c. 2000 Religion News Service

PARIS _ What do you do when your finances are shaky, your popularity is sliding and your boss faces charges of influence peddling?

If you’re the French Communist Party, you turn to Jesus.

In a move that may send Karl Marx spinning in his grave, the embattled party launched an extravagant art show last week featuring French paintings and sculptures with Jesus as the theme.

Billed as a bow to the millennium, “Jesus and Humanity” has drawn both skepticism and praise among France’s Roman Catholic clergy, and a few snickers among jaded Parisians.

As for the Communist Party, Marx’s condemnation of religion as the “opiate of the masses” must be balanced with sympathetic statements aired later by the movement’s ideological founder. A legacy of state-sponsored atheism in Cuba, China and the former Soviet Union is taken with a Gallic shrug.

“The point is, we are in France _ not anywhere else,” said Jean Marc Bouchez, part of the party’s art show team. “You can be a Communist and still believe in God. This is quite possible, you know. The main thing is we can agree about the forces that limit the possibilities of human development.”

Nor have French Communists shied from more worldly attractions. Several fashion houses used the party’s north Paris headquarters recently to stage shows, paying handsome sums in return. Designed by renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Neemeyer, the wavelike building is considered a work of art in itself.

Running until December and free to the public, the latest exhibition features works by 30 French artists. Most are contemporary, a few from centuries past. They include an array of crosses and abstract portraits of Jesus, and a dominating theme of red, black and white.

More than just creating a splash, Bouchez argues, the show is ideologically appropriate. Both Christianity and Communism champion the poor and the downtrodden, he said. Both struggle for a better world.

It is an argument the nation’s Catholic bishops have tentatively embraced.

“I think this is a good initiative,” said Father Stanislas Lalanne, spokesman for the bishops of France, who attended the show’s opening. “I think it’s important to say Christians don’t have a monopoly on Christ. It goes beyond our church. And I am curious to see how they translated Jesus into art.”

These days, the French Communist Party needs all the support it can muster. Over the past few years, the party’s ranks have plummeted from 500,000 to less than 200,000 members, and it is struggling to remain in the black. During the 1997 legislative elections, Communists secured only 9.9 percent of the vote _ six points less than France’s far-right National Front.

“The youth don’t want to sacrifice anymore,” complained 64-year-old Jacqueline Lamotte, a party member since the age of 16. “They don’t think of Communism as a symbol of man’s liberation.”

Perhaps of greater concern, the party’s leader, Robert Hue, is implicated in charges the party offered municipal water concessions to a French company that poured $2.6 million into its coffers during the early 1990s. If convicted, Hue faces up to 15 months in prison.

But after his day in court, a rotund and beaming Hue nonetheless made an appearance at the exhibit’s Oct. 25 opening. So did scores of other party stalwarts in rumpled corduroys or black-leather chic. Many reacted to the exhibition with wry grins.

Bernard Lavanier, sporting a ponytail and leather jacket, criticized much of the art for being too realistic. But Lavanier, a staunch atheist, said he had no quibbles with the subject.

“Personally, it doesn’t bother me; to the contrary,” Lavanier said with a chuckle. “But one can’t stop at Jesus Christ; you have to do the other side as well.”

“I’ll admit this is an area we’re not used to covering,” said 48-year-old Regine Berlis, as she studied a small bronze statue of a hanging Jesus by French artist Claude Mary. “But I don’t see why Communists should forbid certain subjects. After all, there are themes common to both Christianity and Communism.”

But 85-year-old Jean Jolivet had his doubts. After reading about the Jesus exhibition in the newspapers, the Catholic priest took a train from Provence to check it out for himself.

“Whether this is out of good faith or to collect more support, I’m not sure,” Jolivet said. “Maybe the Communist Party has evolved to a certain extent, because at first it was opposed to the Catholic religion.”

He paused, gazing at the white banner advertising the show outside. “At any rate _ `Jesus and Humanity,”’ he added, reflectively. “At least the title is a good start.”

DEA END RNS