We are grateful to David Critchley for providing us with a translation of the Foreword to a recently published collection of essays by the eminent French traditionalist Jean-Pierre Maugendre: Quand la mer se retire: La tragédie de l’Église au XXIe siècle (When the Sea Withdraws: the Tragedy of the Church in the 21st Century) (Contretemps, 2024). Hopefully this entire book will be translated soon. Meanwhile, the Foreword itself is worth sharing for its directness and plain speech.
Foreword by Michel de Jaeghere
When the sea withdraws, we are shocked first by the sight of the vast emptiness which it has left behind. The most optimistic reassure themselves, looking at the pools formed here and there on the beach. They form a circle around them, hands upraised, and sing. The pessimists see the damp sand as an enormous desert, bereft of life in perpetuity. They conclude that all is hopelessly lost. Others reckon that we must adapt ourselves to the new climatic conditions without nostalgic glances back at a departed past. Take advantage of the dryness. Others again place their hopes on a return which they consider inevitable, and resolve to prepare themselves by fighting back against the triple temptation of resignation, blindness, and despair. Jean-Pierre Maugendre belongs to this last group.President of Renaissance Catholique, an association dedicated to promoting the social kingship of Christ, Jean-Pierre Maugendre has commented for many years on the contemporary scene, both political and religious. He has brought together here some of the articles and commentary that he has devoted to this topic, from 2005 to 2024: from the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the seat of Peter to Pope Francis’s Synod on Synodality. The collections allows twenty years of the life of France and the Church to pass before our eyes, and it would be an understatement to say that the author casts a critical eye on those years: whether he discusses the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy or that of Emmanuel Macron, the pontificate of Benedict XVI or the current ecclesiastical revolution, he reveals the spectacle of a double collapse, of the Church and of the State. Here we find the scandal caused by the speech given by Benedict XVI at Regensburg, in 2006, urging a reconciliation between faith and reason, while pointing at the divorce between them provoked by Islam; here are the contradictory motu proprios devoted to the freedom of the Gregorian Mass by Ratzinger as pope and by his successor. To the sight of a Church shaken by the immense scandal of pedophilia, unsure of its teaching and outlawing its own liturgy, corresponds that of a State which has abdicated from its sovereignty and dismantles its borders, and uses up all its energy in masking its incapacity by leaving to the generations to come the resolution of the crises whose beginnings it has allowed to grow by sweeping them under the carpet. Sometimes the two forms of decadence march in lockstep, when the Catholic hierarchy participates in the disarming of the State by stigmatising every policy that tries to halt the migratory wave breaking on Europe, or when the State thinks that it can fight against the threat of a conquering Islam by promoting the dechristianisation of France in the name of a laicity which it wants to believe will enable two peoples to “live together” on the same soil, at the very time when this “living together” consists of depriving the country of the living source of its identity and of its heritage. At the foot of the picture we see a procession of politicians full of false principles and bishops determined to betray the duties that they have been assigned.
For all that, Jean-Pierre Maugendre’s book is not a collection of laments. He points out some “divine surprises” well-suited to strengthening our hopes, like the rehabilitation of the Mass of St Pius V by Benedict XVI, or the vast assembly of young people on the occasion of the Manif pour tous. He brings on stage several figures who rise above the storm of events like lighthouses: Jean Madiran, Hélie Denoix de Saint Marc, Doctor Xavier Dor. In addition he opens up useful perspectives on the limits of Catholic obedience, or on the reconciliation of political prudence with the proclamation of the truth. At the same time he rejects naivety as being a superior form of laziness or cynicism.
But even while he draws attention to the dead-ends into which modernity has driven us, Jean-Pierre Maugendre has above all the merit of showing that what we are taking part in is a civilisational crisis nourished by the cessation of preaching on our final purposes, the continued inflation of human rights, the triumph of the thinking of 1968, and the transformation of that thinking into wokism. In the face of this decay of the foundations of the Church and of the city, he thinks it pointless for us to content ourselves with mounting a strategy based on electoral hopes and a mere change-over of political and ecclesial personnel. He believes that it is much more necessary to set in motion an intellectual and moral Reformation. When the Church of God seems tempted to cease preaching to men that there is no other way of salvation than Jesus Christ, no other way than the Cross, when a country forged by Christianity thinks that it grows by making abortion a constitutional right and by proclaiming a right to blaspheme, it is not enough to resign ourselves to chronicling the great collapse. We must grasp again the principles which underpin the greatness of Christian civilisation , and investigate the conditions in which they can be revitalised, restored to honour, and put into practice. That is the task to which this precious book invites us. In analysing several of the key episodes of our most recent past, it summons us to prepare our future on the basis of a more solid foundation than the slogans of a facile hunt for votes.
