Perhaps a red hat in Paris … next time?

Another consistory, another snub for Paris.

While there are many different ways to approach Pope Francis’ recent appointment of twenty-one new members of the College of Cardinals, what immediately jumped out at me was the absence of a red hat for the French metropolitan.

Before exploring why I think this omission raises concerns for the future of the Church, we should notice two other, wildly different European dioceses that did get a new cardinal.

The first is Madrid, whose brand-new 57-year-old archbishop, José Cobo Cano, was elevated to the College immediately, even though there are two other living cardinal archbishops-emeriti from the same episcopal see, including Carlos Osoro Sierra, who will be eligible to vote at a Conclave until May of 2025.

Good for Madrid. They should certainly have a cardinal. And good for Archbishop Cano, about whom I know very little. I single Madrid out simply to show that there does not seem to be a logical reason why Paris, a major diocese with a cardinal archbishop-emeritus who is past voting age, would be denied a cardinal too.

Here’s another logical inconsistency.

Madrid is obviously among the most important cities in the history of the Church, and it also has the second-largest population within its city limits of any city in the EU today, with approximately 3.5 million people (second to Berlin at 3.8, with Paris further down the list at just 2.1 million). So, the biggest Catholic city gets the biggest signal of its importance. No problem there.

However, although Madrid claims more people than Paris within its city limits, the larger Parisian urban area is by far the largest in the EU, with almost twice as many inhabitants as the next largest population center, with approximately 11 million inhabitants compared to just over 6 million in the Ruhr Valley of Germany, and a comparable number around Madrid. By this logic, Paris deserves a cardinal far more than Madrid does.

But of course, it’s not all a numbers game. Moscow has over 13 million people, and it obviously does not have a cardinal. Bejing does not have a cardinal either, nor does Tokyo or Cairo. (Perhaps they should, and interestingly, Jakarta and Mumbai do.) But no one would argue that Madrid or any other European city surpasses Paris’s importance as both a Catholic stronghold and a major population center for at least the last millennia.

This brings me to a brief mention of a second diocese with a new cardinal.

Bishop Francois-Xavier Bustillo of the tiny Corsican diocese of Ajaccio did receive a red hat, even though the entire island he lives on counts a total population of about 350,000 souls. It is obviously not as if Ajaccio is an up-and-comer of such importance that the great historic see on Seine has to take a backseat.

Pope Francis clearly likes the 54-year-old Spanish-born man he has promoted in Ajaccio, so much so that he handed out the bishop’s book, Testimoni, non Funzionari (“Witnesses, not Functionaries”) to the priests of the Diocese of Rome at the Chrism Mass in 2022. And again, good for him and for Corsica; but when a tiny place on a Mediterranean island gets a cardinal and Paris gets a big, fat nothingburger, we have to wonder what’s going on.

Another Frenchman, the current apostolic nuncio to the United States and career-diplomat Christophe Pierre, was also made a cardinal, and The Pillar offered helpful insight on that appointment. When we add Pierre and Bustillo to the list that includes Archbishop Philippe Barbarin (Emeritus of Lyon), Archbishop Jean-Pierre Ricard (Emeritus of Bordeaux), Archbishop Dominique François Joseph Mamberti (another career diplomat), and Archbishop Jean-Marc Aveline (Marseille), that gives France six votes if a conclave were to be held today.

But hélas, no Paris.

Now, there may be largely unknown but perfectly sensible reasons Paris cannot have a new cardinal right now. It’s hardly worth speculating, but perhaps this is a time-out punishment for the sudden resignation of the previous Archbishop, Michel Aupetit, in the wake of allegations of sexual impropriety (not that it looked as though Aupetit was headed for the College either). And/or, maybe the current Archbishop, Laurent Ulrich, is simply meant to be a bureaucratic placeholder whose big task is to get Notre Dame rebuilt (yay! and uh-oh!) and then bow out when the archdiocese is ready to reset with a new prince of the Church taking his seat in new digs in a few years. Who knows?

Whatever the case, the timing is terrible.

I am not actually one for following church appointments very closely, but I am interested almost to the point of obsession with the worldwide cultural implications of Christianity’s success or failure in Europe. It is particularly troubling to see Paris ignored ecclesiastically when the struggle for the very civilization that the Church once bore in Paris at its vaunted university and among its artists and statesmen is playing out right there, right now. As the recent riots in Paris demonstrate, the city is ground zero for a fight spilling out all over Europe and the West over the question of identity.

This struggle cannot be dismissed with the same old “Et alors?” to the rowdy routines of a curiously demonstration-prone citizenry. It is more than an unfortunate outcome of immigration and integration policy failures requiring just one more big attempt at the right policy solution. Nor finally, and hilariously, is the problem due to what the increasingly wretched President Macron chalks up to video gamers’ cosplay run amok! Rather, we see coming to a boil a diabolical brew that has long been simmering in Paris, a city that has a way of setting trends for the rest of us.

The French capital once shone the bright light of Christ in its colorful cathedral windows, but it now casts a long shadow of an impossible post-modern laïcité. As it turns out, in Paris first and everywhere else soon, we see that it’s all religion, all the time. Which one will prevail? For Christians, the question in the Parisian atmosphere is apocalyptic: Will Christ reign amid the toxic concoction of relativism, nihilism, Islamism, consumerism, and scientism?

As I’ve written before, there are reasons to believe a Christian strategy of “make Paris great again” could help make everywhere else great again too. We may soon find out. But the Church has to wake up and take up spiritual arms.

Twenty years ago, Pope St. John Paul II described the problem in his apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Europa. Among the many choice passages, this one resonates deeply with me in our present context:

I would like to mention in a particular way the loss of Europe’s Christian memory and heritage, accompanied by a kind of practical agnosticism and religious indifference whereby many Europeans give the impression of living without spiritual roots and somewhat like heirs who have squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history. It is no real surprise, then, that there are efforts to create a vision of Europe which ignore its religious heritage, and in particular, its profound Christian soul, asserting the rights of the peoples who make up Europe without grafting those rights on to the trunk which is enlivened by the sap of Christianity (§7).

In many speeches and writings, Pope Benedict XVI elaborated further on the inextricable link between Europe and Christianity. And he embodied the connection with his name: Benedict, the patron saint of Europe. But with his abdication and Francis’ arrival, many things changed, and among the most noticeable transitions has been the decisive shift away from thinking of Europe, and its great cities like Paris, as the headquarters of the Jesus movement.

From my vantage point, the glaring omission of Paris is the mark of a risky evangelism strategy that favors the periphery over the center – a theory that prioritizes the world “out there” over the Church’s millennia-old roots. And while I hate even to think it, I fear the Church may now be just as indifferent to its own demise in Paris and beyond as anyone else. The hierarchy may wake up one day and scratch off the neutral label on the bottle of tasteless, odorless liquid it has been drinking in Europe for decades, only to find a skull-and-crossbones underneath.

In conclusion, I want to commend an article from 2015 that I have come back to again and again over the last few years. It is not written by a Catholic or a European, but by an American Jew, David Gelernter, who pleaded in print with Pope Francis not to forget the importance of fighting for the faith in the backyard of his new home in the Vatican. If the Old World of John Paul and Benedict goes, Gelernter argued, there may not be much left to fight for in the New World so dear to Francis’ heart. Gelernter writes:

What is he doing in the Philippines and South America at a moment when, throughout Europe, Christianity is dying?

And once the fire is dead in Europe, the rest of the world will grow cold too, gradually but inevitably.

The pope must go to his own backyard and preach: to Berlin and Paris and London; must walk out into the center of Trafalgar Square, or some such place, and preach for his life and the life of Europe and Christianity and, ultimately, mankind.

Pope Francis likely has few opportunities left to “preach for his life” in the Place de la Concorde or anywhere else. And perhaps dressing up Laurent Ulrich in scarlet robes would not be the civilization-saving gesture I would wish it to be. But Paris must not fall. And propping it up even a little bit must soon include putting its senior pastor in the place his historic see and his critically-important city deserves.

À la prochaine, Paris?