Roman Catholicism: Not Cassocks But Coveralls

The French worker-priest is back. Pope Paul VI has resurrected France's postwar experiment in dealing with the "deChristianized" working class, an experiment once thought to have strayed so radically that liberal Pope John XXIII himself pronounced its doom.

The notion that a shepherd of souls should wear a workman's coveralls first got important attention one evening in 1943, when Paris' Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard, who died in 1949, picked up a book written by two of his abbes and sat up the entire night reading it. Authors Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel contended that...