The pope’s questionable lecture on secularism

The fruit of a singular history of emancipation of the State from the Catholic Church, the French understanding of secularism, known as secularismis difficult for many foreigners to grasp. As the supreme guardian of the Catholic faith, the pope is obviously not in the best position to promote it. But he could be expected to give a fair reading of a principle and legislation designed to allow the cohabitation of all forms of belief and non-belief, and which sanctions any infringement of the freedom not to believe but also to believe.

By choosing Corsica for his third trip to France, Pope Francis has confirmed both his preference for the “fringes” and his complex relationship with France. After visiting the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 2014, in September 2023 he went “to Marseille, but not to France,” as he put it. On Sunday, December 15, a week after the reopening ceremonies for Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, which he refused to attend despite invitations from the Elysée Palace and the diocese, the Pontiff spent the day in Ajaccio at a symposium on “popular religiosity in the Mediterranean.”

The choice of this theme and of an island where 90% of the inhabitants claim to be Catholic – and where religious practice remains fervent and intertwined with political life – ensured the success of a visit marked by an open-air mass attended by over 17,000 people. But it was also intended to convey a message of mistrust of the French secular model. Pleading in favor of a “healthy secularism” that is “neither static nor fixed, but evolving and dynamic” – in short, flexible in a traditionally Corsican manner – Pope Francis reiterated, in a toned-down form, the criticism he has already voiced of a French secularism with “far too strong coloration inherited from the Enlightenment,” leading, in his view, to religions being presented “as a subculture.”

Vector of freedom

It’s a fact that secularism is a subject of debate and the object of caricatures, abuses and political instrumentalization; it’s also a fact that representatives of religions are allowed take a critical view of it. But Pope Francis, by describing the principle of secularism as a fixed dogma from the outset, tends to bolster those who hold the view he intends to denounce, that secularism is an anti-religious weapon rather than a vector of freedom for everyone, essential to living together.

Rather than appearing to link France’s de-Christianization to its secularism, the pope might consider how people, Catholics included, perceive his recent remarks. For example, in Belgium, on September 29, when he likened doctors who perform abortions to “hired killers” and defined women in basic terms (“woman is a fertile welcome, care, vital devotion”), who are still excluded from positions of responsibility in the Church, and his silence on sexual violence in the Church, notably the Vatican’s refusal to make public the archives on French priest Abbé Pierre, accused of numerous counts of sexual violence.

Highly respectable and powerful, Pope Francis’s humanist messages, his preference for minorities and the disenfranchised, his sensitivity to the issue of migrants, his allergy to exclusionary nationalism – explicitly expressed in Corsica – would be carried with greater force if the Church he embodies were better able to recognize its own mistakes, learn from them, and live more in tune with the times.