Le pari personnaliste: Modernité et catholicisme au XX e siècle (review)

Reviewed by: Le pari personnaliste: Modernité et catholicisme au XXe siècle Paul J. Fitzgerald S.J. Le pari personnaliste: Modernité et catholicisme au XXe siècle. By E.-Martin Meunier. [Collection Héritage et Projet, n° 71.] (Montreal: Éditions Fides. 2007. Pp. 369. $39.95 paperback. ISBN 978-2-762-12756-0.) What was the Personalist movement in France rebelling against, and how did this “wager” set the stage for the major changes in the Catholic Church that were institutionalized at the Second Vatican Council? In the great shift in the Catholic ethos from post-Tridentine to post-Vatican II eras, which internal contradictions within Catholicism were resolved and which new ones appeared? Finally, why has Catholicism seemed to collapse in Western Europe in the decades following the Council? Meunier explores these interlinking questions in this sweeping and thought-provoking book. He begins by rehearsing some of the major themes of Catholic antimodernism to frame the rise in France of that intermingling of philosophical, spiritual, and theological currents, grouped together under the rubric of Personalism. He tracks the condemnations and the confusions surrounding this ecclesial movement, to posit, in the end, a fascinating answer to his overarching question about the failure of what he calls “Personalist Catholicism” to retain the adherence of the French laity, a decline that was echoed in his own Quebec. First presented in 2001 as a doctoral dissertation, in a style that is much more intellectual history than historical theology, Meunier sketches the nineteenth-century Catholic ethos dominated by Jansenism (with its reduction of the religious task to that of expiation of guilt due to sin), Thomism (with what Bernard Lonergan, not mentioned here, would call the “classical mentality”), and clericalism (with its subordination of the laity). In its conflict with the Third Republic (largely omitted here), the hierarchy adopted a posture of resistance and disengagement. The laity, who were also citizens and participants in economic expansion and social transformation (urbanization, industrialization, and national homogenization), were pulled in two directions between Church and state. In their desire to break both with bourgeois [End Page 162] Catholic accommodation and the hierarchy’s stubborn resistance, such Personalists as Marie-Josef LaGrange, O.P.; Jacques Maritain; Charles Péguy; and especially Emmanuel Mounier offered an alternative. Drawing inspiration from the medieval synthesis, they saw a way beyond fascism, communism, and capitalism. Their incarnational theology valorized history as God’s process of salvation, each human being as recipient of a unique vocation to agency in God’s work—and thereby to personal sanctification—and the edification of new social structures as a principal task of the Church in its response to God. Drawing his grid of analysis from the sociological research of such giants as Émile Poulat, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, and Marcel Gauchet, and reading widely in the popular literature of the era, Meunier does a fine job of showing the itinerary of these theological insights via the nouvelle théologie into the decrees of Vatican II. He then asks, “If Personalism was the great and appropriate Catholic cure for all that ails modern society, and if the Church adopted these at Vatican II, then why did the masses desert the Church?” Meunier’s answer is that the central tenets of Personalist Catholicism have had to be worked out in a hostile social environment. The ability of every person (including clergy) to discern and live out one’s vocation is confused with and confounded by Western secular society’s siren calls of utilitarian individualism and therapeutic relativism. Meunier characterizes the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as ongoing attempts to reconcile the resulting tensions (maybe in fact the enduring paradoxes of Christianity): what is true for the one and for the many, what is good for today and for always, and why authority, to succeed, must finally be kenotic. Paul J. Fitzgerald S.J. Santa Clara University Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press

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