‘You have a duty to disobey to the ecclesial authorities on temporal matters!” You might assume that the man saying these words, standing in a café in Paris and addressing some 30 young people, is a secular bigot of the kind we have in France, thanks to our laïcité, or state secularism. But you would be wrong. The man wears a cassock. He is a priest of the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, a traditionalist society of apostolic life in communion with the Holy See.
It is late January and the priest is giving a conference to the small far-right group Dextra. According to him, “the Church is trying to demolish the uncompromising Catholics, as it did in the time of Maurras”. He is referring to the Action française crisis. Back in the 1920s, Charles Maurras, a journalist and author, led the fierce monarchist movement Action française. He was an agnostic and a virulent critic of Christianity, describing the four Evangelists as “obscure Jews”. Nevertheless, he believed that the Church was a vital tool for national unity.
