NEWS STORY: Grass-roots Innovation May Help New Pope Reclaim Europe’s Churches

c. 2005 Religion News Service POITIERS, France _ Marie-Cecile Augeai does not consider herself a church hopper, but after years of moving around France, the 47-year-old Roman Catholic is an expert of sorts on local parish life. Since settling in Poitiers last year, Augeai believes she has found her spiritual home _ at Saint-Jean de […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

POITIERS, France _ Marie-Cecile Augeai does not consider herself a church hopper, but after years of moving around France, the 47-year-old Roman Catholic is an expert of sorts on local parish life.

Since settling in Poitiers last year, Augeai believes she has found her spiritual home _ at Saint-Jean de Montierneuf, an 11th century stone edifice framed by buttercups and daisies, where the congregation largely runs the show.


“There’s a sense of warmth and fraternity here,” said Augeai, as she sipped cider during a meet-and-greet gathering after Sunday Mass. “One senses an openness. People aren’t afraid of tackling difficult questions.”

Such religious enthusiasm is hard to find these days in France, a country where priests are in short supply and parishioners fled the churches long ago. Indeed, of all the challenges German-born Pope Benedict XVI faces as he embarks on his papacy, perhaps none is more daunting than reviving Europe’s embattled Catholic Church.

But in a continent that rejected the mention of Christianity in its new constitution, and where scattered governments move to legalize such Vatican taboos as same-sex marriage and the right to die, profound changes are afoot among the dwindling bastions of Catholicism.

That includes changes in this ancient Gallo-Roman city in west-central France, torn apart by bloody religious wars and pieced back together by a 1577 edict granting religious freedom. Today, Poitiers is at the center of a quiet movement to change the church from below _ regardless, perhaps, of which pope presides above.

“I see this Montierneuf community living like the first Christian communities, trying to live by the Gospels,” said 31-year-old Congolese priest Claude Moussolo, one of the parish’s two resident clerics. “Before it was the priest who centralized everything. Now everyone has a responsibility in church life.”

Lay people are beginning to take over the day-to-day running of Western European parishes, assuming functions previously reserved for the clergy _ and challenging a paradoxical trend of centralizing church powers championed by the late Pope John Paul II and enforced by his close associate, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the new pope.

In many ways, the new clout of practicing Catholics is merely a practical response to the dearth of priests across the continent _ only 90, for example, were ordained in France last year. And while some parishes have morphed into vibrant dissident movements, embracing married clergy and gay unions, others _ at least tacitly _ are toeing the Vatican line.


“My feeling is that the pope is in Rome, but parishes are working things out for themselves,” said Nicolas de Bremond d’Ars, a priest and sociologist at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences, in Paris. “There aren’t going to be any revolts _ because there’s simply too much basic work to do.”

But, he added, “Once these lay people get used to acting in a free and responsible manner, we may see an adaptation of Catholicism at the grass roots that’s very significant.”

The changes now amount to small ripples against the mighty current of European secularism. Belgium and the Netherlands have both legalized euthanasia and gay marriages, and the Socialist government in nominally Catholic Spain is heading in the same direction. Even in staunchly Catholic Portugal, the new Socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Socrates is planning to hold a referendum on relaxing strict abortion laws.

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Many doubt Benedict will adapt the church to such European realities. But others, including critics like Isaac Wurst, say they are open to surprises.

“He’s got very strong positions especially on moral issues and a top-down church,” said Wurst, the Dutch spokesman for We Are Church, an international Catholic reform movement. “But at least he’s a good theologian, and he seems able to listen.”

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Perhaps no European country embraces the secular mantle as fiercely as majority Catholic France. Only about 10 percent of the population attends church regularly, and experts estimate the number of priests has plummeted 70 percent over the last 30 years _ a dearth only partially addressed by importing foreign clerics like Montierneuf’s Moussolo.


A government ban against students wearing religious symbols to public schools last year sparked outrage from a conservative minority _ but quiet approval from the rest of the public.

And a survey published by the French Catholic weekly La Vie found the vast majority of non-practicing Catholics hoped the new pope would end restrictions against married and female priests, birth control and some forms of abortion.

But as churches empty across much of France, those in the Poitiers diocese are slowly filling _ thanks, arguably, to a new experiment in lay management. Crafted a decade ago by the local archbishop, Albert Rouet, the initiative _ a first in France _ is being replicated by several other dioceses.

“When people take responsibility in their church, others come,” said Rouet, who estimates church attendance has inched up to 5 percent from a negligible 0.5 percent in some parts of his largely rural diocese. “We no longer have this idea in our heads of a recession.”

Augeai’s husband is among the new parishioners attending Sunday Mass at Montierneuf, after spending years as a non-practicing Catholic. “People here care about debating things,” she said. “They’re not afraid about tackling questions like homosexuality or abortions.”

But others are less certain that running daily parish life means having a say in church doctrine.


“We asked that question at a diocese meeting,” said 50-year-old Philippe Devaux, a member of the parish’s management team who admits he is divided on questions like gay union and female priests. “The answer we got is that local churches don’t have decision-making powers in such matters.”

Grass-roots initiatives elsewhere in Europe are also at odds over spearheading fundamental reforms.

In Amsterdam’s Haarlem suburb, a church run by a group of dissident lay Catholics and former priests now draws up to 700 people on Sundays, said Wurst of We Are Church. Women and men share responsibility for conducting Sunday services.

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But other Dutch parishes are staying firmly within Vatican norms, even as they decentralize. “Still, I think local communities are the bricks of the church’s future,” said Wurst, a 74-year-old former priest who left the church to marry in 1968. “What is dying is the official clerical church.”

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In neighboring Belgium, the country’s remaining 10 percent to 15 percent of practicing Catholics also are cautiously tinkering with local control. Some lay-run parishes have increased the age of confirmation to 18 years from 12. In others, laymen and priests are instituting new forms of liturgy, said Lieven Boeve, a theology professor at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.

“This is happening within the broad borders of the church,” Boeve said. “But you cannot just say we live in a dying church _ just a smaller church.”

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Whether European parishes can woo back disaffected Catholics is another matter. Past examples of shaping a more liberal church _ including in Benedict’s native Germany _ are hardly encouraging.


When German bishops challenged the Vatican’s abortion policy in 1999, John Paul never visited the country again. In 1998, the pope rejected similar reforms floated by Austrian priests, including calls for ordaining women and married men.

In France, Bishop Jacques Gaillot was fired from his Normandy post in 1995 for defending homosexuals and married priests, among other unorthodox views.

“Ratzinger is a disappointment,” Gaillot told France’s Liberation newspaper last week. “I think of all those who feel excluded from the church, the divorced, the remarried … the homosexuals, the women who want to be welcomed as priests … Ratzinger closed the door on Vatican II. He keeps it in letter but not in spirit.”

Nor is Patrice Gourrier much more sanguine. A priest at the Montierneuf church, Gourrier recently published “An Open Letter to the New Pope” _ a book calling for profound changes in the Catholic Church. His writings have earned him widespread applause and a flurry of press coverage, hate mail from a few Catholics … and careful silence from Archbishop Rouet.

“Practicing Catholics are experiencing a strong identity crisis _ they’re afraid of life,” Gourrier said. “Benedict XVI corresponds perfectly to his times. He’s uncompromising on church doctrine. He’s the pope who reassures.”

Even as he described lay-controlled parishes like Montierneuf’s as sparking “a profound upheaval” within the French church, Gourrier also sketched their limits.


“People are making the parishes function but there’s no real debate,” he said. “Where are people discussing ideas and change? Every time there’s been a debate, it’s been (discouraged) because of fear of Rome.”

KRE/RB END BRYANT

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