Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) was one of the most prolific authors of all time. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic, worked on Latin documents, and made himself very well-informed about Christianity, but turned against it. But he was extremely naive about Jews; bear this in mind.

Click for Detailed notes on McCabe - scroll down for selections from A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (1948).

Here's the full A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (about 1.3 MBytes; Word format; includes notes on some of its limits)

Religion in France.

J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia

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      France, Religion In. In his special study of the attitude of the people to the Church during the Revolution (Christianity and the French Revolution, Engl. trans. 1927), Prof. Aulard, the highest authority on the subject, is so impressed by the speed with which they abandoned religion, in spite of the efforts of Danton and Robespierre to protect the influence of the Church, that he concludes that the faith had never had deep roots in the country. Many articles in this work bearing upon mediaeval and later France [Abelard; Feast of Fools; Louis XIV; etc.] confirm this, and the ease with which Protestantism [see Huguenots] captured the sincerely religious minority in the sixteenth century gives the same impression. The history of the Church explains this. From the sixth century [see Franks] to the eighteenth the French Church was lenient to moral disorders, in priests and people, so that its creed was held lightly. Cardinal Richelieu [see] gravely threatened to sever the Church from Rome, and for a century after his time the French clergy asserted a remarkable degree of independence. [See Gallican Church.] Scepticism flourished more in Paris than in any other city, while in the provinces a defiant devil-worship captured entire regions. The provincial judge L'Ancre of the seventeenth century has left us an amazing picture of it in his book L'incredulité et mescréance du sortilège pleinement convaincu (1622). [See Black Mass; Satanism.] The first great wave of modern scepticism (due to the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Encyclopaedists) met little opposition except from the clergy, and the notorious corruption of the leading prelates deprived these of moral power. These matters and what happened during the Revolution will be discussed in a later article [French Revolution]. Napoleon [see], frankly for political reasons, restored the power of the Church, and the return of the monarchy gave it its customary Fascist authority. But the sceptics of Paris fought stubbornly. The Catholic writer Veuillot said, in the thirties, that it was as surprising to see a young man enter a church as to see a Moslem; but Napoleon III, again for purely political reasons, helped the Church to regain power after 1848, and the Communard rising of 1871 frightened the sceptical middle class into an alliance with it. The faith had, however, no real roots, and from 1880 onward Catholics dwindled to a minority of the entire country, and have from that date never had a President or leading statesman of the country until the co-operation of the Vatican with Hitler, and the deliberate use of loose women to seduce the leading Radical statesmen, gave power to Pétain, Weygand, Darlan, and Laval - all strict Catholics.
      McCabe's Decay of the Church of Rome (1909) proved, by Catholic authorities and statistics, that in the first decade of the present century there were, at the most, 5,500,000 Catholics out of a population of 40,000,000, and such high authorities as Sabatier put the number at about 4,000,000. During the European War (1914-18) the powerful body of French Freethinkers voluntarily dissolved in a sort of "gentleman's agreement" with the Church to avoid destruction of the national effort - so the ex-minister Buisson informed the present writer - but the Church seized the opportunity to reorganize, and inaugurated a vigorous campaign. It was again heavily favoured by political circumstances. Alsace and Lorraine, taken over from Germany, remained sullen and troublesome, and, since they were overwhelmingly Catholic, the Vatican made its usual deal with the Government: we will keep them quiet - at a price. Joan of Arc was "canonized"; Rationalist statesmen attended church ceremonies; criticism of religion was discouraged; the Papal Nuncio at Paris had a voice in foreign politics; and so on. The royalists now organized and became aggressive and, though the Vatican checked their premature demonstrations, the country was split into deeply hostile factions, and the Church got priest-ridden politicians like Laval and officers like Pétain and Weygand in key positions. Yet, in spite of the boasts of progress, in English Catholic literature, the Church had not regained ground in numbers. Catholic writers like G. Goyau (L'effort Catholique dans la France d'aujourdhui (1922), say that the number of Catholics (including more than 1,000,000 accessions in Alsace-Lorraine) was estimated at between five and ten millions; and Denis Gwynn (The Catholic Reaction in France, 1924), a Catholic writer resident in France, repudiated the higher figure.
      English Catholics often try to reduce the significance of the figures by drawing a distinction between "practising" and "non-practising" Catholics. They do not explain that their Church does not recognize secession, and so they continue to include seceders. What happened in 1940 we do not yet clearly know, but fragments of news which have escaped the Catholic censors and appeared in British papers - as that it was the Catholic Laval who bribed and intrigued to get supreme power entrusted to Pétain (Annual Register, 1940), that the Pope was the first foreign power to congratulate Pétain, that the surrender of Catholic Belgium was arranged in Paris, that Italy, Spain, and the new France were to receive a mandate from the Pope to control South America, that the German bishops were checked by the Pope in a proposal to publish a new agreement with Hitler, and that Cardinal Hinsley has warned British Catholics to expect a violent attack on their Church in England at the close of the War - prepare us for another sordid revelation of Papal activity. But the elections of 1946, at which the Catholics dare not appear under that name, show that the proportion of Catholics remains the same. Home Page

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