By Fr. Benedict Kiely
Jairus, an officer of the synagogue in Jerusalem, asks Jesus to come to his house and heal his daughter, who is gravely ill. According to the Gospel of Saint Mark, Jesus hurries toward his house, but on the way they tell him that she has died. Upon arriving, the Lord, who sees what others cannot see and knows that the glory of God will be revealed, tells them that the girl is not dead, but asleep. They laugh at Him; some translations say that “they mocked Him.”
The Lord enters the girl’s room, takes her hand, and in Aramaic says: “Talitha koumi – little girl, arise.” She wakes immediately and stands up.
Only Christ can restore life to the dead, or revive what seems to be dead.
For centuries, tyrants such as Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, or the followers of Muhammad have claimed to have put the Church to death. But She has always risen.
When contemplating the scenes we witnessed this week in France during the visit of Pope Leo, it is natural to think both of those proud words of tyrants and demagogues and of the story of Jairus’s daughter.
France, called for centuries the “eldest daughter of the Church,” has long been asleep. The horrors unleashed in that land with the regicide of the King and Queen, and the terror of the Revolution of 1789, seemed in many ways to have killed the little daughter of the Church. The further effects, we might say, of the revolution and of the so-called Enlightenment have created a French society—like much of European society—that is, in the words of Pope Leo, “deeply secularized.”
And yet, a million people lined the Champs-Élysées in Paris to see the pope. Thousands of young people welcomed him with enthusiasm. And, as we know, France is the very epicenter of what is called the “silent revival” of Catholicism, although last week in France was rather noisy.
A wise French commentator called it the “Advent of the Church” in France. Another friend, a journalist, told me that “a page of history had been turned.”
Advent, of course, means the coming of the King, the awaited arrival. That is precisely why the season before Christmas bears that name: we celebrate His first coming in the Incarnation and await His Second Coming in glory when, in the words of the great Advent hymn, “Every eye shall now behold Him / Robed in dreadful majesty.”
The French commentator went on to say that the revived Church was rising to counter the deleterious, soul-destroying effects of secularism and nihilism. Militant atheists, nihilists, the children of 1968 (the soixante-huitards, as they are known in France), would laugh if they were told that the little daughter would rise.
Leo XIV said in Paris that “people are rediscovering the Gospel and embracing the Faith,” precisely because of the emptiness and dissatisfaction produced by a society without God. He called it the “little flame that the Holy Spirit has kindled in the darkness of the night.”
Andrew Breitbart, it is said, coined the phrase that “politics is downstream of culture.” True, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the circumstances. But, even more significantly, culture is—or should be—downstream of religion.
Leo observed that France was not only a secular society, but a “deeply secular culture.” Abortion, now demonically enshrined in the French Constitution, and a euthanasia law enthusiastically supported by the dollar-store Napoleon, Emmanuel Macron, were passed only weeks before the pope’s arrival.
And yet, a culture once deeply formed by the Faith, permeated through the generations with the tradition of saints, artists, and scholars—so magnificently displayed in the vigil of young people with the pope at the Stade de France—can, even if its roots have been forgotten or deliberately obscured, revive when its foundation is renewed.
Over the past year I have spent time with various groups of faithful young French Catholics. Some are devoted to the Latin Mass; some are new converts to the Faith; some belong to charismatic or new communities; some are simply ordinary, pious members of a parish.
All of them are, invariably, joyful, filled not only with a joie de vivre, but with a joie de l’esprit. What is significant is that they are remarkably steeped in French culture in a way that, sadly, is not found in the United Kingdom or in the increasingly secular United States.
Although superficial matters of food and drink and the specific traditions of the various regions of France mark these young people, they also have a deep knowledge of and respect for their common national history.
A young convert told me the story of his entry into the Faith. His brother asked him to be the godfather of his son. He understood that he had to take it seriously and sought Baptism.
When I asked him if his brother practiced, he replied that he did not, but that he was coming to realize that the entire foundation of France was Christian. (A reaction, perhaps, to the threats to France’s national identity from uncontrolled immigration and political radicalism in recent years.)
The young man described this as a “gateway to the Faith.” That humble story may be the central reason why French culture, revived and embraced, is becoming a vehicle for the renewal of the Faith.
This is a moment of enormous hope and inspiration for all of us. Not only in France, but wherever this renewal is emerging, the Church must “recognize, welcome, and protect” this little flame, as Leo XIV said.
What seems dead can awaken, if touched by the hand of Christ. The Goddess of Reason, once enthroned in Notre Dame de Paris by the followers of the atheistic Revolution, seems to have been definitively discarded. The Faith, as Hilaire Belloc once wrote, is the “only lighthouse in this night, if lighthouse there be.”
As we are seeing, that is true even for the “first daughter” of the Church, long lost.
About the author
Fr. Benedict Kiely is a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. He is the founder of Nasarean.org, which assists persecuted Christians.