The Church and the Government in France

Extract

The past year has been one of intense anxiety for the Catholics of France, and although, after steering a bold course through great dangers, they can for the moment regard the situation with much more confidence than was possible even three months ago, it is too soon to say that their trials or their dangers are yet at an end. Their leaders have at any rate shown themselves capable of making the utmost use of their tactical advantages, which have given them, in the present time of national crisis, a strength out of all proportion to their numbers in relation to the rest of F ranee. And so long as the present critical conditions continue, the Catholics, as a powerfully organized and coherent minority, will be able to exert constant pressure on any Government which contemplates a policy of internal discord.

Yet less than six months ago M. Herriot was still in power, fulminating against the usurpations of the ‘clerical reaction’ during the years of the war and threatening to carry out a whole programme of anti-Catholic legislation. He had already decreed the abolition of the Vatican Embassy. His Minister for the Interior had carried out a thorough investigation all over France to discover how many members of the proscribed religious communities had come back to France, with a view to expelling them once more. His Education Minister was delivering violent tirades against the Jesuits and the other teaching orders, and was preparing a complete scheme for re-establishing a State monopoly of education all over the country.