Summary: | In his last book, Henri Tincq, who was a journalist in charge of religious questions at the newspaper Le Monde (1985-2008), took a disenchanted look at the Catholicism of his youth: "We are losing a heritage: that of the liberal Catholics, the social Catholics, the 'abbés démocrates', the Catholics who resisted during the Occupation. This heritage would have dissolved to the benefit of a Catholicism that carries identity-based and "neo-conservative" reflexes, whose pendulum movement would now lean to the right. Although recent sociological surveys testify to the splintering of the Catholic landscape in France, accentuating an already long-standing opposition between "liberals" and "intransigents" and then between "progressives" and "traditionalists", a process of "right-wing" Catholicism would seem to have been taking place for two decades, in what constitutes the long political history of French Catholics in the 20th century. To take the measure of this process requires the opening of a vast historiographic project, like the research coordinated by Denis Pelletier on the "left-wing Catholics". Faced with the scope of such an undertaking, mobilizing both the history of parties and electoral geography, this volume proposes an approach to the social, cultural and religious history of politics, from the perspective of the right and Catholicism since the "problematic" decade of the 1960s. This reflection attempts to identify the forces and influences of the networks, both Roman and transnational, on which this process of "right-wing" Catholicism is based, if such was the case, primarily on the scale of French Catholicism, but also on the European and American levels. And this, by taking into account the receptions, circulations and transfers that can be identified from the Americas. Here, the role of traditional or charismatic communities, the action of family movements and educational associations, the influence of training spaces, the press, publishing and the Internet are all apparent. It also remains the networks of mobilization carried out within the partisan structures marked on the right but also the classic figures of the publicist, even the polemicist, engaged in the politico-religious combat
|