulu's in his priest's soutane.

"The gang," says Father Baudry, "was thunderstruck. Lulu told me she took back nothing she had said about priests, but since we were already friends, my presence would be tolerated." In time it came to be eagerly welcomed. Lulu even took to calling him "Begonia" and "my little zebra." In Lulu's he returns kidding for kidding, buys his share of drinks like anyone else, and offers advice or joins serious discussions only when others take the initiative. "There's no question of converting these people except in rare cases," says Father Baudry. "If I tried to do that, doors would be closed to me. But the people in Madame Lulu's bistro are infinitely nearer God than they were four years ago."

The Long View. Tall, 49-year-old Abbe Jacques Hollande, director of the Mission de Paris, has twice journeyed to Rome to discuss the Mission's work with the Pope. In his tiny, book-lined office last week, the abbe took the long view of his job. "Our work will not really take effect for perhaps 40 years," he said. "The whole world, in various ways, has wandered from the church. In France, workers imagine that there is an alliance between the church and capitalism, of which they have here witnessed the excesses and abuses. The church is wrongly identified with the middle classes, the bourgeoisie. This we must change ... I tell you that the person of Christ still enormously interests the workers . . .

"Our . . . civilization is collapsing in a gigantic cataclysm. We don't regret it too much. The inspiration for that civilization was so profoundly materialistic . . . But that which collapses must be replaced. Will the church be present in the work of reconstruction? Will her conception of man and life prevail? Will the result be Christian? That is our preoccupation."

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