Le Figaro
- Republic and Democracy
- A FEW MEDITATIONS
- THE CONSECRATION of the Chinese Bishops
Le Figaro's front page of 30 October 1926 opened with Lucien Romier's essay on the renewed quarrel over classical studies. Léon Bérard's letter to Édouard Herriot had brought the question back before Parliament, and Romier left the pedagogy to others, arguing instead that the dispute pitted republican tradition against democratic equality. Achille Mestre rejected the claim that modern youth cannot meditate and invited students about to return to the Latin Quarter to a kind of spiritual retreat. Paul Lesourd described the consecration of the first Chinese bishops in a brilliantly lit St Peter's, where a huge crowd cheered as the Pope was carried in on the sedia gestatoria to the sound of silver trumpets.
Translation
Republic and Democracy
In a noble and charming letter to M. Édouard Herriot, M. Léon Bérard has just reopened the controversy over classical studies before parliamentary opinion. I shall not enter into the pedagogical debate, in which so many others excel. I shall simply note a few general features of this singular and inexhaustible conflict. Once it is raised above the disputes of immediate politics, the conflict sets republican tradition against democratic equality.
A FEW MEDITATIONS
The gloomy detractors of our time assert that the young people of today are incapable of meditation. I believe this so little that it is precisely to a kind of "retreat" that I come, in these last days of the holidays, to invite the students who are preparing to return to the Latin Quarter.
THE CONSECRATION of the Chinese Bishops
That is why the ceremony of the consecration of the first Chinese bishops held such importance in the Pope's eyes; why it unfolded with incomparable splendour in St Peter's, fully illuminated and hung with red draperies. An enormous crowd filled the basilica and acclaimed the Pope when he made his entrance on the sedia gestatoria, to the sound of silver trumpets.
Context
Bérard's compulsory-Latin reform and its reversal
Léon Bérard, whose letter to Herriot sets off Romier's essay, had himself run the French school system. He was Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts from November 1919 to January 1920 and again from January 1921 to March 1924. According to his Senate biography, he believed deeply in the Greco-Roman humanities and, overriding the Chamber's Education Commission and the Conseil supérieur de l'Instruction publique, tried to make Latin compulsory for every secondary pupil. The reform did not last: his successor revoked his decree of 3 May 1923. Back on the deputies' benches, Bérard asked to question the government about the opening of "modern" secondary classes, which shows that the quarrel was still unsettled. So when Romier writes that the controversy has been "reopened", he means a fight Bérard had already lost once as minister. Romier's view that the dispute ultimately sets republican tradition against democratic equality is his own reading. The Senate record documents only the institutional course of the reform.
What Rerum Ecclesiae asked of the missions
Lesourd's "that is why" ties the ceremony's importance to papal policy. On 28 February 1926 Pius XI issued Rerum Ecclesiae, an encyclical on the missions that urged foreign missionaries to give up assumptions of racial inferiority and to train indigenous clergy, and that held that a Church which does not produce bishops is incomplete. It came after Benedict XV's apostolic letter Maximum Illud of 30 November 1919, and after preparatory work in China itself. The plenary council held in Shanghai from 15 May to 12 June 1924 under the papal delegate Celso Costantini brought together 105 participants. Before it opened, Costantini had raised two Chinese clerics to head church territories, a sign that the time had come to start building a local hierarchy. On 30 March 1926 Cardinal Willem van Rossum, prefect of Propaganda Fide, announced the Pope's decision to consecrate six Chinese bishops. The importance the article says the ceremony held "in the Pope's eyes" therefore matches a policy pursued over several years.
The first Chinese bishops and France's protectorate over the missions
The six Chinese priests were consecrated by Pius XI on 28 October 1926, two days before this issue appeared, and became the first Chinese Catholic bishops of modern times. One of them, Joseph Hu Ruoshan, had served as a consulting theologian at the 1924 Plenary Council of Shanghai. After leaving Rome the new bishops toured Italy, France, Belgium and Holland, where crowds of European Catholics greeted them. The event also touched France's own position. Since the Treaty of Tientsin of 1858, which followed the Second Opium War, France had been the legal protector of Catholic missions in China, and the Holy See had no direct diplomatic contact with China because France blocked every attempt to establish it. The Shanghai council had set itself the goal of separating the missions from the colonial project, and the Roman consecration was a visible step on that path. Lesourd's passage, for its part, presents the day as a papal triumph staged in St Peter's.
Herriot's 1924 programme and the Catholic backlash
Édouard Herriot, the addressee of Bérard's letter, had clashed openly with Catholics two years earlier. As président du Conseil, in his investiture speech of June 1924, he announced the withdrawal of the French embassy to the Holy See and the strict application of the laws on religious congregations. The Jesuit Paul Doncœur co-founded the Ligue des droits du religieux ancien combattant and in October 1924 published an open letter to Herriot. According to the Catholic site Aleteia, after some twenty months of political struggle the government realised that public opinion no longer backed its anticlerical projects and gave them up. The selected passage from Mestre speaks only of students' capacity for meditation and of an invitation to a retreat; it does not mention the congregation laws. The 1924–1926 confrontation is nonetheless the immediate background against which a Catholic writer's appeal to the student generation appeared in the autumn of 1926.
Original
République et démocratie
M. Léon Bérard, par une lettre noble et charmante à M. Edouard Herriot, vient de rouvrir la controverse sur les études classiques devant l'opinion parlementaire. Je n'entrerai point dans le débat pédagogique, où tant d'autres excellent. Je noterai simplement quelques traits généraux de ce singulier et inépuisable conflit. Une fois élevé au-dessus des disputes de la politique immédiate, le conflit met en opposition la tradition républicaine et l'égalité démocratique.
QUELQUES MEDITATIONS
Les contempteurs moroses de notre temps assurent que les jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui sont incapables de méditation. Je le crois si peu que c'est précisément à une sorte de «retraite» que je viens, en ces derniers jours de vacances, convier les étudiants qui se préparent à regagner le quartier Latin.
LE SACRE des évêques chinois
C'est pourquoi la cérémonie du sacredes premiers évêques chinois avait tant d'importance aux yeux du Pape; pourquoi elle se déroula avec un éclat incomparable dans Saint-Pierre tout illuminé et tapissé de tentures rouges. Une foule énorme envahissait la basilique et acclama le Pape quand il fit son entrée sur la Sedia gestatoria, au son des trompettes d'argent.