French-Style Secularism Under Scrutiny

Arson attack on the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Saint-Omer, September 2, 2024
Pope Francis, while receiving in audience Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, Archbishop of Reims and President of the Conference of Bishops of France (CEF), on December 18, 2024, confided that he viewed French-style secularism "with a bit of distance."
This "gently critical" judgment is informed by a recent survey by the Pew Research Center (PRC). For almost 20 years, this center has been evaluating restrictions on religion in various countries around the world.
To do this, it uses two criteria: the Government Restrictions Index (GRI) and the Social Hostility Index (SHI), or the way in which society reacts to a religion present in its territory, or to ethical positions emanating from a religion regarding issues such as abortion, homosexuality, etc.
The figures just published by the American institute at the end of 2024 are in fact the culmination of a long synthesis work that offers an overview of the period from 2018 to 2022.
In 2022, the median results on the two indices are 3 out of 10 for the GRI and 1.6 out of 10 for the SHI, keeping in mind that according to the PRC, the index deemed "moderate" for the GRI is between 2.4 and 4.4 out of 10, while it is between 1.5 and 3.5 in the case of social hostility.
Two lessons emerge from the study: on the one hand, government constraints on religion seem to have reached a peak; on the other hand, the GRI on religion and the SHI towards religious groups go hand in hand. These two lessons are observed over the period 2018-2022 in three-quarters of the 198 countries where the survey was conducted.
Thus, for South Korea, New Zealand, or the United States, their two indices are at a low or moderate level, as in 60% of the countries studied. Conversely, Afghanistan, Algeria, India, and China reveal two indices in the red, which is the case for 12% of the countries studied and where it is not good to live as a believer, and as a Christian in particular.
But one figure attracts the reader's attention, especially when they live in France: it appears that France is the country within the European Union in which religious restrictions and social hostility are at their highest level: 6.0 for the GRI and 5.9 for the SHI.
The many anti-Christian acts recorded, the hostility towards the positions recalled – often timidly – by the Church of France on the right to life or relative to the ideology of “gender,” the constraints weighing on private schools in terms of school content, the expansion of the “right” to abortion and the prospect of the law on euthanasia trouble the religious convictions of many health personnel.
It would be easy to put the observation into perspective by saying that the situation is still brighter in France than in North Korea, but the facts are there. It is in this context that one can understand the repeated criticisms by Pope Francis of French secularism, accusing it of considering religion “as a subculture and not as a culture in its own right.”
One should also remember the clear words of Pope St. Pius X in the encyclical Vehementer Nos, criticizing a secularism "contrary to the order very wisely established by God in the world, an order that requires a harmonious concord between the two societies (civil and religious).”
(Source : Pew Research Center – FSSPX.Actualités)
Illustration : SDIS 62