In his 1878 encyclical Inscrutabili Dei Consilio, Pope Leo XIII likened “complete forgetfulness of things eternal” to “the deadly kind of plague which infects in its inmost recesses”.Footnote 1 This document set the tone for eight decades of magisterial teaching on unbelief. Indeed, Pius XI might have been speaking for an almost unbroken line of popes, stretching from Leo to his own successor Pius XII, when he wrote in 1937: “During Our Pontificate we too have frequently and with urgent insistence denounced the current trend to atheism which is alarmingly on the increase”.Footnote 2 Pius XII himself, not to be outdone, lambasted atheism's “most ignoble corruptions” in 1956's Haurietis Aquas, along with its “lethal tenets” in 1958's Meminisse Iuvat.Footnote 3
Only six years later, however, the Fathers of Vatican II promulgated Lumen Gentium, article 16 of which affirmed the possibility of salvation for “those who, without any fault of theirs, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God”.Footnote 4 The following April, Paul VI founded a Secretariat for Non-believers– named, as its president Cardinal König wryly emphasized, “for” rather than “against” non-believers.Footnote 5 Among its first tasks was the redrafting of articles 18 and 19 of Schema XIII. The resulting statement of the Church's position on atheism, Gaudium et Spes 19–21, offers, among much else, a sympathetic overview of the sheer variety of atheisms, admits that “Believers can…have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism”, and invites its contemporary adherents to “a dialogue that is sincere and prudent”.Footnote 6
Evidently, from Pius XII's “lethal tenets” in 1958, to the Council's optimism regarding dialogue, cooperation, and even salvation, something had changed in the Catholic understanding of atheism. Recent research on Vatican II has emphasized a growing openness and tolerance within the Church towards non-Catholics and non-Christians, beginning perhaps as far back as the discovery of the New World, but accelerated by social factors in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The dramatic developments, in both tone and content, of the Church's teaching on atheism must also be understood against this background. But it does not, in itself, suffice to explain it. As such, in this paper I will briefly highlight two separate but related trajectories in twentieth-century European – and in fact, predominantly French – Catholic history: one intellectual; one practical and social. Both of these were, as I shall argue, defining landmarks on the road to Gaudium et Spes 19–21.
Trajectory 1: Dialogue and Scholarship
The first trajectory is one of dialogue and scholarship. In the decades preceding Vatican II, for arguably the first time in history, Catholic priests and theologians began seriously to engage, socially and intellectually, with real unbelievers. The true beginnings of this engagement can be dated with some precision: 1934 to 1938, the era of the French ‘Popular Front’, a coalition of left-wing parties spearheaded by the French Communist Party (PCF).Footnote 7 This short and turbulent period had a number of notable repercussions. Among these, as David Curtis has argued, “one facet was a main tendue[‘outstretched hand’] to Catholics that the Party has never withdrawn”.Footnote 8 In 1936 Maurice Thorez, the PCF's general secretary, proposed dialogue with Catholics.Footnote 9 The intention was to reach beyond the Left's traditional, staunchly-anticlerical boundaries, and to cease alienating influential groups, including Catholic intellectuals and members of dynamic, socially-committed youth movements such as the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC), who might otherwise be sympathetic to the left-wing parties.Footnote 10 Irrespective of its political motivations, and whatever its other limitations, there can be no denying that this gesture, this olive branch, to French Catholicism marked a significant watershed. Organized dialogues, involving Christian and atheists actually talking to one another, started to be arranged (although these were, prior to the Council, necessarily informal, unofficial affairs).
La main tendue sparked a flurry of responses. In 1937, the Jesuit philosopher Gaston Fessard published “The outstretched hand”: Is the Catholic-Communist dialogue possible?.Footnote 11 Fessard's answer, drawing particularly on the young Marx's ‘existential’ humanism, was a cautious, qualified “yes”.Footnote 12 The previous year, the lay Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain had published his own remarkable work of “‘positive’ anticommunism”,Footnote 13Integral Humanism, which was itself partly based on Marxist concepts. The Dominican journal La Vie intellectuelle, for which Marie-Dominique Chenu acted as censor, published a series of articles on Marxism in 1937–8.Footnote 14 And during the same period, a young Jean Daniélou (who had been an acquaintance of Sartre's while at the Sorbonne) wrote two articles for Chronique sociale de France on the young Marx's humanism.Footnote 15
Catholic intellectuals were hence, again for the first time, engaging sincerely, in a non-polemical way, with some of the key figures of modern atheistic thought. Over the next twenty-five years, a significant number of serious studies on atheistic themes would appear. To name only the more famous figures, de Lubac's magisterial 1944 volume The Drama of Atheist Humanism comprises detailed analyses of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Comte, and (of course) Marx.Footnote 16 Hans Küng's licentiate dissertation, written at the Gregorian in the early-1950s, was on Sartre.Footnote 17 Romano Guardini, also in the early-1950s, began (although never completed) a study of Nietzsche.Footnote 18 And in Britain, the Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston published studies of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, existentialism and logical positivism in the forties and fifties.
Needless to say, this burgeoning intellectual engagement with atheism engendered new theological understandings of it. But its implications were felt in other areas also, most notably in ecclesiology. Of particular significance here is de Lubac's Catholicism, published in 1938. De Lubac stresses the unity of mankind, as affirmed by the Fathers, and it is clear from his introduction that the impetus for this ressourcement lies in criticisms of the Church made by contemporary ‘free-thinkers’.Footnote 19 Although disagreeing with their charges that the Church is “uninterested in our terrestrial future and in human fellowship”,Footnote 20 de Lubac strikes a note that would later be echoed in Gaudium et Spes:
Nevertheless, if such a misunderstanding has arisen and entrenched itself, if such an accusation is current, is it not our own fault?…if so many observers, who are not lacking in acumen or in religious spirit, are so grievously mistaken about the essence of Catholicism, is it not an indication that Catholics should make an effort to understand it better themselves?Footnote 21
This striking nostra culpa, an admission of failure in light of the erroneous, but nonetheless excusable, criticisms made by sincere unbelievers, motivates the entirety of the text – which, as Fergus Kerr recently put it, “Many, including Congar, Balthasar, Wojtyla and Ratzinger, considered…as the key book of twentieth-century Catholic theology, the one indispensable text”.Footnote 22
Slightly earlier even than this, in 1935, Congar published an article in La Vie intellectuelle entitled ‘The Reasons for the Unbelief of Our Times’.Footnote 23 Commenting on recent sociological studies of the French working classes, revealing “a generalized state of unbelief”,Footnote 24 Congar focuses on the social, rather than the strictly intellectual, origins of this situation. He identifies two main factors. Firstly, the secularizing processes of modern society have forced a separation between faith and life. Secondly, and most importantly, the Church's reaction to these processes – as he puts it, “she fell back upon her positions, put up barricades and assumed an attitude of defence”Footnote 25– has alienated those who might have otherwise remained. In later works, Congar identified Christian disunity as a further cause of unbelief. As he put it in 1961, “Concretely, the division among Christians is a scandal for the world. The world is exonerated, to a degree, from the duty to believe”.Footnote 26 In the same piece, referring back to his 1935 article, Congar commented: “It seemed to me that, since the belief or unbelief of men depended so much on us, the effort to be made was a renovation of ecclesiology.”Footnote 27 Thus Congar's great theological achievement, his hugely influential corpus of ecclesiological writings, was, like de Lubac's Catholicism, motivated in no small part by the Church's engagement with atheism. Indeed, Gabriel Flynn has recently argued that “the overarching concern of Congar's whole theology of the Church is precisely to counteract unbelief.”Footnote 28
Trajectory 2: The Priest-Worker Experiment
The Church's encounter with atheism was not, of course, purely theoretical, which leads us to the second trajectory: the priest-worker experiment. As mentioned above, already in the 1930s sociological studies of the working classes suggested that French Catholicism was facing a grave new world of mass indifference and unbelief.Footnote 29 In 1943, at the behest of the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Suhard, Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel published a curious mix of reportage and manifesto, the seminal tract La France – Pays de Mission? Drawing on social research, their own experiences, and a great deal of anecdotal evidence, the two priests identified certain regions of French society as “Pagan areas. Missionary areas.”Footnote 30 Generally speaking, these were the working-class neighbourhoods of large industrial cities such as Paris and Marseilles.Footnote 31 Their description of these is significant, and worth quoting at length:
In this region and in all like it…[a man] knows nothing of whence he comes, whither he is going, why he is on earth. He has no reason for living, no guiding principles, no scale of values. Nor do you find among such people that basis of Christian values that elsewhere helps you to reach many Christians even though they are unconscious that they are Christians. Even the natural morality is gone,… Yes, here we are indeed in missionary country.… Here we find nothing, sheer emptiness…with civilization superimposed.Footnote 32
In the face of this massive missionary task, Godin and Daniel famously proposed that priests leave behind the bourgeois parish system, immersing themselves totally in the lives of the proletariat – bringing them the gospel on their own terms, and not those dictated by an already (and increasingly) alien culture.Footnote 33 Daunting though this project was, Pays de Mission? is not without hope for future ‘priest-workers’:
Already half Christian are a mother who brings up her children with a great deal of love, a workman who is obliging with his comrades, or, still better, who puts his whole heart into his job. That girl is a Christian who carries out her duties of girlhood in a spirit of charity and joyfulness, Christian that poor man who shares the bread he has begged with one poorer than himself.Footnote 34
Taken together, these two quotations are highly instructive. On the one hand, the contemporary proletariat, being de facto atheists, are characterized as not possessing even the rudiments of “natural morality”. But on quite the other, even here are sometimes to be found Christians who are ignorant of the fact –anonymous Christians, as one might say. This tension should come as no surprise, coming as it does on the threshold of, and moreover helping to usher in, the Catholic reappraisal of unbelievers.
Pays de Mission? had a deep impact, and various ‘Missions’ were duly set up. These attracted a steady trickle of young priests – including disproportionate numbers of Dominicans and Jesuits. Henri Perrin, one of the latter, was among the first to join the experiment. Beginning in 1943, workers in occupied France were conscripted for forced labour in Germany.Footnote 35 Since chaplains were forbidden from accompanying them, a number of priests, including Perrin, clandestinely volunteered to go as workers instead.Footnote 36 Assigned to a munitions factory, he initially avoided detection, but was eventually arrested, imprisoned for several months, and deported back to France. Recovering in Paris, he wrote of his sojourn in a “foreign land”:
But make no mistake – this foreign land I'm talking about isn't…the country in which we lived. No, it's the workers' world, about which we previously knew nothing and which we gradually discovered while we were there.… This is the land where Christ is unknown, where the name of God evokes no response; it's the land of men without God.… In our new life we were obliged to see and reckon with the mass of ordinary people, non-Christians, those who are not “one of us,” whom we had never come across except in the silence of the streets, on buses, or in trams. Suddenly, as a result of a conversation or a meeting…we discovered a “foreign country”– which yesterday was distant and unknown, but is today terribly close and distressing.Footnote 37
Significantly, Perrin recounts his experience in terms of meeting unbelievers for the very first time. As such, not surprisingly, his initial impressions of his fellow-prisoners were not overwhelmingly positive.
From the first, I resolved not to treat them as Christians.… They did not have a Christian's point of view on any of the great problems which must present themselves to a man as soon as he thinks – life, love, money, death, society, the family, justice.… They were not Christians, and had no right to claim the title, since they had nothing to do with Christ.… Whether they wanted to or not, they lived in utter paganism.Footnote 38
Before long, however, by living alongside these men and coming to know them better, Perrin's attitudes shifted somewhat: “actually they were not as ill-disposed as they at first seemed.… From Raymond to Hermanus there was a whole crescendo of good will, and even a certain desire [for religious instruction], more obvious in some than in others, more easy to waken in some than in others.”Footnote 39
Perrin was not the only priest-worker forced to make this reappraisal.Footnote 40 In fact, it happened naturally as, after the War, they began fully to enter the workers' world. As workers themselves, and committed to the rights and welfare of their compatriots, the priests would join, or otherwise cooperate with, the Communist-controlled unions. Priests and Party activists thus began to socialize and collaborate, forcing both sides to revise their erstwhile prejudices. As Oscar Arnal has rightly observed:
these intimate contacts with grass-roots militants would reshape inevitably and profoundly their earlier notions.… That is not to suggest that there were not some hostile and suspicious moments, but such discord emerged habitually within an atmosphere of dialogue and leisure. Indeed, informal socializing was the first pattern of Communist-clerical encounters within the context of the neighbourhood and the very nature of this friendly mingling was able to transform conflict into camaraderie.Footnote 41
Although worlds away from French Catholic intellectual life, the priest-workers' new perspectives were not unknown to some of the academic theologians mentioned above. If nothing else, the preponderance of Jesuits and Dominicans among the priest-workers ensured that their learned confrères – including, among others, de Lubac, Daniélou, Congar and Chenu – were kept abreast of their experiences. And indeed, when the “mission” was eventually liquidated by the Holy Office in February 1954, Congar and Chenu's sympathies saw them stripped of their teaching posts at Le Saulchoir and exiled from Paris.Footnote 42 This new spirit of dialogue, respect, and collaboration between Catholics and unbelievers did not, however, die with the priest-worker project. And nor was it confined only to France. In Franco's Spain, for example, collaborations between Catholics and Communists began happening from the late-1950s, featuring joint ventures between the leftist unions and the Workers' Brotherhoods of Catholic Action. A 1965 article in World Marxist Review, carrying the once-unthinkable title ‘Towards an Alliance of Communists and Catholics’, cited this fact in support of its author's assertion that: “The Catholics are our main allies today in the struggle against Franco. This is a fact. It is perhaps the most characteristic and encouraging feature of the Spanish scene today.”Footnote 43 Elsewhere in Europe also, Catholics were increasingly confronted with the presence of unbelieving apostates within their own families, requiring a very different form of “collaboration”. As Karl Rahner details in his 1954 essay ‘The Christian among Unbelieving Relations’, for many this brought the Church's (hitherto “abstract”) denunciations of atheists into painful relief, and showed up their inaccuracies and inadequacies.Footnote 44
Conclusion
In precisely the same period, then, as the latter two Pope Piuses were routinely denouncing atheism and (particularly) atheists, two crucial developments were underway in the Catholic understanding of modern unbelief. On the one hand, Catholic intellectuals were seriously studying the leading writers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century atheism: Marx, Comte, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, the logical positivists, Sartre. And on the other, Catholic priests were living, working, and collaborating with non-believers, and Marxists in particular. Together, these meant that neither the traditional view that, as Garrigou-Lagrange put it in 1914, “speculative atheism is an impossibility for any man who has the use of reason and is in good faith”,Footnote 45 nor the theologies of atheism that had been based upon it, could any longer be countenanced. For, indeed, to quote Congar, “The Church learns through contact with facts.… Truth remains unaltered; but it is grasped in a new and undoubtedly more adequate way when men and the world are known as they are, in an extent, age and goodness other than what has been believed of them previously.”Footnote 46 Furthermore, there is a clearly demonstrable link between those involved in these two developments, and the new, respectful and pastorally-centred approach to atheism that was enshrined in the texts of the Second Vatican Council. Congar, for example, played a part in the drafting of Lumen Gentium 16. He was, moreover, among the first consultors appointed to the Secretariat for Non-believers, as also were Chenu, de Lubac, and Jacques Loew (a French Dominican and one of the first priest-workers, working as a docker in Marseilles).Footnote 47 And de Lubac was one of four periti entrusted with drafting what would become Gaudium et Spes 19–21 (a text which substantially echoes his earlier ideas), as also was Daniélou (who was however never formally appointed to the Secretariat).
Now the ambit of this paper has been very narrow. A great deal more could have been, and elsewhere should be, said about Gaudium et Spes itself; how the theology behind actually developed; the role of Paul VI's encyclical Ecclesiam Suam; the intellectual debt both de Lubac and Maritain owed to Blondel and Maréchal on the subject of atheism; and the origins and development of the Secretariat for Non-believers. But my purpose here has simply been to narrate, very briefly, two aspects of Gaudium et Spes 19–21's genealogy – to suggest how and why Catholic-atheist religions shifted, on both sides, “from anathema to dialogue”.Footnote 48 This transition was by no means an easy one, and needless to say, it was not permanent. But this history is nevertheless an important one – and one which may, at the present time, be useful to revisit.
