PAYS DE MISSION?
By CANON ROGER LLOYD
THE French Christian Workers' Unions are now making history. In the recent strike in the Paris automobile factories they succeeded in forcing the Communist Party to change its policy and in embarrassing the French Government ; and the cause of the strike was their determination to assert their cause as against the Communist domination of the trade unions. Thus they came into the news, and it looks as though they will stay -there, for they have shown they are a force to be reckoned with. But is this the sort of history they really want to make? The rock from which they are hewn is the organisation now about ten years old which is known by its nickname, the Jocistes. This nickname is derived from the initials of the full title, Jeunesses Ouvrieres Chretiennes, the Young Christian Workers. It is a movement strong in France and Belgium, and its two purposes are and have always been to carry Christian principles into industry through a genuine workers' movement, and to restore the Christian faith and cul- ture to the great blocks of industrial Workers in the cities. This they have not succeeded in doing, though they have struggled heroically.
The failure to make any impression on the paganism of the French industrial worker is absolute ; and many French Christian thinkers are therefore struggling to find out why both the Catholic Church in France as a whole and its specially trained "commandos," the Jocistes, appear to be getting nowhere in this vitally important field. This situation it is which has caused two French priests, MM. H. Godin and Y. Daniel, both of whom are concerned with the Jocistes and have for years been labouring in the " parish " of the French industrial worker (M. Godin has lately died), to sit down to think the whole matter out again from the very beginning. They have done it in a little book, La France Pays de Mission?, which is not only of capital importance for Frenchmen and all students of France, but is also the best introduction to the problem of evangelism in the great blocks of industrial population almost anywhere in Europe or America that I have ever seen. It is to be hoped that it can be translated and published here.
From long experience, both of the work and of the social field where it has to be done, the authors have exact and comprehensive knowledge of their material, the mind of the French industrial worker. Their picture of him is gloomy. He himself and the com- munities which envelop his whole life are pagan. Their sentiments and emotional reactions are pagan. Their legal environment is pagan. The institutions to which they belong—cinemas, camping clubs, youth hostels—are pagan. They are ignorant of right and wrong, and have no sense of sin. As a consequence these urban pagan regions are not merely without Christian culture ; they are without any culture at all. The Catholic,,Church means nothing
to them, and the French parochial system (not quite the same thing as the English) is not equipped, no matter how hard it tries, to make any effective difference. This France, the France of the industrial areas in the great cities, as opposed to the other France of the countryside where conditions are totally different, is therefore a missionary field, Un Pays de Mission. But a mission is properly a going out of the Church to take Christianity into a land where it could not possibly exist before because it has never been heard of. What applies to the work of the Church in, say, the heart of New Guinea applies now also in industrial Paris or Marseilles. The first rule of missionary work is that the function of the mission is to plant the Church in -the new soil ; and it is the Church's business when planted, not the mission's, to save souls. Hence the true missionary always strives to build up a genuinely native Church, which he can only do by claiming for Christ the whole communal culture of the region. His aim is, in fact, to win the native community as such, and to baptis a whole culture, rather than to be content to bring into an essentially European Church just a few souls here and there. The mission creates the Church where the Church does not exist. This, say the authors, is the actual condition in the French cities. They are there- fore a missionary area in the true sense, and they can be dealt with only by a mission, and not by the ordinary routine methods of the existing French Church. That is the heart of their argument ; and it leads them in the end to this remedy, which they print in italics :
"It seems that the role of a truly popular Catholic mission
must be to uncover and identify (decouvrir) every human community, and to form in each of them a Christian cell which, with the help of a priest, shall form a radiant and radiating community, of dynamic force."
It is exactly the same insight which lies behind the various forms of the cell movement in England and America. There, too, it is realised that when faced by communities whose very surroundings make them obstinately materialist the ordinary methods of Church extension get nowhere. But this book, small as it is, is the most thorough analysis of a common European problem that I have ever seen.
Considered as an expert account of the prevailing mind and temper of the communities of French industrial workers, the book explains much that is otherwise puzzling about current French history. When a vast section, and in modern times the most important section, of a nation's population is in such a frame of mind, and incessantly subject to the conditioning of pagan suggestion, how is it possible for the affairs of the nation to flourish or for the workers themselves to find happiness? The only possible beneficiary is the Communist Party. In the circumstances, the achievement of the Christian Workers' Unions in becoming a formidable rival to the Communist-controlled unions is indeed remarkable. But of course it is not by inter-trades-union strife that paganism can be won to accept within Christianity a spiritual interpretation of life.
An English priest, or any English Christian, must read such a book with a good deal of discomfort. - Wherever vast quantities of working men and women are gathered together in huge towns, and within them are virtually segregated into communities and areas almost wholly their own, the breeding-ground of the communal reces- sion from practising Christianity through a steadily weakened Christian culture to materialistic paganism has been created. The ground has been ,made ready for the disease in nearly every great city in Europe and America. None the less, as things are at present, there are tWo points where the French analysis would not describe the English situation. In England the parochial system, the idea of the parish and its vicar at the disposal of all, means a good deal more than the authors say it means in France, even though in the matter of parish boundaries it has largely broken down in the cities. But whereas the authors' use of the word mission suggests that in France the parochial system is almost completely irrelevant to any mission to the industrial worker, in England the parish is not only relevant to such a mission but essential to it. 'Secondly, we are not in England hampered at every turn and point by that terrible tradi- tion that bevery Socialist ought automatically to be an atheist, and that everybody who is trying to work for better social conditions must of necessity expect to find the whole body of the Church arrayed against him. We may thank God that a man called F. D. Maurice once existed, and another man called William Temple; and for various odd little societies like the Guild of St. Matthew and the Church Socialist League.
But with those differences, England, toof is Pays de Mission ;
and here, too, the vital remedy of the French authors, the planting of a small Christian community inside a larger and relatively pagan one, applies ; and the beauty of this instrument is that it is so simple, so economical, so flexible. Such an instrument may well be of decisive historical importance, because it is expressly designed to win back from paganism thac section of society which in the twentieth century is of decisive historical importance. The future of every country in the western world today, and probably in tne eastern world tomorrow, is in the hands of the urban proletariat ; and there is no possibility of social recovery anywhere unless the mass of the industrial workers are cheerfully prepared to toil and sweat for it. If the whole of their culture is that of pagan materialism, they cannot do it, and the mission of Christendom to them is an enterprise of world-wide significance. The importance of the work of MM. Godin and Daniel is that they force their readers to think more realistically about what this mission really is, and they clearly indicate where its real hope lies. It will be a pity if for lack of an English translation their book is read only by those who know French.
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