Catholicism and the Work Ethic in France - from CatholicJournal.us

We visited Paris again, this time in late October with Catholicism on our minds, while at the same time trying to get the election off our minds. Success, but throughout our 10-day series of events, Paris taught us important reasons for the election outcome. France is a working man’s culture, and so is America; that is, the down-to-earth, levelheaded Americans, and that is who pushed President Trump over the victory line.
We often hear of the declining Church membership of French citizens and after visiting three neighborhood churches in a section of Paris called Boulogne Billancourt, I can attest. St. Jean de Chantal, St. Cecile, and Immaculate Conception are sparsely attended neighborhood churches which made me wonder how they could survive financially. On a previous visit, St. Sulpice and St. Germain de Pres were SRO Sunday Masses, so they were not perhaps uniform throughout the country or city. But trends indicate that Evangelical Protestantism, Islam and especially atheism are increasing rapidly.  
What we did witness however, is the workaday world of Parisians. Community and service to the community are words that come to mind. In the process of that workaday service, always a ‘bonjour’, always a ‘merci’ and pleasantry among customers and fellow workers. The good-natured youth working in fast food restaurants and lesser cafes impressed us, along with their daily public transportation commutes, without a grouchy outburst among them.
We also hear of the French trends toward socialism. My own visits in the 1980s observing President Francois Mitterrand’s mission of ‘Euro-socialism and America’ seemed to be the start of it all. But France is hardly socialist yet. My goodness, the country is dominated by what we may refer to as corporate France. A large central government and socialized medicine yes, but its healthy GNP exists from the likes of the many fashions, health care, retail and financial concerns throughout, not to mention wine, agriculture, and transportation enterprises.
With that comes its working-class morality, its Catholic roots in insisting on the worker's need for dignity and productivity, and the ubiquitous organized unions demanding their fair wage and economic justice for all. Included in that is the entrepreneurial nature of the French with its small shops and businesses everywhere. I call those Catholic foundations.  
French family life and its workaday world seems to keep France levelheaded and moderate in lifestyle. Yes, a little left leaning politically, but that is the young, always. As a professional educator, I had the opportunity of working with international professionals, teaching them professional English. My French students [well, insurance execs, doctors, politicians, bankers] would always talk of their youthful plunge into left wing politics. They would express their tilt toward Marxism and working-class interests, but never in the terms of identity politics as expressed by the American left. To me, it seems the American left has given up on the working class. They twisted Marxism by exploiting race and ethnic disparities, a sort of Neo-Marxism. The French see it differently. The French culture dominates. The dozens of worldwide Africans, Asians, Middle East immigrants that we encountered all spoke impeccable French. They all identified as French. They all were proud of France; save for some intransigent Muslims we all hear about. We didn’t see them. Upper middle-class Boulogne Billancourt is not for them. The Catholic Church does not look at enculturation in the Neo-Marxist sense either.
We are all the body of Christ. We are Americans, but we are Christians first. They were all French, not sure of their religions.
On a negative note, we were not thrilled by seeing everyone with their heads buried in their cell phones. It’s worse than the U. S., and even around La Sorbonne, University of Paris. You would think their heads to be swimming in philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, and all ideas talked of by their secular priest professors. No, technology has got control of them. Perhaps this is the new socialism, and as I mentioned above, it’s probably not Jesus, Him and Him crucified in their heads.

Two Authors Every Christian Should Read

Excerpt from 'More from a Florida Catholic':  Dostoevsky and Hugo

Who are your favorite books and authors?  Here is my choice:  ‘Crime and Punishment’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky and ‘Les Miserables’ by Victor Hugo.

It boils down to this.  Really, I was intimidated.  The book was sitting on my shelf for twenty years.   I don’t even know how I acquired it and how it got there, but this was a classic.  The only classic in literature I had read previously was Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’ and that was in 9th grade.  The other was ‘Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables in my college French class, but I hardly understood a word since we as a class read it in French.  Later on this one.‘Crime and Punishment’ intimidated because I had visions of that great Russian novelist style of grand epics, spanning generations, spanning continents, multiple plots and a thousand pages long, such as Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’.  This was the prototype of the great Russian novel.  My wife read Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’, 1100 pages.  It read like a Danielle Steel novel, she said.  

So one day I picked up my ‘Crime and Punishment’ book and of course could not put it down as it fascinated me from the beginning.  This was 1991.  Hardly a grand epic, but rather it was a murder mystery with the protagonist committing the murder[s] in chapter one.  It was a psychological thriller with ongoing diatribes of the then contemporary philosophies of the day.  It took place in St. Petersburg, Russia seemingly within a 4-block area of a hidden inner-city neighborhood, far from spanning continents.  The protagonist, Raskolnikov, was in a battle with his conscience throughout, what is called the psychopathology of guilt, all the way from his neighborhood in St. Petersburg to his prison cell in Siberia.   Replete with Christian themes, Dostoevsky maintains that perseverance and persistence, commitment and hard work is our calling for true success in life.  That adherence to God’s commandments is what is required of us regardless of socio-economic circumstances.  No excuses.  But what really fascinated me was that I was there.  I was there in Russia itself in 1861, in that small hidden neighborhood, in those streets, in Raskolnikov’s mind.  Dostoevsky had that ability, and he has been copied ever since.  Genius.  And it was fun reading all those long Russian names.  

My college French class at Winona State was a disaster for me.  My knowledge of the language was insufficient and could not appreciate our daily assignment of us sharing reading responsibilities, orally.  I think I developed a proper French accent from it, but that was about it.  I dropped the class, the only class I ever dropped in college.  

My major in the social sciences allowed me to study European history and what better reading assignment to supplement history class than reading ‘Les Miserables’.   My father worked for the U. S. Department of Defense and had posts in Europe in the 60s and 70s.  So, my residence there was very educational, visiting all the spots known to me about European history and interacting with Europeans.  I identified with Europeans much more than Americans, but I loved baseball. 

However, I only visited France briefly around 1970 and Marseilles and the French Riviera at that, not even Paris.  Fifty years later wife and I decided to take a trip to Paris.  Reviewed my high school and college French, read up on Paris and France in general, purchased Frommer’s Travel Guide, no longer Europe on $5 a day. A great trip it was, philosophically, religiously, gastronomically.   

Well, this was an epic.  It spanned generations and Hugo’s research impressive.  He wrote of European politics, French politics, the French Revolution, political ideologies, the Catholic church and religious history.  He further researched military history and the Battle of Waterloo, cultural descriptions of both rich and poor, the penal system, the banking system, the police system, even the Parisian sewer system and its history.  He said baboons lived down there; how in the world did that happen?

The major theme was protagonist’s Jean Valjean’s struggle for redemption. Certainly a more difficult struggle than ours.  A romanticist for sure, Victor Hugo captured my heart as well as my mind and interest.  My conclusion was, no college education is complete without reading the 1032 page masterpiece, ‘Les Miserables’.   Forget those silly musicals.