France's new president is a 'zombie Catholic'

[rug]

Paris, France, May 10, 2017 / 04:44 pm (CNA).- Newly-elected President Emmanuel Macron, according to one of his biographers, embodies a new phenomenon in France known as “zombie Catholicism.”

Once among the most Catholic countries in the world, sometimes called the “eldest daughter of the Church,” France has seen serious decline in churchgoing numbers in modern times. While more than 50 percent of people still identify as Catholic, only 5 percent regularly attend Mass.

Still, in France’s recent presidential election, a latent Catholic identity in many of France’s citizens proved to be a powerful political tool.

Sociologists Emmanuel Todd and Hervé Le Bras were the first to label the phenomenon in their book “Le mystère français” in which they explain that “Catholicism seems to have attained a kind of life after death. But since it is a question of a this-worldly life, we will define it as ‘zombie Catholicism.’”

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/frances-new-president-is-a-zombie-catholic-41556/

[DetlefK]

1. Actually... the first fully christian country was Armenia.

[rug]

3. Yes, seventy years before the Edict of Thessalonica.

[True Dough]

2. I figured he'd be

a Pastafarian. It is relatively big in Europe, and he is "Macron-i", after all.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/big-in-europe/501131/

[rug]

4. No, he's pretty bright.

[Willie Pep]

5. I don't know what to think about the zombie Catholic phenomenon.

I have friends who fell away from the Church in college but came back to it when they got married and started to have children. They were usually well-educated and politically conservative. I think that for many zombie Catholics Catholicism is seen as a way to impart strong values and discipline. While I am happy to see people going to church the zombie Catholics practice a very this-world form of Catholicism and they are often arrogant and classist, at least in my experience.

Fewer working-class people attend Mass and we are beginning to see a divide between middle-class churchgoing Catholics and working-class Catholics who don’t regularly attend Mass and who are alienated from Catholic culture. This issue has existed in France for a long time and was the impetus behind the worker-priest movement in the 1940s when it was noted that many French workers were alienated from the Church. The Church needs to work on reconnecting with working-class Catholics in the developed world including the U.S. since I notice many of the same trends here as in France.

[rug]

6. That's a thoughtful post.

The future of the Church cannot be in the suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods. The message is certainly there.