But she didn’t bother anyone. Over time, passersby had become accustomed to it. However, it will have to be unbolted. It was the Council of State that decided so. The subject of the dispute: a statue of the Archangel Saint Michael slaying the dragon located on the forecourt of the Saint-Michel church, in Sables-d’Olonne. A town from which the sailors of the Vendée Globe leave every four years for a more than perilous round the world trip.
Nothing to do, the patron saint of Gaul and France will have to clear the way, because he occupies a public place which, according to a finicky interpretation of the law of 1905, could not accommodate a religious symbol. The municipality may well have held a referendum where 94.5% of voters opposed the unbolting, nothing helped.
The case would never have hit the headlines without a small group of secularists, the National Federation of Free Thought, which leads a legal guerrilla war against all Catholic symbols. At La Flotte, on the Ile de Ré, he set his sights on a charming statue of the Virgin Mary built after the Last War. Yet it brightened up the landscape and delighted passers-by.
This radical interpretation of secularism resembles like two drops of water the outcry that followed François Legault’s statements last week. As if a secular state suddenly no longer had a past, culture and heritage. The French State may have been secular since 1905, but that does not abolish a millennium and a half of history. A history that merges, whether we like it or not, with that of Catholicism since the baptism of Clovis in Reims, somewhere between 496 and 506.
The day after the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris, Emmanuel Macron had not hesitated to evoke “this cathedral which is that of an entire people and its millennial history”. Because Notre-Dame may well be a jewel of Catholicism, it also belongs to all French people, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, agnostics and atheists included.
In the same way, there is nothing incongruous in a Quebec Prime Minister congratulating himself at Easter on the fact that Catholicism has “engendered among us a culture of solidarity which distinguishes us on a continental scale”. . The assertion is all the more justified in that it is not a mere boast. It is a well-founded thesis taken up by some of the best minds of our time.
Who can deny that Quebec stands out in North America for its social measures? From the day care system to drug insurance, including parental leave, it is obvious. On a mainly Protestant continent, the contrast is striking.
That part of it comes from our Catholic heritage is probably what one of the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber, would have said. In IProtestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, he asserts that Protestantism has, so to speak, oiled the mechanisms of nascent capitalism, hence its dazzling success in the countries of the Reformation. Unlike that of the Catholics, the Protestant ethic valued work, a form of “rational asceticism” and individualism.
For Luther and Calvin, the believer is alone before God, as the proletarian is naked before Capital. Salvation being the sole decision of God, material life is thus dissociated from spiritual life. Without rejecting charity, Luther was not shy about denigrating the “good works” of those who thought they were earning their heaven in this way. Let us add that, for Adam Smith, the “invisible hand” of economic liberalism replaced that of the rich who gave to the poor.
On the contrary, among Catholics, the old peasant and aristocratic mores, and what Weber calls “the religious ethics of fraternity”, will partly persist. While the Catholic world will generally remain more resistant to the values of capitalism, it will see in charity a fulfillment of the word of God.
Of course, religion does not explain everything. It would be necessary to evoke the tradition of Roman law, opposed to the common law, and the fact that Quebec is a small nation with a collective spirit, like the Scandinavian countries, where social democracy triumphed. A nation all the more tightly knit because it is deprived of its freedom and only survived after the Conquest thanks to exemplary solidarity. A solidarity largely organized by the Church, of which a large number of functions were transferred to the State in the 1960s.
Is it a coincidence that, like Quebec in North America, the one who was the eldest daughter of the Church is today in Europe the champion of social measures? With 0.8% of the population and 3% of world GDP, it represents about 5% of world social expenditure.
We bet that unlike François Legault, Emmanuel Macron would not have aroused such a shower of sarcasm if he had made the same remarks. As if there was nothing more urgent in the land of Marie de l’Incarnation than shooting at the ambulances. An obvious sign that, 60 years after believing we had slain the dragon, nothing is settled in our relationship with religion.