A street off the Rue Mouffetard, late afternoon in wet, gloomy winter. The café was half-empty, the heating uncertain. Every time the door opened, cold street air wafted around my ankles. I was here to talk again to Claude, to discover - as Christmas approached - how he felt the message of Catholicism could be made more relevant to the disaffected youth of Paris and around the world, young people who seemed to be re-evaluating the attractiveness of the Universal Church.
Here is our conversation, stripped of the pleasantries.
Adam: Claude, it's reported that young people - bored, alienated and bereft of ideals - are beginning to consider Catholicism again. Yet when the Church tries to speak to the young, it seems to lead off, as always, with the implausibly miraculous: virgin birth, divine incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, a promised return. All delivered as if they were items in a history class - or a police report.
That's always going to invite the utmost incredulity... or at best a dismissive shrug. Even if the claims were taken to be true, isn't it the case that many would say: so what? What possible consequences could there be from such weird and ancient events for anyone's actual life?
Claude: How could I disagree? If we make those events the entry point, we almost ensure the wrong reaction. People hear apparent fairy stories, or what they take to be tendentious propaganda. The deeper truths - the ones that could speak to their condition - are lost before we even begin.
Adam: Yet plenty of Catholics believe the Catechism of the Catholic Church. They would be profoundly offended by the way you tend to frame the mysteries of faith as symbolic.
Claude: I believe the contemporary term is 'luxury beliefs': beliefs which - in their very strangeness - bind the community of adherents together, as an in-group but at no cost as they have no practical consequences. Beliefs become ‘luxury beliefs’ when they are held as badges rather than inhabited as disciplines.
Adam: For you perhaps. But orthodoxy would also promise those true believers literal entry into the kingdom of heaven after they die. Which self-defines as a practical consequence if you believe it.
Claude: Yes, and I'd go further. Paradoxically the very integrity and longevity of the Church absolutely depends upon its core believers - and this includes the overwhelming majority of the clergy - truly inhabiting an enchanted world suffused by the living presence of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
I'm the first to recognise that this, culturally, is an immense distance from the secular worldview of the average citizen in the West.
Adam: That very distance surely makes it unwise to insist upon the primacy of the counterintuitive - even counterfactual? It feels like underselling your supposedly profoundly true message by insisting on a supernatural framing which sounds completely implausible to anyone not brought up with it.
Claude: Well, the creeds are the skeleton of Catholicism - hard-won self-understanding forged over the centuries. But catechesis too often confuses skeleton for present body. A twenty-year-old doesn’t need the bones of long-forgotten doctrinal disputes thrown at them which is what the essence of the Creed is; rather, they need to know why any of it should matter to them at all.
Adam: OK, it sounds like we're in agreement. But what would you say instead? Imagine someone disillusioned with politics and consumerism and the emptiness of life. Why should Catholicism claim their attention? Rather than, say, the attractions of Lutte Ouvrière or your former PCF?
Claude: Touché, perhaps... I’d begin with the needs the Church still addresses better than most institutions: the hunger for community in an atomised society; for practices that make love, solidarity and loyalty more than slogans; for meaning that doesn’t collapse into nihilism, narcissism or utopian fantasy.
Adam: Really?! Sociology with incense? Cohesion dressed up with angels? Life after death?
Claude: The Catholic proposition is that love and truth aren’t the useful illusions of the cynic but the grain of the real. Ritual and doctrine really do point beyond mere comfort and community; they keep our community from worshipping itself. That’s why transcendence matters: it prevents the club from becoming its own idol, a cult fixated on some human charismatic who invariably falls from grace.
Adam: So let's go with an example. Your own view: do you think the Resurrection happened as literal history in AD 33 or whenever?
Claude: I don’t treat the Resurrection as a historical puzzle waiting to be solved, nor as a metaphor we invent to console ourselves. It is the Church’s foundational claim about reality as lived: that death does not have the final word over meaning, loyalty, or love.
Whether there was an empty tomb is not irrelevant, but it is secondary. The Resurrection is not a report about a past event so much as the event that brought the Church into being and still governs its life. It is true insofar as it commands allegiance, reorders fear, and sustains fidelity where despair would otherwise be rational.
Outside that form of life it will always look like myth or madness. Within it, it is simply the formulation of hope.
Adam: I guess that's a common thread in all the great religions, as well as radical political movements: "We communists are dead men on leave." But would you be so frank within the Catholic community itself, I wonder?
Claude: Perhaps, although it would depend on who I was talking to - religion works on the whole person, not just the intellect. But I would point out to those interested in ideas that a very historical literalism is a modern obsession.
The early Christians used the mode of typology - the theological method by which events, figures, or institutions in the Old Testament are read as prefigurations (“types”) that find their fulfilment (“antitypes”) in later events, especially in Christ, the Church, or the sacraments. They told their theology in narrative form.
Reading those texts as reporter's notes misconstrues the genre. It's always theological argumentation in the dense cultural matrix of the time; parable.
Adam: The Virgin Birth?
Claude: The Virgin Birth is not a biological curiosity; it is the Church’s refusal to say that what finally matters in human life is generated by ordinary mechanisms of power, inheritance, or desire.
It says: this life is received, not produced; called, not engineered. That claim had to be told in the symbolic language available at the time, just as we now tell different truths through different conceptual forms.
To read it as obstetrics is to miss its polemical force entirely.
Adam: You know the phrase 'Cafeteria Catholicism'?
Claude: Of course. But Catholicism has always been broader than the movement’s gatekeepers. Within its walls: mystics, reformers, skeptics, radicals. I stand within that broad current.
Adam: Suppose the young person replies: why not stay secular - read philosophy, join a political movement, fight for change in the actual world?
Claude: Movements always fracture on the rock of human nature, always conceal the narrower interests of some disgruntled faction of the elite or wannabe elite. The Church alone endures, not because it’s flawless but because it binds lives together under transcendental meaning - not hostage to episodic fashion.
Adam: So practice before doctrine and not to worry too much about the inconsistencies and the magic?
Claude: Practice alongside doctrine, but yes - let people see what the practices do. The Eucharist turns “this is my body, given...” from a slogan into an internalisable commitment. Confession forbids our consoling self-narratives until we’ve told the truth. If any of that begins to make sense, the liturgy becomes a grammar for what they already half-know.
Adam: And the present style of evangelisation?
Claude: Too often mistakes assent for conversion. It asks the young to nod to miracles before showing them why they might need the entire value system. Reverse the order: start with community, self-discipline, commitment to a greater cause and recognition of mystery; then teach the framework that founds and steadies those things, respecting the divergencies of interpretation within the canon.
Adam: People will point to scandals, evasions, abuse - the charge of hypocrisy lands pretty quickly.
Claude: Then tell the truth quickly. The Church’s credibility won’t be argued back; it must be behaved back through justice for victims, protection of the small, and that ordinary sanctity manifest without vacuous, bland and self-serving press releases.
As we get up to leave, Claude pushes a small folded manuscript into my hand without comment; I put it in my pocket to read later. When I get home I remember the paper and sit down to read it. I'm astonished by its frankness: no wonder it's written in the third person.
Here is what Claude had entrusted to me.
What Claude Really Believes about Catholicism
Claude’s path into Catholicism was not the tidy arc of faith rediscovered, nor the sentimental tale of a prodigal son returning to a waiting Father. It was the weary detour of a man who had lived through utopias collapsing under their own contradictions. A former militant, he watched the Marxist dream wither in police states and privileged bureaucracies, until even the rhetoric rang hollow. Something in him still sought community, ritual, and a moral horizon larger than himself. That was the opening through which Catholicism entered.
He is quick to make one point clear: he does not believe in the personalised supernatural God of catechism posters and children’s homilies. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Trinity - for him these are truths enacted in practice rather than reported as facts. He treats them as parables, symbolic formulations of truths about human dignity, suffering, and hope.
To demand their historicity is, in his eyes, to miss the point. Ancient people did not trade in empiricism; they lived by narrative and symbol. Claude insists we should meet them on those terms.
So why Catholicism? Not because it offers cosmic guarantees. He values it because it is a community anchored by the sacred. In a fragmented, atomised society, the Mass actively gathers people across divisions into a ritual of solidarity. Bread and wine, blessed and broken, are not to him the body and blood of a deity in any Aristotelian, metaphysical sense; they are the enactment of sharing, the memory of scarcity resisted by togetherness. The liturgy is both familiar and renewing, a rhythm that reassures and situates him within a living tradition.
Catholicism also gives him language. Where Marxism spoke of comradeship, class struggle, and revolution through to utopia, Catholicism speaks of communion, justice, and the Kingdom of God. Claude does not believe in heaven and hell as destinations, but he recognises them as dramatic images of what is at stake in human life.
To live rightly, to build communities of fairness and love - that is “heaven”. To surrender to greed, cruelty, or alienation - that is "hell". The Church, in all its arguments and inconsistencies, remains one of the few institutions still staging that drama on a global scale and it endures.
He is not blind to its failures. The abuse scandals, the entanglement with power, the endless tendency to authoritarianism - all this he acknowledges without apology. Yet he holds that Catholicism, precisely because it is a vast and contradictory body, is more honest than purist projects which collapse under their own abstractions and rigidities. Within its walls there are fundamentalists and heretics, mystics and bureaucrats. That breadth is its strength: “many rooms in my Father’s house,” as Claude likes to quote.
What does he truly believe? He believes in community over atomisation. He believes in love as the highest commandment. He believes in the symbolic power of ritual to bind people together. He believes that human beings, for all their flaws, need institutions that lift their gaze above consumption and private interest and in being the dupes of remote elites. And he believes that, however contradictory, Catholicism can still function as such a place.
For Claude, Catholicism is not a surrender to superstition, but a choice of solidarity. It is the flawed but enduring vessel in which he has chosen to travel through the wreckage of lost and abandoned utopias.
A comment on this article from GPT5.2.
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