Green shoots in the French Church

Impressed by Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on the surroundings, new non secular, academic, agricultural and media networks are gathering momentum within the Gallic countryside

The French translation of Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ appeared a couple of months earlier than the staging of the United Nations Local weather Change Convention (Cop21) in Paris. It was a right away inspiration for a lot of, particularly younger, French Catholics who had by no means earlier than thought long and hard concerning the questions it raised. Since then, many teams have begun to develop artistic concepts and tasks that assist folks to turn into extra ecologically conscious. They’ve additionally dispelled fears {that a} easier and extra sustainable lifestyle would endanger the customarily illusory stability to which so many Catholics in France cling as a great.

Media studies and the fixed downturn in church attendance (in keeping with a current Bayard-Ipsos ballot solely 4 per cent out of the 53 per cent in France who establish as Catholics attend Sunday Mass) counsel a Church disturbed and even shattered by a sequence of abuse scandals. Many are damage or indignant and a rising quantity even ask to be “de-baptised”. Bodily assaults on Christians have quadrupled.

There have been 30,000 clergymen on the finish of the Nineties; in 2015, the variety of lively clergymen had fallen dramatically to a mere 5,800. Because the thinker Camille Riquier of the Catholic Institute of Paris remarked lately, the French Church is caught in a “interval of weak religion and doubt”.