Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics. By Sarah Shortall

Abstract

In recent decades, France has figured prominently in international debates on secularism (laïcité) and religion, for instance with respect to its ban on religious iconography in public schools. Following the legal separation of church and state in 1905, this once predominantly Catholic country became increasingly irreligious over the course of the twentieth century. At present, French Republicanism itself is a strident secular belief that tends to accuse religious believers of divisive “communitarian,” subnational commitments. Such ongoing anxieties about traditional religion are rooted in the fact that Catholicism has long been a dominant political and cultural force. If the gradual ascendency of Republican laïcité is familiar, less well-known is how theologians and religiously committed thinkers came to terms with separation. Such is the neglected story that Sarah Shortall tells in her original and engaging reconstruction of French Dominicans and Jesuits from the early 1900s through the Second Vatican Council during the 1960s. Once the victory of anti-clerical politics of the early Third Republic (1870–1940) was assured, French Catholics had a choice: they could pine for yesteryears when they had been in charge, or they could come to terms with the fact that the ground had shifted. For some, secularity provided an opportunity to revisit Christian traditions and rethink theological categories. Loss became an occasion for revival. Shortall argues that a coterie of French priests, some of whom eventually got in trouble with the Vatican, imagined ways of being in not of the world; that is, of being religious in the public sphere without having to fully embrace the saeculum. Such visions, says Shortall, amounted to a “counter-politics,” positions from which secular powers could be criticized in light of sacral time, the incarnation, soteriology, eschatology, and so forth. Innovations came from rereading Thomas Aquinas or reviving Patristic and Augustinian perspectives against the rote authority of neo-scholasticism. In the interwar era, Jacques Maritain theorized the notion of the human person, and “New Theologians” such as Henri de Lubac formulated ecclesiology in terms of a collective mystical body of Christ. Both were opposed to contemporaneous alternatives such as the royalist Action Française, which, nostalgic for a bygone era, sought to reboot theocracy and was condemned in 1926.