A STARTLING REBIRTH! The original Saint Joseph’s at 50 avenue Hoche in Paris (left) was considered a beautiful, traditional Catholic Church that was a pillar of what became a fashionable neighborhood. However, by the 1970s and 1980s maintaining the old building had become impossible; some portions of the structure were irreparable. Rather than simply trying to replace the familiar design, however, church leaders decided to use this major capital campaign as an opportunity to ensure the congregation’s financial sustainability. The solution was a dramatically new design with a large, below-street-level church topped by an office building that could be leased and would support ministries. The last Mass in the old building was held in 1985.

In a century and a half, St. Joseph’s confronted many of the big questions congregations are facing today

EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the past two years, veteran journalist Bill Mitchell has worked with our publishing house to complete the landmark history of The National Catholic Reporter (NCR), titled Beacon of Justice, Community, and Hope. We were inspired to publish that book because NCR’s many challenges and creative solutions over the past 60 years are relevant today. In this column, Bill is recommending another very timely history, Faith, Hope and Paris: English-Speaking Catholics in Turbulent France. You’ll find lots of contemporary questions sprinkled through Bill’s overview of Tom Heneghan’s book.

And don’t miss the photo gallery at the end of Bill’s column!

By BILL MITCHELL
Contributing Columnist

What happens to parish life when core principles of the faith are under attack right outside its doors? That’s a question for congregations of all stripes in these early weeks of Trump 2.0.

Click on this cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

It’s also a key question at the heart of this revealing history of a church and its surroundings by journalist Tom Heneghan. His main character: St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Paris.

Like most congregations, St. Joseph’s has struggled with financial problems, deferred maintenance of its buildings, a deepening clergy shortage and only the vaguest notion of what lies ahead.

But unlike most other churches, St. Joseph’s has a story to tell that encompasses a century and a half of French history. Its parishioners and priests have endured the horror of up-close warfare. They’ve encountered boldface names like Ernest Hemingway and Oscar Wilde. And they’ve wrestled with that difficult to translate French strand of secularism known as laïcité.

St. Joseph’s was founded by the English-Irish province of the Passionist Fathers in 1869 as the Mission Anglophone (English-speaking mission) in Paris. It is located close by the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées, where it gathers to its pews Catholic expats from 40 countries.

Among them is Heneghan, a retired American journalist who became a parishioner at St. Joseph’s when he arrived in Paris in 1997. His career spanned 40 years as a Reuters correspondent in London, Vienna, Bonn, Geneva, Islamabad, Bangkok and Hong Kong. He spent his final 14 years with Reuters as its religion editor based in Paris. I got to know him in the early 1980s when we were both correspondents based in Vienna to cover Eastern Europe.

In telling the story of his parish, Heneghan zooms out to sketch a bigger picture framed with an expat’s eye for relatable nuance and a reporter’s pursuit of telling detail.

Ever the journalist, the author limits discussion of his own involvement to fleeting references to updating the church library and leading the men’s spirituality group on Saturday mornings over Zoom. For St. Joseph’s, dealing with Covid was just the latest installment in a long story of challenges.

I read this book with several questions at the back of my mind. As a member of the Paulist Center in Boston, a non-geographic church sometimes described as a spiritual home for “Pope Francis Catholics,” I wondered what a history of the center written decades from now might conclude. How, for example, might it assess our response to President Trump’s aggressive treatment of migrants in our midst?

Like the order of Passionist Priests in charge of St. Joseph’s, the Paulist Fathers are struggling with the twin dilemmas of dwindling vocations and aging priests. With a backdrop of the synodality pushed by Francis but adopted so unevenly around the world, both churches are charting a future requiring increased lay leadership of a community staffed by only a single priest.

As different as this storied church is from other parishes around the world, Heneghan’s reporting provides a useful reference for congregations of all sorts as they reassess such basics as worship space, finances and leadership. Despite his own affiliation with the church and the cooperation of priests and parishioners alike, he avoids the congratulatory pitfalls of official, authorized histories.

Questions then—and now:

How should a church respond in the midst of war?

At St. Joseph’s, it was less than a year after the church was founded that big news unfolded at the Vatican as well as in France. On July 18, 1870, the First Vatican Council proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility, a move that intensified long standing anticlericalism in France. The next day, France declared war on Prussia. The impact on the church of the Siege of Paris, followed by the Commune insurrection, provides some perspective for those of us wrestling with such concerns as music selections by the liturgy committee.

“Many of our people narrowly escaped being killed on the way to our church,” Fr. Francis Bamber reported in the house chronicle about shrapnel hitting the church facade on May 12, 1871.

With many of English parishioners having fled the city, the priests said they learned something about French Catholics of the time. The priests converted part of their residence to a medical station caring for wounded soldiers but they found few takers for services for the soul.

“We were quite disappointed,” Fr. Bamber noted. “We thought that the threat of bombardment would bring people to the sacraments, but this was not the case… As a rule, the Parisians did not come to confession even when going into the midst of the greatest dangers.”

The fighting also surfaced an anti-clerical mood that resulted in priests—who were exempt from military service—facing insults and calls for them to be “sent to the front” on the streets of the city.

Severe food shortages accompanied the fighting, with Heneghan reporting that “there were even suggestions that priests could be slaughtered for meat.” He quotes Fr. Bamber: “It was proposed in one of the republican clubs that, when they had used up their horses and other animals, they should begin on the clericals as being meat of more exquisite quality.”

Who should tell our story?

The author describes those early entries in the parish chronicle as “riveting,” but says the quality of such narratives kept by church leaders “went downhill from there.” Other major events unfolded in France that are virtually missing from the parish records. There is “almost nothing about World War II. There is nothing in the records about the woes of Parisians in the Occupation, although the Passionists saw with their own eyes what was happening.”

Heneghan suggests that Passionists may have stopped writing during WWII, even privately, out of fear that German occupiers might find such papers. However, throughout the church’s long history, Heneghan complains: “Strict record keeping was not a Passionist strong point.”

He found that key documents once stored at the parish were missing. Many had been taken by German soldiers during World War II and were subsequently destroyed by Allied bombing raids of warehouses in Berlin. All of which sent the author tracking down documents and interviews in the U.K., Ireland, Italy and the United States.

The arrival of the 20th century brought two developments that were a boost to St. Joseph’s as well as the city: the automobile and the opening of the city’s first subway line. Its historic Étoile station was just a short walk from the church.

Improved transportation was among many changes for the better during the years before and after 1900, known as the Belle Époque. Living standards improved, entertainment got more interesting and Parisians finally got a break after the struggles of the previous century.

Should we minister to a sinner as infamous as—Oscar Wilde?

“Late in the year 1900,” Heneghan reports, “several different strands of life that intersected at St. Joseph’s—England and Ireland, Paris and the Belle Époque, Catholicism and conversion—combined in a single event for which the church is still known.”

The episode began with a note delivered to St. Joseph’s asking for a priest “who can talk English to administer Last Sacraments to a dying man.”

The dying man was registered at a hotel under the name of Sebastian Melmoth. In fact, he was Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer who was living in exile in France after spending two years in prison as a result of a homosexual affair.

Wilde had been baptized Catholic but not raised in the faith. Regarding himself as Anglican, he said he expected to become Catholic in his later years. And he had some choice words about the two faiths: The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people, the Anglican Church will do… Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

I won’t spoil Heneghan’s narrative by telling you here how the parish’s priest, Father Cuthbert Dunne responded to this complex request—except to say that the subsequent drama became both a Broadway play as well as part of the award-winning 2018 film, The Happy Prince, in which Tom Wilkinson played Father Dunne.

That section of Heneghan’s book is just one of many gems readers will discover along the way.

How do we respond to those who reject religion in our day?

The fin de siècle era also presented a major challenge to Catholics living in France: laïcité, a policy Heneghan interprets to mean everything from “a healthy separation of church and state to outright anti-clericalism.” He writes that laïcité “rose to menace St. Joseph’s like nothing seen before.” Among other things, it included a ban on religious orders of priests and nuns that forced the Passionists running St. Joseph’s to pose as diocesean priests for 46 years. Another consequence: France broke off diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1904 and they were not restored until 1921.

The historical roots of laïcité are deep. The author points out that the 1789 French Revolution “aimed not only to overthrow the centuries-old monarchy but the even older Catholic Church that supported it.”

He adds: “Hundreds of priests were killed, thousands exiled. Notre Dame Cathedral was rededicated to the Cult of Reason and the motto ‘To Philosophy’ was carved over its main doors. The cathedral was later used as a simple warehouse.”

He notes that traces of such attitudes remain: “Laïcité has become so ingrained in modern French identity that the 2019 fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris sparked off a wave of widespread concern about the damage to a central monument of France’s national heritage.The near loss of a religious edifice was hardly mentioned outside of Catholic circles.”

With both English and Irish priests staffing St. Joseph’s, the growing Irish independence movement represented a tension in waiting. It came to a head when an Irish priest named Christophor Heron celebrated St. Patrick’s Day Mass in 1917, the first anniversary of Ireland’s patron saint since the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin against British rule.

Heneghan reports that Heron “delivered a ringing denunciation of the British army to a congregation including English and Irish soldiers,” adding:

In his sermon, he said British troops that put down rebellion in Ireland had been worse than the reported atrocities the Germans had committed in Belgium. British diplomats and parishioners present were stunned and several walked out in protest, while others in the pews expressed their support for the sermon. It didn’t take long for the British embassy to be informed and diplomatic inquiries to begin.

Fr. Heron was subsequently re-assigned to Ireland.

What about the whims of ‘Catholic’ celebrities?

With a favorable exchange rate and a bohemian lifestyle, the Roaring Twenties in Paris became a magnet for such American writers as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway arrived there with his first wife, Hadley, in December 1921 but within five years that marriage ended as he fell in love with Pauline Pfeiffer, described as “a Paris-based American journalist for Vogue magazine.” Hemingway recounts their matrimonial efforts in A Moveable Feast. Pfeiffer was Catholic and wanted to be married by a priest. Hemingway claimed membership in the church by virtue of receiving the Last Rites from an Italian priest while an ambulance driver during World War I.

Pfeiffer checked with her friend, Fr. Gabriel Macarby, rector of St. Joseph’s, who advised her to get married in her local church in the 16th arrondissement. Hemingway managed to pull together sufficient documentation and the wedding happened on May 10, 1927.

And, what about cooperation vs. confrontation in times of crisis?

The first consequence of World War II experienced by St. Joseph’s was the replacement of the English priests then assigned there with priests from Ireland, a neutral country in the war.

Although the church did not come under direct attack, the Gestapo kept the parish under surveillance, confiscated some of its records and eventually had German priests saying Mass for German soldiers at the church.

The most striking resistance to the Nazis at St. Joseph’s was ventured by one of its parishioners, a 20 year-old Irish governess named Lilly Hannigan, and one of its priests, Fr. Kenneth Monaghan.

Heneghan reports that Hannigan:

got her start in the clandestine work when an American plane came down near the country house where she was taking care of the family’s six boys. She hid the crew in the woods, contacted the resistance and had them smuggled out. The Gestapo never suspected the Irish girl who spoke fluent French and made her way to St. Joseph’s church for Sunday Mass. After the service, Lilly Hannigan would meet privately most weeks with Fr. Ken Monaghan in the sacristy, where coded messages from the resistance in the suburbs would change hands, to be forwarded later to other resistance members in the capital.

Among the unexpected by-products of the four-year German occupation of France was an easing of tensions among the Catholic Church, the French government and the French people. The Sign, a magazine published by the Passionists, concluded that “the most important result of the four years of German occupation of France has been one which few people foresaw or imagined. It is the return of the Catholic church as a recognized and important factor in French political life.”

The New York Herald Tribune put it this way: “Anti-Catholic Communists and anti-Communist Catholics were for once under the same flag.” And by 1949, Passionist priests in France no longer had to conceal their religious affiliation.

The Irish writer Brendan Behan provided a snapshot of Sundays at St. Joseph’s in a travel piece for the Irish Press in 1954, noting that there was always a crowd outside

…just like any Irish church anywhere. The ambassador and embassy crowd, Aer Lingus officials, some very correct governesses, a few nurses from the American Hospital at Neuilly, an odd artist or musician on a scholarship to the Beaux Arts or the Conservatoire, some business people and a collection of citizens.

Is the church a building—or its people?

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing St. Joseph’s in the post-war era was the physical church itself, a structure erected in the 1860s and showing such dangerous decline that restoration was not feasible. After several potential solutions fell through in the 1970s and early 1980s, the church settled on a plan aimed at serving its growing congregation as well as finding the money to do so.

How could the Passionists afford to build a new church and hang onto its convenient, prestigious location on Avenue Hoche?

The solution: Build an office building that would generate sufficient revenue to support a church in the basement, an approach previously adopted by two Anglican parishes in Paris. Given the underground imperative, architect Christophe Rémy said he tried “to recover the spirit 2,000 years afterwards of the first Christian Churches in Rome, which were in salt mines underground.”

Not everyone was thrilled. “Poured concrete in a hole,” said an American parishioner. But a South African parishioner provided Heneghan with a different perspective: “To be an outspoken Catholic is not the most popular thing to be in today’s world. I think going back to an underground church in these modern times is very appropriate.”

Its physical space was just one of the challenges St. Joseph’s faced as it headed into the 21st Century, the dwindling availability of priests near the top of the list.

In 2004, the parish launched a strategic initiative that relied on a method known as “Future Search.” Heneghan reports that, despite the work of the pastor and 72 parishioners, the 10-page booklet summarizing the initiative’s findings and goals met an all-too-common result: Mostly gathering dust on a shelf. But he says the process served to prompt parishioners from various ethnic groups to collaborate and get to know one another in ways that had never happened before.

And, finally: Is there strength in diversity?

The church was steadily becoming not just a church for American, British and Irish expats but a spiritual home for a global community of English-speaking Catholics in Paris.

As parishioner Joe Smallhoover told the author, “Sometimes, when I’m distributing communion, I want to say, ‘and where are you from?’ I feel like I’m giving communion to the world.”

St. Joseph’s continues to struggle with an issue it encountered almost immediately after moving into its new building: insufficient space, especially for the many children signing up for Sunday school classes.

Pointing out that such classes did not become a regular thing for Catholic parishes until a 1905 encyclical by Pope Pius X, Heneghan notes that St. Joseph’s “has survived challenges its founders could never have imagined.”

He concludes that “it has stood up to the challenges of life in Paris so much that one could say the city motto Fluctuat nec Mergitur (“it wavers but it does not sink”) has become its own.”

Journalist Bill Mitchell spent nearly twenty years as a reporter and editor for the Detroit Free Press, and most recently served as CEO and publisher of the National Catholic Reporter.