French Catholic Research Articles

French Catholics and Synodality: Spiritual Sensibilities and the Will to Participate or Abstain

Using the situation of French Catholicism as a starting point, this article shows how sociologists of Catholicism have continued to refine the methods and categories used to construct the representation of Catholicism and understand the expectations of Catholics. The most recent surveys are based on an in-depth analysis of how Catholics think about “their church,” and identify what is causing the crisis within it. They are of particular interest in understanding why some practicing Catholics, especially younger ones, have shown little interest in the Synod on Synodality scheduled by Pope Francis. In fact, sociological surveys help us understand how the synodal process, through its procedure and legitimization, encourages the participation of certain sensibilities and discourages others. Sociological analysis also enables us to identify resources for overcoming this resistance, developing listening among Catholics and working towards the authentically ecclesial character of synodality. In conclusion, the article argues that the contribution of the social sciences should be taken into account in the development of consultation techniques and ecclesial governance.

A Third Way?

Abstract This article seeks to engage with the particular historical moment when, despite the cold war dichotomy of communism and capitalism, the short-lived (Southern) Republic of Vietnam under its first president, the Catholic, Ngô Đình Diệm (1901–1963) attempted to tread a third way. Diệm sought to introduce a Vietnamised form of French Catholic Emmanuel Mounier’s (1905–1950) political philosophy, Personalism, into the ideological framework of the new Republic, building upon an earlier exchange between Vietnamese and French Catholics. Ultimately this was unsuccessful and Personalism was unable to unify South Vietnam’s diverse society in opposition to the communist North, culminating in the ousting and assassination of Diệm in 1963. This moment offers a glimpse of a different path, suggesting that global capitalist liberal order might not be the only future. This article brings together various sources on Personalism and Vietnam to depict this historical moment.

Too Religious to Protest? Contested Thresholds of Catholic and Muslim “Intransigence” in the French Public Sphere

This article examines French Catholics’ recruitment, organization, and policing of Muslim participants in the 2012 to 2013 anti-same-sex-marriage protests La Manif Pour Tous. It argues that French Catholics are alert to forms of public participation which suggest religious “intransigence” (strict religious observance) and can be said to transgress the secular character of the public sphere. Instead, they craft a public presence that can be interpreted as secular, or “liberally” religious-and-secular, without passing the implicit threshold of intransigence. But French Catholics’ efforts to police Muslims’ and their own public visibility reveal the subjectivity and impermanence of the thresholds that are held as proof of religious intransigence. This article contributes ethnographic evidence to the historical and sociological investigation of “liberal” versus “intransigent” forms of French Catholicism and advances the anthropological study of the inequalities and privileges of Muslim and Catholic representation in secular French politics.

‘Don’t educate me—move me!’ Why we need art and artists (especially films and filmmakers) to love education into existence

Abstract This paper explores the anthropological and ontological conditions of our ‘educational movement’ in aesthetic experience and illustrates these through a range of examples from popular cinema/film (the Empire Strikes Back; Memento; David Lynch’s musings). For the anthropological framing of education, I enlist the help of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and his notion of ‘formation’ as it unfolds in the aesthetic appearance of the cultural world—with film’s moving images’ coming-into-form-and-meaning as my key example. For Gadamer, the artwork’s formative potential is bound up in its capacity to move our senses and intellect into an encounter with what is other to our subjectivity. Drawn into a mode of paying attention to what appears (e.g. in film’s moving images), we are called to lose ourselves and be present in a new way to familiar world objects and relations. The second part of the paper imagines the ontological conditions that make possible our formative movement in the cultural world: the mode of the beautiful. Why do certain artworks shine forth and summon us to be present to them? To pursue this question, I turn to French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s notion of Beauty and craftsmanship. He turns us (like Gadamer) to a neo-Platonic notion of Beauty rooted in St Thomas Aquinas’ notion of the mystery of B/being (i.e. God). In Maritain’s reading, our hermeneutic aesthetic experience—and with that our movement into self-formation—is held in existence through the artist’s participation in the mode of the beautiful and their loss of self in the labour of love of craftsmanship.

Regimes of Visibility of Sexual Violence in the French Catholic Church (1950–2020): An Analysis Through Television News

Regimes of Visibility of Sexual Violence in the French Catholic Church (1950–2020): An Analysis Through Television News

A Theresian Moment: French Catholics and the Spirituality of the Ordinary in the 1930s*

The subject of this article is the lived religion of lay Catholics devoted to the woman described as one of the greatest saints of the modern era, Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, known as Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897). It draws on letters written to the Lisieux Carmel in Normandy at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938. Much scholarship on the laity in the interwar years concerns itself with renewal and militancy in the public sphere. By contrast, the body of evidence at hand provides insights into continuities in established forms of devotion and into the religious thinking of the kinds of believers about whom we know relatively little. I argue that Catholics influenced by Thérèse's teachings, notably the “Little Way” and her “Spirituality of the Ordinary,” modelled the saint's destabilisation of the active/contemplative (or public/private) dichotomy. The letters reveal the entanglement of the spiritual and the secular in the lives of ordinary Catholics and how, after Thérèse, they participated in the Christian animation of society beyond the home. In their writing we also see evidence of the correspondents' attachment to the universal Church when they felt, acutely, the uncertainties of the international situation.

Політика США щодо франко-корейського конфлікту 1866 р.

In the article comprehensively examines the process of formulating the Korean policy of the USA in the 1860-s, aimed at the «opening» of the Joseon state to foreign commerce. It is noted that this course was a direct continuation of the strategy, which passed the initial public test in the middle of the ХІХ-th century, during the violent «opening» of Japan. Examining the process of formulation of Washington's policy towards the Korean state of Joseon, the author proves that the reason for interference in Seoul's internal affairs was oppression and persecution by the «isolationist» government of the East Asian state. This problem became particularly acute in 1866, when the Joseon government massively persecuted the country's Christian community, which was developing under the patronage of the French Catholic mission. As a result of the conducted research, the author came to the following conclusions. The Korean policy of the USA became significantly more active in the 1860-s. Under the pretext of protecting French Catholic missionaries from repression by the Korean authorities, the White House advocated, along with other states (in particular, France) for the «opening» of Joseon to foreign trade. The latter was considered as a universal recipe for the spread of «civilized» rules of coexistence to the previously «isolated» countries of East Asia. The actions taken by Washington during this period can be interpreted as a «test of strength» in order to determine the further strategy of «opening up» Korea.

Priest, Rebel and Scholar. François-Marie Savina in Tonkin (Vietnam) 1901–1941

With this case study of a French Catholic missionary in Tonkin, as north Vietnam was called during colonial times, I wish to illustrate how individual agency might find ways of expression in spite of severe hierarchical clashes. Put differently, I wish to critically reflect on a case where the scientific inclination of a given missionary in the field became his calling. The surprising result being that instead of meeting the expectations of conformity or “toeing the line” of Catholic conversion duties, he intentionally took a significant step outside dogmatic morality.

‘We are Scottish nationalist and Catholic’: Death’s Bright Shadow and Catholic literary nationalism

ABSTRACT This article contends that although the ‘golden age’ of the English Catholic novel has received (and continues to attract) ample critical attention, there is much still to be gleaned about contemporaneous Scottish Catholic literary works. In presenting George Scott-Moncrieff’s Death’s Bright Shadow (1948) as a case study, the article identifies a distinctively Scottish Catholic and nationalist imagination, which nonetheless owes much to the conventions of the French Catholic Literary Revival, as well as celebrated works by Greene and Waugh. Ultimately, the article suggests that political nationalism is a key feature of work produced by Scottish converts of the early to mid-twentieth century. It proposes that the geographical, cultural and political realities of place which inform the twentieth-century Catholic novel are a notable, if relatively under-explored, part of Scottish Catholic fiction.

Coexisting in Intolerance under the Edict of Pacification

Abstract This article examines the legal battle between Catholics and Huguenots over the articles of the Edict of Nantes from 1650 to 1685 in Normandy. Their legal disputes show us how seventeenth-century French people perceived the issues of religious tolerance and coexistence by focusing on how the edict's articles controlling Protestant worship spaces were interpreted and implemented. Norman Catholics attempted to outlaw Protestant temples, but they had to move within the edict's authority. Norman Huguenots still could deflect unfavorable decisions through legal recourse based on the edict. Even if confessional antagonism remained alive, and the Revocation finally upended the legal cohabitation of the two confessions, the legal battle reveals that by transforming the main character of religious conflict from a deadly fight to a judicial matter, French Catholics and Protestants bit by bit adapted into a new type of confessional relationship: coexisting with “abominable heretics.”

Pope Benedict XVI & the French Ressourcement. “Lumen gentium cum sit Christus”

What unites Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI to the French is ressourcement, a controversial movement that initiated a brilliant reorientation of Catholic thought and teaching in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the light of the significant work that has already been done on Ratzinger’s original contribution to Vatican II, the objectives of the present paper are, first, to situate him as theologian and Christian humanist at the heart of the ressourcement movement and to evaluate his work for peace and harmony in the confines between past and present. It attempts to illuminate a way forward for the Church, based on the anthropological, philosophical, and spiritual foundations of the new Christian humanism of the ressourcement project, championed by the French and their German allies. Secondly, the paper seeks to document the influence of notable, twentieth-century, French Catholic thinkers, theologians and philosophers, on Ratzinger’s thought and future contribution to Church and culture on a global stage, with particular attention to Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou (1905-74), and Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). Thirdly, it presents a fresh consideration of his vision of the Church, his contribution to the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council, and of the turbulent post-conciliar period. The key goals in this domain are, therefore, to articulate Ratzinger’s spirituality and his preponderant contribution to theological anthropology, using the lens of Vatican II. This is a point of some considerable importance and fills a critical lacuna in Catholic theology. As a pertinent comment of Congar’s makes clear. “For there is little awareness of the values of anthropology; we have created an ecclesiology without any anthropology”. Like Congar, Ratzinger sought to construct a theological anthropology concerned to serve the pastoral needs of the Church but without neglecting its cultural and social elements. Spirituality and anthropology are then, unsurprisingly, as luminous, intricately interwoven threads that permeate and fortify his entire theological edifice.

The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698–1725 by Linda Carol Jones (review)

The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698–1725 by Linda Carol Jones (review)

From the Silent Revolution to Sexual Abuse Scandals The Question of ‘Women’s Place’ in French Catholicism

In reviewing the way in which the question of ‘women’s place’ has been handled in French Catholicism since the 1980s, the article unveils three configurations, which, from a chronological point of view, partly overlap. First, during the silent revolution, the existence of a stained-glass ceiling was little decried. This has not, however, prevented women from assuming a wide range of positions and responsibilities in the Church. The second moment focused on the liturgy. It was not until the third moment, when sexual abuse scandals shook the Church’s reputation and influence, that the stained-glass ceiling was openly impugned in French Catholicism. Thus, this article, which constitutes the first existing synthesis on the place of women within this context, endeavors to account for the absence of mobilization in favor of women even though this French specificity definitely erodes at the end of the period under scrutiny.

Ceremonial Splendor: Performing Priesthood in Early Modern France

In Ceremonial Splendor, Joy Palacios makes two interconnected arguments. First, she contends that during the period of roughly 1630–1730, Parisian seminaries successfully articulated and taught the model of the vray ecclésiastique, or true churchman, which aspiring priests educated within these establishments came to embody. In addition to physical decorum, one of their most important lessons was how to perform the Mass in a consistent and highly choreographed manner that emphasized the éclat, or splendour, of the consecrated Host and drew parishioners into an expression of sacredness that expanded outward from the individual bodies of priests and church buildings to encompass the entire community. Second, Palacios places this ceremonial logic germane to the French Catholic Church in opposition to the performance logics of the theatre. Her argument here is that it is not enough to study the seventeenth-century texts debating the morality of the theatre from a religious point of view. Rather, it is important to acknowledge that the ‘performance activities’ associated with Catholic worship also influenced antitheatrical sentiment. In my opinion, the second argument of the book is not as well-explored as the first, but the preoccupation with the theatre also precludes a more nuanced exploration of the ways that the religious ideals articulated in Parisian seminaries intersected with those of other cultural spheres in seventeenth-century France.

Pascal and Blondel on Real and Notional Knowledge

This article examines real and notional knowledge in the work of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949). It explores the relationship between real and notional knowledge through the themes of disproportion, diversion, contingency, and faith in each thinker and argues that the right relationship between real and notional knowledge is the organizing principle of their thoughts.

Voltaire après la nuit: Paris, Moscou, Genève by François Jacob

Reviewed by: Voltaire après la nuit: Paris, Moscou, Genève by François Jacob Simon Davies Voltaire après la nuit: Paris, Moscou, Genève. By François Jacob. Ferney-Voltaire: Centre International d'Étude du xviiie Siècle. 2021. ii+186 pp. €40. ISBN 978–2–84559–150–9. François Jacob published his biography Voltaire in 2015 (Paris: Gallimard). His new book investigates Voltaire from a different angle, his reputation in post-Second World War countries until a Congress in 1963. The cities in his subtitle represent France, the Soviet Union, and one man, the 'savant anglais' Theodore Besterman. Besterman created the Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva, of which, years later, Jacob was to become the Director. The monograph's sources are wide-spread, published and archival. It explores primarily the image of Voltaire rather [End Page 243] than the reception of his works. This image is often situated in a political context. In France he could be portrayed as an anti-Semite during the German occupation to buttress the persecution of Jews. Simultaneously he was depicted as an 'anti-vychiste' and a 'résistant'. The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth was commemorated in 1944, yet the French Catholic Church continued to worry about his malign influence. French people were also anxious about his potential linkage to communism. The Soviets, while uncomfortable with his life as a landed gentleman, published a catalogue of his library and volumes of his marginalia. Nevertheless, it was the English-speaking world that did most to explore his life and works. Here, arguably unwisely, Jacob cites Kathleen O'Flaherty's Voltaire, Myth and Reality (Cork: Cork University Press, 1945). She views Voltaire as a bogeyman from the perspective of a conservative Irish Catholic. The extraordinary mood changer was Besterman. Winning support across the Atlantic, he championed Voltaire for spreading Enlightenment values, and Voltaire became more an international than a French figure. Besterman's edition of the patriarch's correspondence was ground-breaking in a positive and, for the French, a negative sense. He published the most comprehensive edition of the letters not in France, but in Switzerland (Voltaire's Correspondence, 107 vols (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1953–65)). If that was one affront to patriotic pride, a second was even more damaging: the missives were annotated in English. Besterman had a troubled relationship with the CNRS, with the result that the 'hexagone' was not involved in celebrating its Voltairean heritage. Moreover, the Englishman began publishing Studies on Voltaire in 1955—France was losing its 'patrimoine'. He organized the first international Congress on the Enlightenment in Switzerland in 1963, with a limited participation from French scholars. Having contacted Besterman, Nancy Mitford produced her account of Voltaire's love life in English (Voltaire in Love (London: Hamilton, 1957)). Voltaire's works could still inspire adaptations, particularly those of Candide. Leonard Bernstein's musical work is well known but the tale also encouraged film versions in France. However, it could be contended that these offspring did little to enhance the understanding of the qualities of Voltaire and his works. Although it is not pertinent to the time-frame of this study, Besterman was also instrumental in launching the edition of Voltaire's Œuvres complètes which was completed at the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford in 2022—an achievement marked at a reception in the British Embassy in Paris in June that year. Overall, Jacob's study underscores the importance of editorial decisions and their context. He highlights the difficulty of embarking on major projects on Voltaire which are free from 'toute empreinte idéologique' (p. 49). Voltaire has become a standard point of reference in the advocacy of tolerance—witness the 'Je suis Charlie' slogan created as the response to the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015. This publication succeeds in illustrating the fact that scholarly editing is not a value-free undertaking and that history and chance can play a significant role. [End Page 244] Simon Davies Belfast Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Witnesses to the Living God: Three Paradigms for Approaching the Politics of Nouvelle Théologie*

Witnesses to the Living God: Three Paradigms for Approaching the Politics of <i>Nouvelle Théologie</i>*

Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France by Daniel J. Watkins (review)

Reviewed by: Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France by Daniel J. Watkins Darrin M. Mcmahon Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France. By Daniel J. Watkins. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2021. Pp. xviii, 325. $130.00 CAD. ISBN 9780228006305.) This is a history of French Catholicism in the long eighteenth century organized around the history and reception of a single book, the French Jesuit Isaac-Joseph Berruyer's Histoire du peuple de Dieu. Published successively in three parts in 1728, 1753, and 1757, the work was a rare, if tremendously popular, French example of what the historian Jonathan Sheehan has described, with reference to the more prevalent varieties in England and Germany, as an "Enlightenment Bible," an attempt to apply Enlightenment scholarly practices, attitudes, and opinions to the hermeneutical investigation and translation of Scripture. In Berruyer's case, the work reflected, as well, the broader Jesuit effort to accommodate time and place in its teaching of the Christian word. Whereas Matteo Ricci and his brethren had famously donned the vocabulary and dress of China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to proselytize more effectively there, Berruyer made a similar calculation about eighteenth-century France. "To combat the unbelievers of our day," he insisted, the Church needed "new weapons." Drawing freely on the Enlightenment's own arsenal, Berruyer produced a Bible that aimed to appeal to an [End Page 410] enlightened eighteenth-century public. Employing novelistic conventions (and in a revised edition the illustrations of the great rococo painter François Boucher), the booked aimed to appeal to the sentiments, recounting the Biblical narrative through characters and stories in paraphrase that relegated the actual words of the Vulgate to glosses in the margin. It also stressed that the Bible's chief aim was that great eighteenth-century concern—earthly happiness—and it used sensationalist epistemology, accounts of natural religion, and doctrines of human progress to show Christianity's evolution and consonance with reason. If in this way, as Watkins observes in a nice line, "The Enlightenment became yet another mission field" for Jesuit proselytism, the impact of Berruyer's Bible was decidedly mixed (p. 28). Enlightenment authors like Voltaire predictably mocked it as a "salon novel," while others, like the radical abbé Morellet, hailed its innovative Christology. Yet despite evidence of the work's genuine popularity among the laity (precise publication figures, unfortunately, seem to be lacking), the work irked the Jesuits' Jansenist critics, who drew attention to theological concerns and decried the book's allegedly lax morality and its presumption in substituting the word of man for the word of God. For their part, more traditionally minded figures within the Jesuit order itself worried out loud about dangerous "innovation," and their complaints soon caught the ear of Gallican authorities in the French hierarchy, who detected their own dubious departures from tradition and orthodoxy, as well as hints of ultra-Montanism. Watkins spends the bulk of the book showing how these disputes metastasized into a full-blown affaire, which not only divided Jansenists from Jesuits, and Gallicans from Ultramontanes, contributing ultimately to the expulsion of the order and various official condemnations of Berruyer's book, but drove a further wedge between those ready to accommodate aspects of Enlightenment thought to Catholic teaching and those who saw any such flirtation with Catholic Enlightenment as traffic with the enemy. The upshot of his analysis, Watkins argues, "flips the traditional narrative of the Enlightenment … on its head, by suggesting that the damage that the Enlightenment did to the church had as much to do with internal efforts of Catholic theologians to appropriate it as it do with external assaults by radical, anti-clerical philosophes" (p. 5). Tracing that same tension into the nineteenth century, when various French Catholics attempted to revive Berruyer's book in the effort to better reach the laity, Watkins writes with an admirably limpid style and is well-versed in the relevant scholarship. The consequence is a book about a book, which is also a great deal more. Scholars of Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and the interaction of the two over the course of...

Preface: Francis Jammes’s “Fourteen Prayers,” Part 1

PrefaceFrancis Jammes’s “Fourteen Prayers,” Part 1 Raymond N. MacKenzie, Editor Key Words Reverend Dr. Ian Ker, St. John Henry Newman Francis Jammes (1868–1938), French Catholic poet and novelist, is not as widely read in the English-speaking world as he deserves to be, though some new translations have been published lately, as has a volume collecting some modern appreciations of Jammes.1 I’m going to add to the list with translations of a set of poems he titled “Fourteen Prayers.” In this issue, I’ll present the first seven, and the remainder in our next issue. I’ll include the French originals on facing pages. Jammes (pronounced zhahm) was born in the very small town of Tournay, located in the Haut-Pyrenées region of southwestern France; it is about a half hour’s drive from Lourdes. He spent most of his life in the region, moving west to the town of Orthez when he was twenty; and he is buried not far from there, in Hasparren. But though he loved this corner of the world, he did get out and experience life more broadly. The family moved to Bordeaux for a time when he was a teenager, and from there he went on to Paris and a series of literary friendships, notably with Paul Claudel; on a trip to North Africa, he met André Gide, who became a close friend and confidant for a while. In Paris he lived with his mother—and as we’ll see, the bond with his [End Page 5] mother was of great importance to him. He worked as a clerk during the day, read every night with his mother, and began to write and publish poetry. His early poems struck his readers as offering something fresh, a healthy antidote to the prevailing modes of poetry toward the end of the century, the kind of style literary historians today call Symbolism. In Symbolism, the emphasis is on evocation rather than description, on impression and nuance rather than direct statement; Symbolism’s most famous poets for readers today are Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, both of whom can seem decidedly obscure. The young man from Basque country, however, was writing decidedly clear, direct, accessible yet rich and powerful poems that struck a chord with many readers, especially Gide. Born and raised a Catholic, Jammes’s faith shifted in his twenties to a more generalized spirituality, but the poems, especially from 1897 on, were more often than not concerned with God, looking forward to what would soon (in 1904, with the help of Paul Claudel) be a return to the Church. But to return: 1897 saw the publication of his first great collection, De l’Angélus de l’aube à l’angélus du soir (from the morning to the evening Angelus). It opens with a prose epigraph announcing his view of the poet as a servant of God. The epigraph begins, “My God, you have called me from among men. Here I am.” The collection had a powerful impact on young poets both in France and in Italy who were seeking an alternative to the increasingly obscure and difficult style that the Symbolist poets were adopting.2 There was even talk of a new school of “naturisme,” a renewal of a poetry in closer contact with real life than the rarefied work of the Symbolists. Jammes wrote a serio-comic manifesto for his own personal, one-man school of poetics, which he called Jammisme. The manifesto mixes his actual beliefs with self-deprecating humor. Article I is an excellent example of both: I think that Truth is the praise of God; that we must celebrate it in our poems for them to be pure; that there exists but one school. . . .3 [End Page 6] That school consists of imitating nature, whether “nature” means a bird, a flower, or a pretty girl “with charming legs and graceful breasts.” The last phrase, which may seem a little offensive to some today, is intended as mildly comical, as if warding off the accusation of pomposity. The whole manifesto ends on a similar comic note: But since all is vanity, and even...

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

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.