THE CHURCH IN FRANCE: CATHOLICISME ZOMBIE

Earlier this month, I published a post (admittedly a depressing one) regarding the present status of the Church in Austria. 

 All during this month, I will be showcasing statistics about the European Church and the alarm bells that should be sounding in the ears of the hierarchy.  It is a story not pretty to share.

In this post, let us examine the present condition of the Church in France.

Here are the facts.  

While an estimated 56% of the French population are self-professed Catholics, only 5% regularly practice the Faith and another 15% only do so occasionally.  Over 80% of French Catholics are so in name only rarely, if ever, allowing their shadows to cross the entrances of churches which have become deteriorating museums.
   
The Catholic Church in France is dead.

Parishes are practically devoid of practicing members, a trend that began after World War I.

The few aging Clergy who remain still cling to an accomodationist mindset, aligning themselves to leftist principles of a system of socialism they refuse to admit has failed the Church and the country. 

The handful of Catholic theologians who remain active appear anxious to empty the Catholic faith of any moral content beyond non-judgmentalism (except, of course, on environmental and economic issues).

And, like everywhere else in the West, French Religious Orders which opted for social and political activism are on the brink of extinction. 

Pop-culture refers to the condition of the Church in France as catholicisme zombie.

What is left of French Catholicism, meagerly witnessed in what French journalists refer to as the néocatholiques,  consists of middle-class workers who appear all too eager to engage in a kind of religious/cultural war with the political system.  It is a perennial temptation to which French Catholicism has succumbed in the past, and one which has rarely ended well for the Church.

French Catholicism has been serious damaged by the  pervasive culture of cynicism and permissiveness in which the French take great solace. 

Charles de Gaulle rightfully observed that France a secular republic with a Catholic heart. 

That heart is "CODE BLUE "at the present moment.  

It needs to be resuscitated by the shock that only the truth of the Scriptures and the care of a ministering Church can provide.

Sadly, the French Bishops appear to be as moribund as those they have been called to guide and serve.

What a sad state the “Church’s eldest daughter” finds herself to be!