France united and divided over activist priest

[struggle4progress]

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor
Reuters
Monday, January 29, 2007; 6:00 AM

PARIS (Reuters Life!) - France spent all of last week united in mourning for the revered Abbe Pierre, a lifelong campaigner for the homeless and the poor, but divided over who the frail old man in a beret really was.

No sooner was his death announced last Monday than politicians, anti-poverty activists and the media intoned a unanimous chorus of praise for the crusader who shamed successive governments into helping people they often ignored ...

A recent survey showed that only 51 percent of the French still call themselves Catholic and only eight percent attended Sunday mass regularly. Of those Catholics, only half of them actually believe that God exists ...

"He was a modern Catholic who was open to the ordination of women priests and married men ... open to gay marriage and adoption rights for homosexuals," <Jean-Marie Colombani, publisher of the daily Le Monde> wrote ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/29/AR2007012900241.html

[illinoisprogressive]

1. thanks for this. My mom is from France. Love news from there

[The Majority]

2. France Falling Apart

Looks like France is falling apart. Keeping the church from running the country is a good thing, but this article makes it appear they have gone too far the other way.

When public opinion turns completely against religion the people lose their culture and society begins to break down. I fear this weakness of conviction could be seen as an opportunity by the militant Islamists that have caused problems in France.

France's future might hang in the balance in the next few years. At least France as we know it today.

[struggle4progress]

3. WWII and the Holocaust demolished the faith of many Europeans.

Whether religion is the essentially force behind cultural cohesiveness seems questionable to me.

The decline of the notion of community in America may be associated with a physical lifestyle that isolates people in single-occupant automotive commutes in suburban landscapes and leaves folks seeking solitary entertainment in front of TV screens, rather than some more mysterious cultural factors, and the Europeans -- with more compact cities and a greater reliance on multimodal transportation alternatives -- may not be losing cultural cohesiveness the same way Americans are.

[The Majority]

4. God Is Not

God is not a bus ride or a closely knit apartment complex. If a person loses their faith after a difficult time then they never had any to begin with.

France has lost its faith and we are watching it fall apart economically, socially, militarily, and by just about any other measure.

When someone loses faith in the common religion of their society they also leave the society in spirit. That's their choice, but that decision played over many times tears the society apart.

We only need to look to history to see this has happened many times before.