By Joel Forster, Evangelical Focus. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Pope Leo XIV’s “apostolic journey” to France has produced images of hundreds of thousands of people waiting to see the head of the Roman Catholic Church, mass gatherings with well-organised celebrations, and the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, speaking alongside the Pope.
Paris, Lourdes and Metz witnessed a Catholic fervour that does not square with the idea of a secularised France in which culture and politics follow a path entirely separate from religion.
Evangelical Focus asked David Brown, an evangelical theologian and church planter in France with decades of experience in analysing the presence of Christian minorities in European societies.
Question. The media speak of a huge success of Pope Leo’s visit to France. How strong would you say is the minority of practicing Catholics in France? Would you say that they are experiencing a kind of renewal in their activities and resilience?
Answer. To illustrate the resurgence of Catholicism in France, people are pointing to the number of adult baptisms in France last Easter – over 13,000 adults plus over 8,000 young people between 11 and 17 years old. The number of such baptisms has tripled since 2016. Of course, a part of the explanation is the huge drop in infant baptisms (roughly 150,000 today compared to 380,000 just 25 years ago), leaving some people unbaptised although attracted to the Catholic church.
That said, there is a marked resilience in the number of practising Catholics compared with the drop in numbers in the last half of the 20th Century.
Strangely, the Catholic Church is today far stronger in the cities and bigger towns than in rural areas, which is quite the opposite of the case for the last 200 years. However, fewer than 100 new priests are being ordained annually, and parishes are increasingly turning to priests from other European countries and from sub-saharan Africa (30% of the overall number). But more and more lay people are being employed to run parishes.