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| Claude reflecting on his argument |
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I wrote recently about my first meeting with Claude at a café adjacent to the Left Bank. To my great surprise Claude had made the transition from being an active member of the Parti communiste français to becoming an active member of his local Catholic church.
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-Just a few days ago I’d been selling the paper, Lutte ouvrière, at the métro station and was in need of a rest. I found myself back at that same café and there he was again, reading his paper and generally relaxing.
“What,” I asked Claude, joining him at a table in the back, “is up?”
He told me he’d recently been visited by his brother-in-law, André, also a leftist, and a staunch atheist. Claude had persuaded André to accompany him to Mass, and afterward - once the congregation had left - they had had a spirited conversation in the nave. The parish priest, a learned man, had been meditating quietly near the altar but had plainly also been keeping half an ear on their conversation.
“So how did it go?” I asked.
Well, said Claude, André is a well-liked member of our extended family. He's a middle-aged man, successful in life, with a family. He considers himself rational, secular, utilitarian and sensible. He has no patience with fluffy superstition, in which category he includes Catholicism. He's proud to be an atheist and cannot imagine that anyone with half a brain could disagree with his position that all this God talk is nonsense.
His arguments against Catholicism are many, Claude continued. He doesn't see how anyone could believe in the “Sky Fairy” - as he calls God; he thinks the Bible is a self-contradictory mess of primitive, often bloodthirsty beliefs; he thinks dogmas like the Virgin Birth and Resurrection are utterly implausible and beyond stupid; he thinks heaven and hell are childish delusions - wish-fulfillment fantasies; he thinks going to church and attending Mass are a waste of time, just a demeaning superstitious prostration in front of a non-existent feudal-style lord who anyway can't hear the pointless and supine praises heaped upon him.
He can't understand why so many of our family are in fact practising Catholics.
“Well,” I said, “That’s quite a mouthful. And all at once as well. I imagine that got the priest’s attention!”
Claude replied that he had calmly pointed out to his brother-in-law that dogma and theological foundations were not the reasons he joined the Catholic Church. Like JD Vance, another recent convert to Catholicism, he believed Catholicism represented an organisation of like-minded people who stood up for communitarian and high-ethical standards. In this age of atomisation and nihilism, that was a battle worth joining.
“Good points,” I agreed. “Did your brother-in-law see that dogma was, perhaps, not the central concern here?”
Claude’s expression of distaste suggested the contrary. He told me he would reconstruct the conversation as it had unfolded. It went like this, he said.
André: Let me be blunt with you. How can anyone with half a brain believe in the “Sky Fairy”? An invisible God up there, doing his invisible thing. It’s obviously ridiculous.
Claude: OK, well thanks for laying it on so honestly! Let me start by suggesting that the concept of God you’re rejecting is one many Catholics don’t accept either.
Think of God not as some supernatural person up in the sky but as that part of reality we engage with when we consider: why we exist; what it means to be a person with choices; and what we should do with our lives. Values not facts.
The term “God” gives concrete framing to such profound questions. It may help some people to have a personified authority figure in their minds, but you can go deeper than that. In particular, theologians do not personify God in the (pejorative) way you describe - God is described as ‘mysterious’.
André: So you’re just redefining God to avoid embarrassment?
Claude: Look, we should put ontology to one side - the question of the kind of existence God might have. More importantly, without some anchor of absolute meaning it’s hard to avoid a collapse into nihilism and selfish hedonism. Religions provide a framework for community, for the practice of normative ethics and for resisting less pleasant social behaviours. Human beings being what they are, Church cohesion is best served by a transcendent leadership with a rich cultural backstory.
André: Let’s move on. The Bible - you’ve called it ‘human wrestling with deep questions’; I call it a mess. It’s self-contradictory, outdated, full of barbarism. Why should anyone care about it today, let alone read it?
Claude: The Bible absolutely contains contradictions and harsh passages. It’s a library of texts written and honed over centuries by people with different perspectives, trying to understand life and morality, and to define themselves.
The Bible and Catholic Liturgy invites us into a conversation, not blind obedience; process rather than absolutely fixed outcomes. We need to engage it critically and ethically, just as those who wrote it over the centuries did. We know more today than those early writers - standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say.
André: And what about the dogmas? Virgin births, resurrections: preposterous.
Claude: These claims were certainly unusual in both Roman pagan and Jewish cultures of the time. But the Biblical texts we have are better understood as works of theological argument than of historical documentation. Jesus was crucified but the movement continued. Jesus’s status was debated and magnified in the years following his death, a reframing partially derived via exegesis from the Jewish scriptures, but given a very concrete form.
The Virgin Birth attempts to ground the narrative of Jesus’s dual nature: human and divine. It is a theological concept, not historical.
As for the Resurrection, St. Paul best explains the theological centrality of this belief. Jesus, the movement's leader was executed in the midst of expectations of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven - which at the time meant the liberation of the Jewish people from the Empire. His personal resurrection was the key belief that kept the movement going in those dark times. Again, the concept was derived from exegesis, but presented as a historical parable.
André: You’re dodging. These stories were presented as literal facts. If they’re not true, what’s left of Christianity?
Claude: Historical literalism is a modern obsession; that's not how ancient people understood these stories. What matters isn’t whether every event happened exactly as described but whether the stories reveal enduring truths. Christianity doesn’t have to be about accepting tabloid-style ‘astonishing miracles’ - it’s about how we live: within individuals, communities, and societies. The parable-forms help many people internalise these rather abstract notions.
André: Heaven and hell—childish delusions. Eternal reward for the good, fire and brimstone for the bad. Pretty primitive, isn’t it?
Claude: Again, concrete but symbolic expressions of deep questions. The real questions are these: how should we live our lives - to what purpose? How do we create and maintain our communities? Jesus wasn’t preoccupied with an elsewhere afterlife. He spoke about “the Kingdom of God”: a vision for human society rooted in fairness and love happening right there in Israel.
Early Christians used images like heaven and hell to dramatize this vision. They weren’t writing travel brochures for the afterlife but urging us to act correctly here and now.
André: And yet millions of Catholics spend their Sundays kneeling in church, mumbling obsequious praises to an unhearing deity. It’s quite degrading.
Claude: I see how it might look that way, André. But consider this: people are creatures of ritual. We need spaces to reflect, connect, and renew our sense of common purpose. For Catholics, Mass is that space.
Think of the Eucharist. At its heart, it’s not about appeasing a “feudal lord” but about solidarity. Bread and wine symbolize sharing and community - a counter to division and scarcity, atomisation and alienation. It's rather beautiful.
André: Solidarity? Come off it. The Church is a global power with a terrible track record - support for wars, so-called holy inquisitions, endless abuse scandals. How can you defend an institution so corrupt, so uninterested in reform?
Claude: The Church has done terrible things. But it’s also been a force for immense good - building hospitals, schools, and advocating for the poor. And it’s a place where people can express their highest ethical choices. The contradiction reflects human nature: it’s built by people who are what they are.
Catholicism is at its best when it remembers Jesus’s radical call to community and high ethical standards. At its worst, it becomes an institution that protects its own power - an arrogant clericalism. The challenge isn’t to abandon it but to hold it accountable and insist it lives up to its own ideals. Don’t conflate the message with the institution.
André: Isn’t life simpler without these childish stories, rituals, and institutions?
Claude: Life may seem simpler without them, André, but is it richer? People need meaning as much as they need food and water. Stories, symbols, and communities help us make sense of existence, illuminating our desires to live in the right way.
Religion, at its core, is a way of organizing hope. It’s not about escapism; it’s about confronting reality - suffering, death, injustice - within a framework - processes, if you like - of courage and compassion, and building communities around high moral principles.
Catholicism isn’t the straw man you described earlier. It’s a complex tradition, deeply flawed yet deeply human, rooted in the search for meaning and for managing our journey through life in the best way.
“And André agreed?” I asked him.
“Of course not, and then things got worse. The priest, noticing we had come to a standstill, called me across. André took the opportunity to get some fresh air, saying he’d see me outside.”
I thought this sounded ominous.
“Oh oh, so what did your priest have to say?”
“I said he was a very learned man," Claude replied, "and his expression was somewhere between concerned and amused. He said that surely I was aware that the Magisterium would insist on the historical realities of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the dual nature of Christ, and that the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) reflects the real unity of truly-existent divine persons.”
“What’s the Magisterium?”
“It’s the Pope and Bishops in their role of defining the teachings of the Church.”
“So you’re a heretic?”
“I said to the priest that there have always been currents within the Catholic Church at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy: cafeteria Catholicism is a thing. And I’ve always been a revolutionary.”
At this I had to smile. The PCF? Really?
“The orthodoxies of today,” he continued, “are the heresies of yesterday - or at least they struggled with other currents of thought as one peer amongst peer contenders.”
“Not, I fear, a good answer!” I said.
“The priest said that I needed to appreciate that religions which endure need to speak to every part of society, not just to intellectuals who want to focus on the consistency and scientific and historical plausibility of its conceptual content. Religion is a complete human experience, speaking to emotions and human relationships more than the intellect. Most Catholics do not spend a lot of time worrying about their own theology, not should they.
“He pointed out that when people tried to set up religions based on abstract principles, on a purely symbolic, secular concept of divinity, they had always failed. He mentioned the Culte de la Raison (Antoine-François Momoro et al) and the Culte de l'Être suprême (Maximilien Robespierre) during the French Revolution.
“‘Catholicism needs its heavenly family,’ he said - its rich backstory and homely metaphors. The Catholic Church has had two thousands years of successful adaptation in securing its mission. And if the Church teaches these eternal human truths in the guise of the concreteness of the divine, are the people of faith really to choose to praise, glorify and pray to mere abstractions?
“Still, the priest continued, the Church sees questioning and wrestling with faith as part of a spiritual journey. Your misguided engagement, he said, even when overly critical and misplaced, I see as a sign of a living faith rather than a lack of it. He suggested I study and reflect further on these matters and not give up.”
“I see,” I said. “And do you think it likely you will come to terms with the supernatural aspects which are so central to the theory and practice of Catholicism in the Liturgy and Eucharist? Or do you think you will persist in seeing everything as symbolic, believing everything to be no more than parables?”
“Let us just say that I see and understand the paradox and dilemma of Catholicism,” Claude replied enigmatically. “I think that Catholicism is - shall we say it quietly? - a broader church than the priest envisages.”
And with that we bid our farewells. I’m looking forward to further encounters with Claude - it looks like this journey has scarcely begun!
