Eldest Daughter in Turmoil

The anxieties roused among conserv ative Roman Catholics by their church's current reforms have been mild in the open-minded U.S., obedient Italy, in different Latin America and theologically adventuresome Germany. It is in France, where the church has been sharply divided into progressive and conservative wings since the Revolution, that the issue is bitterest.

"I think I am not being pessimistic in saying that a schism is to be feared by the end of the year," said Rouen's coadjutor, Archbishop Andre Pailler, last month; he foresaw that some French conservatives would leave the church rather than accept the liberal definitions of religious liberty and the church in the modern world that the Vatican Council will probably approve this fall.

"Go to Moscow!" During the French Revolution, a minority of priests and bishops welcomed the new republic, while thousands went bitterly into exile out of loyalty to the Bourbon kings. Since then, the "eldest daughter" of Catholicism has been torn periodically by quarrels over such issues as the Dreyfus Affair and separation of church and state in the 19th century, the worker-priest movement and the Algerian war in the 20th.

Now French integristes (conservatives) deeply fear that the reforming spirit of the council could lead to an accommodation with Communism. "We encounter Marxist infiltration at every step in our Christian lives," warns conservative French Novelist Michel de Saint Pierre. Liberal Catholics, by contrast, are convinced that the church must be "on the march"; they are eager to revive the worker-priests and "carry on a dialogue" with Marxism.

The tension between these two viewpoints has led to a number of demonstrations and a noisily public war of words. In Paris last December, Dominican Yves Congar, one of France's leading theologians, was hounded at a lecture by young integristes yelling "Go to Moscow, Marxist priest!" In some parts of France, conservatives objected so strongly to the introduction of the vernacular in the Mass that they responded in Latin when the priest addressed the congregation in French.

Liberals fret about De Saint Pierre's bestselling (200,000 copies) polemical novel The New Priests, which lampoons the experiments of Paris' young missionary priests. Abbe Georges Michon-neau, pastor of St. Jean near Montmartre, charged De Saint Pierre with throwing "priestly entrails to the pack of dogs who will buy your book and feast on them."

Harming the Peace. No sooner did this argument die down than liberals opened up another controversy by publishing, in their weekly Temoignage Chretien, an essay by French Communist Roger Garaudy. The French hierarchy denounced publishing the article as "incompatible with the responsibility of a Christian journal." Catholic right-wingers took such glee in the rebuke that Maurice Cardinal Feltin of Paris soon had to issue another warning--this time against conservative journals that were harming "the interior peace of the Christian community."

Daunted by the national publicity given to his speech, Archbishop Pailler later explained that what he meant by "schism" was a spirit of disobedience toward the council's decrees rather than a formal split. Nonetheless, church observers believe that he would not have spoken out without the advice and consent of other bishops, and some French conservatives argue that the church is already suffering from a "silent schism" of Catholics who are "walking out on their tiptoes, leaving the church forever." The bishops face a touchy task of reconciliation in a land where those people who are serious about their faith are very serious indeed.

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