At a time when it is fashionable to mourn the very word religion, why praise it?
Indeed, it takes a good dose of impertinence to praise religion as it has a bad reputation today. But I believe this untimely audacity necessary, because religion does indeed offer treasures of wisdom that open up the possibilities of a common life. It offers ways to salvation, happiness, peace and coexistence. It can lead humanity to build itself, to move forward, not to give up before the multifaceted and ever-lively presence of evil and violence.
Current events, however, seem to give reason to the classic anti-religious argument consisting in identifying religion and violence…
No one has the privilege of violence. It is everywhere unfortunately, including, and perhaps especially, in the best things. What is more beautiful than love in a couple? And yet, the couple can be the place of the most heartbreaking dramas. The same goes for religion. Yes, it can be appalling, examples abound.
But it would be very wrong to bury it by professing an atheism which is often followership, because how to affirm with absolute certainty that nothing exists but a god or the divine? Secular spiritualities, which are sometimes invoked, risk being based only on emotion and subjective sentimentality. And suddenly, they can also lead to submitting to abusive gurus! We emancipate ourselves from religion to fall back into fearful submissions…
Why are you so hard on these new forms of spirituality?
But this is to forget that the spiritual life, in the strong and authentic sense, is not a sentimental enthusiasm, a banal and risk-free adventure. We do not engage in it as in a walk in the forest! One cannot open Pandora’s box of interiority or the search for an absolute without also encountering formidable trials and confronting the worst that is within oneself. One only has to read Thérèse of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux or Marie Noël to be convinced of this.
Left to himself on these difficult and rarely “filling” paths, the adventurer risks either becoming discouraged, or giving up, or sinking into psychological abysses until they get lost.
Does religion make it possible to avoid these risks and excesses?
It puts brakes on sentimentality and submission to deceitful masters. It offers “safeguards” which no spiritual life can dispense with. All true spirituality presupposes rites, teachings, directives, time-tested rules of prudence, advisers. It calls for support, that is to say an encouraging, but also critical look. The Gospels give us a stunning example of Jesus’ criticism of religion. Who can say then that criticism is absent from the Christian religious attitude?
So should we link faith and religion rather than oppose them?
A religion without personal faith would only be a religious, social and political conformism, the self-righteousness that Jesus never ceases to roundly denounce. Critical, and therefore living, faith is necessary for any religion: it is the spur that flushes it out of its falsely “religious” depressions to open it up to a practice in spirit and in truth. But, conversely, a so-called pure faith, without “framework” or established religion, would fall into the multiple failings already mentioned.
The idea of “faith alone” is untenable, because we need a community of faith as stimulation and support; we have to be “instructed” in the faith that we do not discover alone. So I am irritated by these Christians, theologians in particular, who exalt the Gospel and propose to speak of faith rather than of religion; a faith that would have to be saved from its “religious” compromises. But this Gospel, we have received it from a religion and from a Church. It was carried by a tradition, a chain of people of which we are one of the links!
Are we not yet called to return to the Gospel?
Admittedly, fidelity to the Gospel is essential, but the will to return to the origins to rediscover an evangelical purity supposedly lost over the centuries is an illusion. Our sources are not “pure”, unscathed from any cultural contamination, because Christianity is a second religion in that it is dependent on a source other than itself.
The Gospel thus refers to Judaism, itself steeped in various influences. You cannot read Saint Matthew without knowing the Old Testament, for example. In addition, everyone reads the Gospels, which also differ greatly from each other, in their own way, with their culture, their sensitivity, their history. And it is not falling into relativism to affirm this. On the contrary ! God speaks to each man in a unique way.
What do you say to Christians tempted to abandon the Church because of the scandals that shake it?
I understand the resentment and this need to distance oneself. But this attitude is equivocal. Isn’t it overestimating oneself to abandon an institution because it wouldn’t live up to one’s expectations? Than to believe oneself too pure to rank among these “sinners”?
The Church is not a “perfect society”, a club of predestined, impeccable chosen ones. She is a bunch of poor guys who try to improve themselves, to convert, to tend towards this ideal to which they are called. (“be holy as God is holy”, Leviticus 11, 44) and of which they know they are incapable. It is only a “sacrament”, the sign of a reality that goes beyond it on all sides.
To read : praise of religion, by Paul Valadier, Salvador, €18.
Paul Valadier: “Any true spirituality presupposes rules of prudence”