Thread by @Valen10Francois

Is Catholicism making a revival in France?

Latin masses, baptisms, pilgrimages, Catholicism seems hip again!

But behind the vibes, what do the stats and maps show?

A 🧵 on the decline and transformation of Catholicism in post-Catholic France

France is historically one of the most important Catholic countries in Europe

To this day the trace of Catholicism can be found everywhere in France

Here's a map of France with all the towns with "Catholic" names (with Saint or trinity in it for example)

But since around the mid 18th century, Catholicism stops being a mass phenomenon and is instead much more geographically polarised

Here's the map of practicing Catholics in 1965. Big contrasts. Alsace, Brittany, the SW and the south-center are very pious

This map is remarkably similar to the number of priests who refused to swear allegiance to the Republican constitution in 1791 showing long established divides

In fact the left-right divide in France from the French revolution until quite recently was a pretty good proxy for Catholicism

Look at the 1974 presidential electoral map for the center-right candidate Valéry Giscard, rings a bell?

But today France is no longer polarised among Catholics vs non-Catholic lines.

France has been a for a little while now a post-Catholic country

Here's the map of practicing Catholics in 2012, looks very similar to the previous ones

But now look at the percentages on the left...

Catholicism was also the social matrix, even for those who weren't big pillars of the church:

From the cradle to the grave, Catholicism would likely be part of your life from start to finish

Cradle? Fewer kids than ever are getting baptised in France. It used to be 76% in the 70s, we now around a quarter

What about the number of Catholic weddings?

Massively collapsed in the last 2 decades

Divorces have stalled in France... but that's largely because fewer people are getting married

Grave?

Increasingly people in France prefer to get cremated instead

The number of priests in France also dropped massively in the early 2000S and very few were ordained to make up for it

You still see moments of Zombie Catholicism that pop up in French politics, a reminder of old divides

Take the 2005 referendum on the EU constitution, the old Catholic bastions overwhelmingly backed the EU side

But France is now decisively a post-Catholic country.

To be sure those trends are happening in many other European countries, but this statement is more true than in most EU countries

So has French Catholicism hit rock bottom?

There are some early signs of a transformation.

For years Catholicism survived thanks to its elders who were born in a Catholic world

Now it is transforming under pressure from the generation born in a post-catholic world

The number of baptisms of young children has continued to decline, but in large part because France's birth rate has collapsed.

Meanwhile the number of adults and adolescents getting baptised has surged 3 to 4X in 12 years

After decades of sex scandals, the Church's image was very damaged.

But young people in France overwhelmingly have a positive image of Catholicism

Signs of this youthful revival can be seen in pilgrimages such as the one in Chartres that attracted 19,000 pilgrims this year, an all-time record after having beaten the previous record from... 2024

Talk to priests across France and they are clearly starting to see something different.

In a post-Catholic world, many young Catholics have a sense of rebecoming missionaries once again

And among young people "traditional" forms of Catholicism, have been especially popular

But also with the influence of evangelical movements, many young Catholics simultaneously tend to adopt more spiritual forms of Catholicism

Does this make this burgeoning revival a reactionary movement?

For many the starting point of this turn traces back to 2013 and the mass demonstrations against the legalisation of gay marriage. Up to 1.4 million people demonstrated.

What do the polls say? It's mixed.

Practicing Catholic tend to be more right-wing than the French average

But the more practicing you are the less right-wing you are

Within French Catholic intellectual circles you do get a dynamic staunchly conservative ecosystem, but also interesting Catholic-environmental movements bolstered by pope Francis and his Laudato Si encyclical

On social media, since Covid there's been the emergence remarkably dymanic Cathosphere.

Soeur Albertine has 336K follower on IG, 200K on tiktok

Abbé Raffray has 168K on IG with a mix of theological and (conservative) political takes

For further reading on these topics I have to recommend the brilliant books from J. Fourquet who has created many of historic maps I used in this thread

I also used some charts from this article lepoint.fr/societe/les-ra…

If you liked this thread, I'd greatly appreciate if you could retweet the first post so others can read it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this thread!

https://x.com/Valen10Francois/status/1970111645574672768

Errare humanum est: a fantastic resource I forgot to link

jean-jaures.org/wp-content/upl…