Religion: Priest to the People

The room in the poor, teeming Paris suburb of St. Denis was bare and cold. There, before only two kneeling couples last week, a young priest celebrated his Sunday Mass. When it was over, he changed his vestments for a workman's grubby overalls, and left with one of the men to meet some friends in a workers' cafe for an aperitif and a cheap lunch and, later, a football game. His companions through the day never thought of him as a priest at all, and that suited him well enough, for he was a member of the Mission de Paris.

In Paris there are 16 other priests like him; in the similar Mission de France there are some 140 who earn their daily bread in factories or farms or trades, side by side with the people to whom they minister. These priests celebrate Mass in tenements or farmhouses, and in their "spare time" give help and advice to those who ask for it. Not much is known of them, in France or elsewhere. While not secret, the work of the Missions is kept discreetly quiet, to avoid attracting undue attention from the Communists, and because their priests' unorthodox activities sometimes offend strait-laced Roman Catholics. But on no other front is the church working any harder to reclaim its lost sheep.

Karl Marx & Movie Stars. First guiding spirit of the Mission de Paris was the late Abbe Henri Godin, a shy, intense parish priest who decided that a pastor was virtually helpless in reaching those who did not come to church. He proposed that the church set up a mission to work among Frenchmen with the same dedicated zeal that sends missionaries to spend their lives in hardship in heathen lands. Paris' late Cardinal Suhard and the French archbishops set up the Mission de France in 1941; the Mission de Paris was founded in 1943.

In the war-shattered Normandy town of Lisieux last week, kindly Father Louis Augros was hard at work in an ugly brick seminary, training the 150 new candidates for the Mission de France and Mission de Paris. "The purpose of the training," said Superior Augros, "is, first, to return to the original Christian message, second, to integrate Christian truth with the preoccupations and intellectual scheme of the modern world."

To reach the first objective, Mission students concentrate on the study of the Bible. For the second, they are encouraged to occupy themselves also with the things of the world. In their crowded dormitories are pin-up pictures of movie stars and sports figures; their bookshelves contain volumes by Karl Marx, A. J. Cronin, Saint-Exupery, and Communist Poets Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. From the chapel come the strains of Old Folks at Home and Negro spirituals with new French words. Such music is considered to be "in touch with the mass suffering of our times. It is full of the plea of peoples who have lost touch with Christ."