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FRANCE. BAPTISM OF FAITH OR REACTIVE BAPTISM?

«Being Christian means bearing witness and, if necessary, fight the worst tendencies of the Prince who governs this world with all the political means granted to anyone with the right to think, speech and electoral vote. Baptismal faith is not something private, but how much more public can there be: active testimony. If not, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotion".

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The 4 March 2024 the Eiffel Tower lit up with the writing «My body, my choice» — my body, my choice - to celebrate the inclusion of the "right" to abortion in the French Constitution, first nation in the world to do so.

It's France itself, secular to the point of exasperation, never truly freed from the revolutionary anticlericalism that remained smoldering like embers under the ashes, the same as in 1793 transformed Notre-Dame into the temple of the Goddess Reason and which in the last two years has found itself celebrating something completely different: an explosion of requests for baptism among teenagers, young people and adults which is unprecedented in its recent history. In 2025 they went further 17.800 the catechumens baptized at Easter: 10.384 grown ups, the 45% more than 2024, beyond 7.400 teenagers among 11 e i 17 year old.

I couldn't help but be happy, be clear, before an adult who consciously asks for this sacrament of grace that cleanses from original sin and opens up the path of Christian life. but yet, I confess this without any pessimism, something about this phenomenon doesn't convince me and with all my heart I hope I have to say, in a few years, that I was wrong. I really want it, I'm wrong.

To understand the phenomenon we must start from two French fears, both real and competing. The first is that of an aggressive secularism that has never been content with separating the State from the Church - something sacrosanct, which Catholics themselves are right to defend to protect both freedoms: of the State and the Church - but which has progressively risen to supreme truth, to a substitute civil religion: it is not the first time in the history of France, the Goddess of Reason installed on the altar of Notre-Dame in 1793 it demonstrates it with the strength of the previous one. The second, less declared but no less widespread, it is instead constituted by the fear of a growing number of French people faced with the expansion of Muslim communities who refuse any integration and who have transformed entire neighborhoods - even in the capital - into enclaves where the law of Great Republic matters less than the law of the square. Exasperating and aggressive secularism on the one hand, fear of Islamization on the other: two pressures they generate, together, fear and confusion in a nation that, no matter how hard he tries to deny it, it cannot erase its Christian roots, an anthropological baggage that constitutes it profoundly, even before its history.

It is in this scenario that I believe it is legitimate to ask an uncomfortable question: these conversions arise from a flash of lightning on the road to Damascus - as happened, over the centuries, to famous people and countless strangers — or they are a reaction, a form of identity defense, an escape from fear dressed up as a sacrament? It would not be the first time that Christianity acts as a bond of people and a refuge in a moment of collective confusion: the case of Poland, in Europa, remains the most eloquent. But what came next is also instructive: in fact the specter of communism has fallen, who had made faith an act of national resistance, Poland has embarked on a secularization as rapid as that of France. Participation in Sunday mass, than in 1981 it was still about the 52,7% of the Polish faithful, she went down to the 46,8% In the 2001, al 40% In the 2011, until the 28,3% the 2021. Almost like for many, the common enemy against which faith was a barrier has disappeared, Christianity had lost its subjective and social utility and purpose.

To understand this mechanism It is worth taking a step back in history, because the link between collective fear and a return to faith - and conversely the link between widespread well-being and religious disaffection - is not an invention of the twentieth century. In Europe devastated by the Black Death of 1347-1351, which wiped out almost half the population in just a few years, popular religiosity exploded to the point of bordering on excess: the flagellant movement was born, who crossed the cities in procession practicing public self-flagellation as extreme penance, convinced that he was acting under direct inspiration from God; pilgrimages and vows multiplied, the cult of the patron saints from the plague grew enormously, San Rocco above all. It was such an exasperated religiosity that the Supreme Pontiff Clement VI had to intervene with two bulls, in July and September 1349, to condemn its excesses and publicly prohibit its practices, a sign that the Church too, in the face of collective terror, he recognized the risk of a refuge-faith capable of bordering on fanaticism.

A case closer to us and in some ways Spain mirrors the Polish one. National Catholicism in the post-Franco war, who had made faith a pillar of identity in a country torn apart by the civil war - during which, between 1936 and the 1939, the anticlerical persecution in the areas controlled by the republicans cost lives, according to the reference study by the historian Antonio Montero Moreno, about 6.832 religious, thirteen bishops included, as well as thousands of lay people killed for their faith - first went through the economic boom of the 1960s and then, above all, the democratic transition and the decades of peace and growing freedom that followed: and it is precisely in those decades that the collapse came, sudden. In just twenty years Spain has gone from a country where the 92% of the population grew Catholic to one in which only the 66% still declares itself as such: over twelve million fewer people, the largest contraction in Europe in absolute terms; baptisms have come down from 325.271 In the 2007 a 214.271 in recent years, today more than half of Spanish children are not baptized and among young people come 18 to the 24 years ago, over half now declare themselves non-Catholic. The seminars emptied at the same time: -30% of seminarians in the last decade e 10.615 parishes up 23.286 — more than half — are today without a resident priest.

It is certainly no coincidence that Spain, in this same thirty years of galloping de-Christianization, has become the European laboratory from which they were born, in sequence, some of the most radical legislative changes on the continent: same-sex marriage, introduced on 30 June 2005, third country in the world after the Netherlands and Belgium, with adoption rights included from day one; the express divorce of the same year, which eliminated any obligation of preventive separation; active euthanasia, legalized in March 2021, seventh country in the world to do so; the so-called ley trans of February 2023, which introduced the change of registered sex upon simple self-declaration, without any medical requirement, among the most permissive regulations in Europe. I don't claim that there is a plan behind all this - it would be unprovable - but the chronological coincidence between the void left by faith and the ground made available for these transformations remains at least a fact to reflect on.

The thread that binds the Black Death, post-Franco Spain and post-communist Poland is the same, mirror bed: in moments of great fear and collective uncertainty the churches fill up, often beyond the measure of authentic faith; in moments of peace and widespread prosperity they become empty, with them diocesan seminaries and religious novitiates are also emptying. In the poorest countries in the world, the bishops ask for financial aid to build seminaries from European bishops who, Meanwhile, they gradually closed their own, going so far as to sell most of the buildings and concentrate the few seminarians from all the dioceses of an entire ecclesiastical region in a single seminary. How authentic certain vocations are and how many aspiring priests are young people who are only looking for a better state of life and a role of maximum respect in their civil societies? All this is not a mechanical law, nor can grace be reducible to a sociological cycle. But it is a pattern that repeats itself with enough regularity to impose caution on anyone looking at the today 17.800 French catechumens and would certainly like to read in it a new springtime of faith, because this can only be assessed in several years.

An authentic conversion, especially in adulthood, it needs strong and well-considered reasons, it cannot be the result of emotion alone, of fear, of the need to belong in a moment of identity loss. Augustine, first a pleasure-loving libertine, then a Manichaean, he didn't convert to defend himself from something, but why something, or rather someone had reached him to the point of undermining all his intellectual and moral resistance. The same applies, in times closer to us, for conversions like that of Edith Stein, Jew and eminent philosopher, or by André Frossard, atheist and communist, later appointed member of the French Academy, all inspirations that arise from an encounter, not from a siege, I am the conscious and free fruit of that love that chases away fear (cf.. 1 GV 4,18). The risk, in France, is that a part of these 17.800 people found not Christ in the baptismal font, but a trench: a solid identity to oppose to a world - secularist on the one hand, Islamized on the other - perceived as hostile. This is not necessarily the case and it would be ungenerous and even dishonest to assume this a priori for everyone. S. AND. Mons. Olivier Leborgne, Bishop of Arras and former vice-president of the French Episcopal Conference, he explained that new catechumens often come from complicated lives, sometimes marked by wounds and experience entry into faith as a healing experience. And this is the language of authentic grace, not trenches, even more so, time will confirm or deny it.

So it takes time to distinguish one thing from another. Time is what is always missing from Easter statistics and what the Church instead, of always, to give: a serious catechumenate, an accompaniment that is not satisfied with the number and verifies the quality of the "yes" pronounced at the baptismal font, exactly what I had the opportunity to write in a forthcoming article of mine regarding the vocational crisis in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, massive entry without adequate discernment has already shown that it can betray, in other contexts, within a generation.

If in a few years France dei 17.800 catechumens the 2025 it will be a more Christian France and not just a more frightened France that has looked for a fort, then I must have been wrong. And it will be, per me, the greatest joy. If not, we will have witnessed: one part, to the Eiffel Tower illuminated to celebrate the inclusion of “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, on the other to an army of reactive baptized people who will not have understood that being Christian means bearing witness and, if necessary, fight the worst tendencies of the Prince who governs this world with all the political means granted to anyone with the right to think, speech and electoral vote. Baptismal faith is not something private, but how much more public can there be: active testimony. If not, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotion.

From the island of Patmos, 28 September 2026

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FRANCE. BAPTISMS OF FAITH OR REACTIVE BAPTISMS?

«Being Christian means bearing witness and, when necessary, fighting — with all the political means granted to anyone with the right to think, speak and vote — against the worst excesses of the Prince who rules this world. Baptismal faith is not something private, but the most public thing there can be: active witness. If not, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotion».

— Contemporary ecclesial affairs —

.

On 4 March 2024 the Eiffel Tower lit up with the words «My body, my choice» — my body, my choice — to celebrate the enshrining of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, the first nation in the world to do so. This is the same France, secular to the point of exasperation, never truly freed from the revolutionary anticlericalism that has gone on smoldering like an ember beneath the ash, the same France that in 1793 turned Notre-Dame into the temple of the Goddess Reason and that in the last two years finds itself celebrating something altogether different: an explosion of requests for baptism among adolescents, young people and adults with no precedent in its recent history. In 2025 more than 17,800 catechumens were baptized at Easter: 10,384 adults, 45% more than in 2024, and over 7,400 adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17.

I could only be glad, let it be clear, before an adult who consciously asks for this sacrament of grace that washes away original sin and opens the path to the Christian life. And yet, I confess without any pessimism, something about this phenomenon does not entirely convince me, and with all my heart I hope to have to say, a few years from now, that I was wrong. I truly wish to be wrong.

To understand the phenomenon, one must start from two French fears, both real and concurrent. The first is that of an aggressive secularism that has never been content merely to separate Church from State — a sacrosanct principle, which Catholics themselves are right to defend in order to safeguard both freedoms, that of the State and that of the Church — but that has progressively set itself up as supreme truth, as a substitute civil religion: it is not the first time in the history of France; the Goddess Reason enthroned on the altar of Notre-Dame in 1793 demonstrates this with the force of precedent. The second, less openly declared but no less widespread, consists instead in the fear felt by a growing number of French people before the expansion of Muslim communities that reject all integration and that have turned entire neighborhoods — even in the capital — into enclaves where the law of the Great Republic counts for less than the law of the street. Exasperated, aggressive secularism on one side, fear of Islamization on the other: two pressures that together generate fear and bewilderment in a nation which, however hard it tries to deny it, cannot erase its own Christian roots, an anthropological inheritance that constitutes it at its depths, even before its history does.

It is in this scenario that I consider it legitimate to ask an uncomfortable question: do these conversions arise from a Damascus-road revelation — as has happened, over the centuries, to celebrated figures and to countless unknown ones — or are they a reaction, a form of identity self-defense, a flight from fear dressed up as a Sacrament? It would not be the first time that Christianity has served as a people’s bond and refuge in a moment of collective disorientation: the case of Poland, in Europe, remains the most eloquent. But what came afterward is instructive too: once the specter of communism had fallen — communism that had made faith an act of national resistance — Poland embarked on a secularization every bit as rapid as France’s own. Sunday Mass attendance, which in 1981 still involved 52.7% of Polish faithful, fell to 46.8% in 2001, to 40% in 2011, and down to 28.3% in 2021. As though, for many, once the common enemy against which faith had stood as a bulwark was gone, Christianity had lost its own usefulness and its subjective and social purpose.

To understand this mechanism, it is worth taking a step back in history, because the link between collective fear and a return to faith — and, conversely, the link between widespread prosperity and religious disaffection — is no invention of the twentieth century. In the Europe devastated by the Black Death of 1347-1351, which cut down nearly half the population within a few years, popular religiosity exploded to the point of excess: the flagellant movement was born, processing through cities practicing public self-flagellation as extreme penance, convinced they were acting under God’s direct inspiration; pilgrimages and vows multiplied, and the cult of the saints who protected against plague grew beyond measure, Saint Roch above all. It was a religiosity so overwrought that Pope Clement VI had to intervene with two bulls, in July and September 1349, to condemn its excesses and publicly forbid its practices — a sign that even the Church, faced with collective terror, recognized the risk of a refuge-faith capable of sliding into fanaticism.

A case closer to us, and in certain respects a mirror of the Polish one, is Spain. National Catholicism in the post-war Francoist era, which had made faith an identity pillar in a country torn apart by civil war — during which, between 1936 and 1939, anticlerical persecution in the zones controlled by the Republicans cost the lives, according to the reference study by the historian Antonio Montero Moreno, of roughly 6,832 clergy and religious, including thirteen bishops, in addition to thousands of laypeople killed for their faith — passed first through the economic boom of the 1960s and then, above all, through the democratic transition and the following decades of peace and growing freedom: and it is precisely in those decades that the collapse arrived, sudden. In barely twenty years Spain went from a country where 92% of the population grew up Catholic to one where only 66% still declares itself so: more than twelve million people fewer, the largest contraction in Europe in absolute terms; baptisms fell from 325,271 in 2007 to 214,271 in recent years, today more than half of Spanish children are not baptized, and among young people aged 18 to 24 more than half now declare themselves non-Catholic. Seminaries have emptied at the same pace: a 30% drop in seminarians over the last decade, and 10,615 out of 23,286 parishes — nearly half — are today without a resident priest.

It is surely no coincidence that Spain, in this same thirty-year span of galloping dechristianization, became the European laboratory from which, in sequence, some of the continent’s most radical legislative turning points were born: same-sex marriage, introduced on 30 June 2005, the third country in the world to do so after the Netherlands and Belgium, with the right to adoption included from the very first day; express divorce that same year, which eliminated any requirement of prior separation; active euthanasia, legalized in March 2021, the seventh country in the world to do so; the so-called ley trans of February 2023, which introduced the change of legal sex on simple self-declaration, with no medical requirement whatsoever, among the most permissive regulations in Europe. I am not claiming that behind all this lies a design — that would be impossible to prove — but the chronological coincidence between the void left by faith and the ground made available for these transformations remains, at the very least, a fact worth pondering.

The thread linking the Black Death, post-Francoist Spain and post-communist Poland is the same one, read as in a mirror: in moments of great fear and collective uncertainty, churches fill up, often beyond the measure of authentic faith; in moments of peace and widespread prosperity, they empty, and with them diocesan seminaries and religious novitiates empty too. In the world’s poorer countries, bishops ask for financial aid to build seminaries from European bishops who, meanwhile, have been progressively closing their own, going so far as to sell off much of the property and to concentrate in a single seminary the few seminarians from every diocese of an entire ecclesiastical region. How many of certain vocations are genuine, and how many aspiring priests are instead simply young men seeking a better state of life and a position of the utmost respect within their own civil societies? None of this is a mechanical law, nor can grace be reduced to a sociological cycle. But it is a pattern that repeats itself with sufficient regularity to counsel prudence to anyone who today looks at France’s 17,800 catechumens and is tempted to read into them, without further thought, a new springtime of faith — because that can only be judged several years from now.

An authentic conversion, especially in adulthood, needs strong and well-examined reasons; it cannot be the offspring of mere emotion, of fear, of the need to belong in a moment of identity disorientation. Augustine, first a hedonistic libertine and then a Manichaean, was not converted in order to defend himself from something, but because something — or rather, someone — had reached him, dismantling every intellectual and moral resistance he had. The same holds, in times closer to our own, for conversions such as that of Edith Stein, a Jewish woman and eminent philosopher, or of André Frossard, an atheist and communist who was later made a member of the Académie française — all of them revelations born of an encounter, not of a siege, the conscious and free fruit of that love which drives out fear (cf. 1 Jn 4:18). The risk, in France, is that some of these 17,800 people may have found at the baptismal font not Christ, but a trench: a solid identity to set against a world — secularist on one side, Islamized on the other — perceived as hostile. It need not be so, and it would be ungenerous, even dishonest, to presume it a priori for everyone. His Excellency Bishop Olivier Leborgne, Bishop of Arras and formerly vice-president of the French Bishops’ Conference, has explained that the new catechumens often come from complicated lives, at times marked by wounds, and experience their entry into the faith as an experience of healing. And that is the language of authentic grace, not of a trench — all the more so as it will be time to come that confirms or disproves it.

Time is therefore needed to tell one thing from the other. Time is precisely what Easter statistics always lack, and what the Church, as ever, knows how to give: a serious catechumenate, an accompaniment that is not satisfied with the numbers and that verifies the quality of the «yes» spoken at the baptismal font — exactly what, as I have had occasion to write in an article of mine soon to be published concerning the vocational crisis in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, a massive intake without adequate discernment has already shown itself capable of betraying, in other contexts, within the space of a single generation.

If, some years from now, the France of the 17,800 catechumens of 2025 turns out to be a more Christian France and not merely a more frightened France that went looking for a stronghold, then I will have been wrong. And that, for me, will be the greatest joy. If not, we will have witnessed: on one side, the Eiffel Tower lit up to celebrate the enshrining of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, and on the other an army of reactive newly baptized who will not have understood that being Christian means bearing witness and, when necessary, fighting — with all the political means granted to anyone with the right to think, speak and vote — against the worst excesses of the Prince who rules this world. Baptismal faith is not something private, but the most public thing there can be: active witness. If not, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotion.

From The Island of Patmos, 28 September 2026

.

FRANCE. BAPTISM OF FAITH OR REACTIVE BAPTISM ?

“To be a Christian means to bear witness and, if necessary, fight — by all political means recognized to anyone who has the right to think, of speech and vote - the worst excesses of the Prince who governs this world. Baptismal faith is not a private thing, but what is most public there is : active testimony. Otherwise, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotionality”.

— Church news —

.

the 4 mars 2024, the Eiffel Tower lit up of the inscription “My body, my choice », to celebrate the inclusion of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, France thus becoming the first nation in the world to do so. It's the same France, secular to the point of exasperation, never really freed from the revolutionary anticlericalism that remained smoldering like an ember under the ashes, the same one who, in 1793, transformed Notre-Dame into a temple of the Goddess Reason and which, the last two years, finds himself celebrating something completely different : an explosion of baptism requests among adolescents, young people and adults, unprecedented in its recent history. On 2025, more than 17 800 catechumens were baptized at Easter : 10 384 adults, either 45 % more than 2024, and more than 7 400 adolescents aged 11 at 17 ans.

I could only be happy, let us understand it well, in front of an adult who asks in full conscience this sacrament of grace which cleanses from original sin and opens the path to Christian life. And yet, I admit it without the slightest pessimism, something about this phenomenon doesn't quite convince me, and I sincerely wish I had to say, in a few years, that I was wrong. I really wish it, cheat on me.

To understand the phenomenon, we must start from two French fears, both real and concurrent. The first is that of an aggressive secularism which has never been content to separate the State from the Church – a sacrosanct thing., that Catholics themselves are right to defend for the protection of the two freedoms, that of the State and that of the Church - but which has gradually established itself as the supreme truth, a religion civil de substitution : this is not the first time in French history, the Goddess Reason installed on the altar of Notre-Dame in 1793 demonstrates it with the force of the precedent. The second, less reported but just as widespread, is due to the fear of a growing number of French people facing the expansion of Muslim communities who refuse any integration and who have transformed entire neighborhoods – including in the capital – into enclaves where the law of the Great Republic weighs less than the law of the street. Exasperating and aggressive secularism on one side, fear of the Islamization of others : two pressures which together generate fear and dismay in a nation which, despite all his efforts to deny it, cannot erase its own Christian roots, an anthropological background which constitutes it in its depths, even before its history.

It is in this context that I believe it is legitimate to ask a disturbing question : Are these conversions born from a flash on the road to Damascus – as happened?, over the centuries, to famous people and countless unknowns — or are they a reaction, a form of identity defense, a flight from fear which is clothed in the Sacrament ? It would not be the first time that Christianity has served as national glue and refuge in a moment of collective dismay. : the case of Poland, a Europe, remains the most eloquent. But what came next is just as instructive : the specter of communism once fallen - it which had made faith an act of national resistance -, Poland is engaged in secularization as rapid as that of France. Participation in Sunday mass, which still concerned 52,7 % Polish faithful in 1981, fell to 46,8 % in 2001, at 40 % in 2011, until 28,3 % in 2021. As if, for many, the common enemy having disappeared - the one against whom faith was a bulwark -, Christianity had lost its usefulness and purpose, both subjectively and socially.

To understand this mechanism, it is appropriate to take a step back in history, because the link between collective fear and return to faith — and, conversely, the link between widespread prosperity and religious disaffection — is not a 20th century invention. In Europe devastated by the Black Death of 1347-1351, which decimated almost half the population in a few years, popular religiosity exploded to the point of sinking into excess : the flagellant movement was born, who traveled through cities in procession practicing public self-flagellation as extreme penance, convinced of acting under the direct inspiration of God ; pilgrimages and vows multiplied, the cult of saints protecting the plague experienced disproportionate growth, Saint Roch at the head. It was such an exacerbated religiosity that the sovereign pontiff Clement VI had to intervene with two bulls, in July and September 1349, to condemn its excesses and publicly prohibit its practices - a sign that the Church itself, in the face of collective terror, recognized the risk of a faith as a refuge likely to sink into fanaticism.

A case closer to us, and in some respects the mirror of the Polish case, is that of Spain. National Catholicism in the post-Franco war, who had made faith a pillar of identity in a country emerging from a civil war - during which, between 1936 and 1939, anticlerical persecution carried out in republican-controlled areas cost lives, according to the reference study by the historian Antonio Montero Moreno, approximately 6 832 religious, thirteen bishops included, as well as thousands of lay people killed for their faith —, first went through the economic boom of the 1960s, Then, Above all, the Democratic Transition and the decades of peace and increasing freedom that followed : It was precisely during these decades that the collapse occurred, suddenly. In barely twenty years, Spain has gone from a country where 92 % of the population grew up in Catholicism in a country where only 66 % still declare themselves Catholic : more than twelve million fewer people, the largest contraction in Europe in absolute value ; baptisms fell from 325 271 in 2007 at 214 271 in recent years, today more than half of Spanish children are not baptized, and among the young people of 18 at 24 ans, more than half now declare themselves to be non-Catholic. The seminars emptied at the same rate : -30 % of seminarians over the last decade, and 10 615 parishes on 23 286 — almost half — are today deprived of a resident priest.

It is certainly no coincidence that Spain, during these same thirty years of galloping dechristianization, became the European laboratory from which were born, in sequence, some of the most radical legislative turning points on the continent : same-sex marriage, introduced the 30 June 2005, third country in the world to do so after the Netherlands and Belgium, with the right to adoption from day one ; the express divorce of the same year, which removed any obligation of prior separation ; active euthanasia, legalized in March 2021, seventh country in the world to do so ; the so-called trans law of February 2023, who introduced the change of civil status upon simple declaration, without any medical requirements, one of the most permissive laws in Europe. I am not saying that there is a design behind all this – that would be undemonstrable –, but the chronological coincidence between the void left by faith and the ground made available for these transformations remains, at the very least, a fact worth reflecting on.

The thread that connects the Black Death, post-Franco Spain and post-communist Poland is the same, read in mirror : in times of great fear and collective uncertainty, the churches are filling, often beyond the measure of authentic faith ; in times of peace and widespread prosperity, they empty themselves, and with them the diocesan seminaries and religious novitiates are also empty.. In the poorest countries in the world, bishops ask for financial aid to build seminaries from European bishops who, in the meantime, gradually closed theirs, going so far as to sell a large part of their buildings and to concentrate in a single seminary the rare seminarians from all the dioceses of an entire ecclesiastical region. How much, among certain vocations, are they authentic, and how much, on the contrary, are young aspiring priests only seeking a better standard of living and a role of the greatest respect within their civil societies? ? All this is not a mechanical law, and grace cannot be reduced to a sociological cycle. But it is a pattern that repeats itself with sufficient regularity to impose caution on anyone looking at the 17 800 French catechumens and would like to read there without further delay a new spring of faith, because this can only be judged in several years.

An authentic conversion, especially in adulthood, needs strong and carefully considered reasons ; she cannot be the daughter of emotion alone, fear, of the need to belong in a moment of identity disarray. Augustin, first libertine enjoyer then Manichaean, does not convert to defend himself from something, but because something – or rather someone – had reached him to the point of shaking all his intellectual and moral resistance. It is the same, in a time closer to our own, for conversions such as that of Edith Stein, Jewish and philosopher badge, or André Frossard, atheist and communist, later elected member of the French Academy : all these fulgurations are born from an encounter, not a seat, and are the conscious and free fruit of this love which banishes fear (cf. 1 Jn 4, 18). The risk, In France, is that part of these 17 800 people found on the baptismal font not Christ, but a trench : a solid identity to oppose to a world – secularist on one side, Islamized by the other — perceived as hostile. It is not said that this is so, and he would be petty, even dishonest, to presume it a priori for all. Mgr Olivier Leborgne, bishop of Arras and former vice-president of the Conference of Bishops of France, explained that new catechumens often come from complicated lives, sometimes marked by injuries, and experience their entry into faith as a healing experience. And this is the language of authentic grace, not that of the trench - all the more reason to let the time to come provide confirmation or denial.

So it takes time to distinguish one from the other. Time is precisely what is always missing from Easter statistics, and what the Church, elle, always knows how to give : a serious catechumenate, an accompaniment which is not satisfied with the number and which verifies the quality of the “yes” pronounced at the baptismal font – exactly what, as I had the opportunity to write in an article to be published soon on the vocational crisis in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, mass entry without adequate discernment has already shown that it could betray, in other contexts, within a generation.

And, in a few years, the France of 17 800 catechumens from 2025 reveals itself as a more Christian France, and not only a more frightened France gone in search of a fort, then I would have been wrong. And it will be, In my opinion, the greatest joy. Otherwise, we will have attended, on the one hand, at the illuminated Eiffel Tower to celebrate the inclusion of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, and on the other hand to an army of reactive baptized people who will not have understood that being Christian means witnessing and, if necessary, fight — by all political means recognized to anyone who has the right to think, of speech and vote - the worst excesses of the Prince who governs this world. Baptismal faith is not a private thing, but what is most public there is : active testimony. Otherwise, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotionality.

From the Island of Patmos, the 28 september 2026

.

FRANCE. BAPTISM OF FAITH OR REACTIVE BAPTISM??

«Being a Christian means witnessing and, if necessary, combat - with all recognized political means those who have the right to think, word and vote — the worst deviations of the Prince who rules this world. Baptismal faith is not something private, but the most public that can exist: the active testimony. Otherwise, everything runs the risk of being reduced to fear and emotion.

- Ecclesial news -

.

The 4 March 2024 the Eiffel Tower lit up with the inscription «My body, my choice» — my body, my choice — to celebrate the inclusion of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, first nation in the world to do so. It's the same France, secular to the point of exasperation, who never truly freed himself from revolutionary anticlericalism, and that continues to simmer like an ember under the ashes; the same as in 1793 transformed Notre-Dame into a temple of the Goddess Reason and that in the last two years has celebrated something very different: an explosion of baptism requests among teenagers, young people and adults unprecedented in recent history. On 2025 were more than 17.800 catechumens baptized at Easter: 10.384 adults, a 45% more than in 2024, and more than 7.400 teenagers from 11 and 17 years.

I couldn't help but rejoice, let it be clear, before an adult who asks with full conscience for the sacrament of grace that cleanses from original sin and opens the path of Christian life. And yet, I confess it without any pessimism, something that in this phenomenon does not convince me at all, and I wish with all my heart to have to say, in a few years: I made a mistake. I really want to be wrong.

To understand the phenomenon we must start from two French fears, both real and concurrent. The first is that of an aggressive secularism that has never been content with separating the State from the Church — a sacrosanct thing., and that Catholics themselves have reasons to defend to protect both freedoms: that of the State and that of the Church —, and that has progressively emerged as the supreme truth, as a substitute civil religion. It is not the first time in the history of France, the Goddess Reason enthroned on the altar of Notre-Dame in 1793 demonstrates with force the precedent. The second, less declared, but no less widespread, Instead, it is the fear of a growing number of French people who, faced with the expansion of Muslim communities that reject all integration and have turned entire neighborhoods — also in the capital — into enclaves where the law of Great Republic weighs less than the law of the street. Infuriating and aggressive secularism, on the one hand, fear of Islamization by another: two pressures that together generate fear and confusion in a nation that, no matter how hard you try to deny it, cannot erase his own Christian roots. An anthropological baggage that constitutes her in the deepest part, even before its own history.

It is in this scenario where I consider it legitimate to raise an uncomfortable question: Are these conversions born from a flash on the road to Damascus — as has happened, throughout the centuries, to famous people and countless strangers — or are they a reaction, a form of identity defense, an escape from fear that is clothed in Sacramento? It would not be the first time that Christianity serves as a mortar for the people and a refuge in a moment of collective confusion.: the case of Poland, in Europe, remains the most eloquent. But what came next is also instructive.: the specter of communism fallen, who had made faith an act of national resistance, Poland undertook secularization as fast as France. Participation in Sunday Mass, that in 1981 still reached 52,7% of the Polish faithful, descended to 46,8% in 2001, al 40% in 2011, until the 28,3% in 2021. As if, for many, the common enemy against which faith acted as a dam has disappeared, Christianity would have lost its own usefulness and subjective and social purpose.

To understand this mechanism It is worth taking a step back in history, because the link between collective fear and the return to faith — and, the other way around, the link between general well-being and religious detachment — not a 20th century invention. In Europe devastated by the Black Death of 1347-1351, that decimated almost half of the population in a few years, popular religiosity exploded to the point of bordering on excess: the flagellants movement was born, who toured the cities in procession practicing public self-flagellation as extreme penance, convinced of acting by direct inspiration from God. Pilgrimages and votes multiplied, and the cult of the saints who protected the plague grew disproportionately, like Saint Roque to first place. It was a religiosity so exasperated that the Supreme Pontiff Clement VI had to intervene with two bulls, in July and September 1349, to condemn their excesses and publicly prohibit their practices. A sign that even the Church, in the face of collective terror, recognized the risk of a faith-refuge capable of degenerating into fanaticism.

A case closer to us and, in certain aspects, speculate in Polish, it's Spain. National Catholicism in the post-Franco war, who had made faith a pillar of identity in a country that had been torn apart by a civil war — during which, between 1936 and 1939, anticlerical persecution in Republican-controlled areas cost lives, according to the reference study by historian Antonio Montero Moreno, to some 6.832 religious, thirteen bishops, and thousands of lay people murdered for their faith —, first went through the economic boom of the sixties, and above all, the democratic transition with the decades of peace and increasing freedom that followed: and it is precisely in those decades when the collapse came, sudden. In just twenty years, Spain has gone from being a country where 92% of the population grew in the Catholic faith to one where only the 66% is still declared as such: more than twelve million fewer people, the largest decline in Europe in absolute terms; baptisms have fallen from 325.271 in 2007 a 214.271 in recent years; Today more than half of Spanish children are not baptized, and among the young people of 18 a 24 years more than half declare themselves non-Catholic. The seminaries have emptied at the same rate: a decrease in 30% in number of seminarians in the last decade, and 10.615 of the 23.286 — parishes, almost half — today lack a resident priest.

It is no coincidence that precisely Spain, in this same thirty years of rampant de-Christianization, has become the European laboratory from which they were born, in sequence, some of the most radical legislative changes on the continent: same-sex marriage, introduced on 30 June 2005, third country in the world to do so after the Netherlands and Belgium, including the right to adoption from day one; the quick divorce that same year, which eliminated any requirement for prior separation; active euthanasia, legalized in March 2021, seventh country in the world to do so; the so-called trans law of February 2023, that introduced the change of registered sex by simple self-declaration, without any medical requirement, among the most permissive regulations in Europe. I do not claim that there is a design behind all this — it would be unprovable —, but the chronological coincidence between the void left by faith and the terrain available for these transformations remains, at least, a fact to reflect on.

The thread that unites the black plague, post-Franco Spain and post-communist Poland is the same, reflected in time like a mirror: In moments of great fear and collective uncertainty, churches fill, often beyond the measure of authentic faith; in times of peace and widespread prosperity they are emptied, and with them the diocesan seminaries and religious novitiates are also emptied.. In the poorest countries in the world, The bishops ask for financial aid to build seminaries from European bishops who, meanwhile, they have been progressively closing theirs, going so far as to sell a large part of its buildings and concentrate the few seminarians from all the dioceses of an ecclesiastical region in a single seminary.. How authentic are certain vocations?, and how many aspiring priests are actually just young people seeking a better state of life and a role of maximum respect in their own civil societies? All this is not a mechanical law, nor can grace be reduced to a sociological cycle. But it is a pattern that is repeated with sufficient regularity to impose caution on anyone who looks at the 17.800 French catechumens and want to read in them, without a doubt, a new spring of faith, because this can only be assessed in several years.

A true conversion, especially in adulthood, needs strong and contrasted reasons; It cannot be the daughter of mere emotion, of fear, of the need to belong in a moment of identity confusion. Augustine, first happy libertine and then manichean, He didn't convert to defend himself from something, but because something - or rather someone - had reached him to the point of disarming all his intellectual and moral resistance.. The same goes, in times closer to us, for conversions like Edith Stein's, Jew and distinguished philosopher, or André Frossard's, atheist and communist, later appointed member of the French Academy: all of them fulgurations that are born from an encounter, not from a siege, conscious and free fruit of that love that expels fear (cf. 1 Jn 4,18). The risk, in France, is that a part of these 17.800 people have found in the baptismal font not Christ, but a trench: a solid identity to oppose a world — secular on the one hand, Islamized by another — perceived as hostile. It is not necessarily said that it is so, and it would be mean, and even dishonest, show it off a priori for everyone. Mons. Olivier Leborgne, bishop of Arras and former vice president of the French Episcopal Conference, has explained that new catechumens often come from complicated lives, sometimes marked by wounds, and live the entry into faith as a healing experience. And that is the language of authentic grace., not from the trench — all the more reason will be the time to come that will confirm or deny.

It is necessary, therefore, time to distinguish one thing from another. Time is precisely what is always missing from Easter statistics, and what the Church instead, since always, knows how to give: a serious catechumenate, an accompaniment that is not satisfied with the number and that verifies the quality of the “yes” pronounced before the baptismal font — exactly what, as I have had the opportunity to write in a soon-to-be published article regarding the vocational crisis in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, massive entry without adequate discernment has already proven to be able to betray, in other contexts, over the course of a generation.

If in a few years the France of the 17.800 catechumens from 2025 turns out to be a more Christian France, and not only a more frightened France that looked for a fort, then I must have been wrong. and it will be, for me, the greatest joy. Otherwise, we will have attended: on the one hand, to the illuminated Eiffel Tower to celebrate the inclusion of the "right" to abortion in the French Constitution; for another, to an army of reactive baptized people who will not have understood that being Christian means witnessing and, if necessary, combat - with all recognized political means those who have the right to think, word and vote — the worst deviations of the Prince who rules this world. Baptismal faith is not something private, but the most public that can exist: the active testimony. Otherwise, everything runs the risk of being reduced to fear and emotion.

From the Island of Patmos, 28 of September 2026

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