It was October 2005, when I was writing the literary column for World 2magazine supplement of World. A small work was to be published entitled My God… why? Short meditations on the Christian faith and the meaning of life. It was an interview with Abbé Pierre by Frédéric Lenoir. I wondered why the press service of Plon publishing had sent it to me, to me who did not hide the fact that I was not baptized, that I had been raised in the most fierce irreligion, that I had eaten the priest since my earliest childhood, in my family and joyfully, and that I had, since my wildest pre-adolescence, gorged myself on anticlerical caricatures ofHara Kiri…Why had this book been sent to me? I was soon to understand.
The ironic curiosity with which I opened the pious work was very quickly rewarded, there was material and I did not deprive myself of it. Following the recent revelations about Abbé Pierre, I said to myself Great, I’m going to bring out my article again. No one will notice anything for the good reason that the article… but let’s get back to My God… why? which I unfortunately did not find in my library. Nor did my article on my computer. Too bad, I remember the essential: the detail that had been enough to ignite my descent into flames. In the introductory portrait that Lenoir made of Abbé Pierre, he mentioned the modest home of the holy man: “a small studio apartment”, he wrote.
The grandson of secular schoolteachers that I am exploded with joy, and the son of a psychoanalyst that I am also rubbed his hands: was there not something revealing in this faulty pleonasm? Slips of the tongue are not the only secret agents of the unconscious. In fact, reading the essay, it appeared to me that Abbé Pierre was nothing more than a walking pleonasm. The nickname he was given at the time, “the poor man’s abbé”, is another, not as faulty as the little studio apartment, but just as much as the physical appearance and the wardrobe of the character whose mythological redundancies Roland Barthes had already pointed out in 1956. Too many signs of sainthood, the divine semiologist warned us, corrupt sainthood. What would he have said upon learning that Abbé Pierre would one day enter the world of santons of Provence?
The priest with the little studio apartment accumulated signs like that, to the point of mystifying his regular interviewer.
Misdirection
Frédéric Lenoir must be amazed to have been so easily fooled. He, a great specialist in the Catholic religion, saw his career prefaced by Paul Ricœur (The Time of Responsibilities1991, collection of interviews with very good people, including Abbé Pierre), Ricœur, whose name Abbé Pierre must now be added to the list of his errors, after Pétain, Mao and Mircea Eliade.
The author must be recognized for My God… why? of having been the first to lift a corner of the cassock of the founder of Emmaüs. A smokescreen operation brilliantly completed by the television interview of Marc-Olivier Fogiel. The insignificant repentance managing to stifle what so many people knew: in the Vatican since 1959, in the brothels of France and Navarre since forever, in the flesh of women and children since their assault, their rape. Lenoir and Fogiel must be amazed to find themselves thus the useful idiots of the Church of Rome. It is true that the professions of hagiographer and television presenter are not the same as those of journalist, investigator, biographer.
To return to my article from 2005, barely sent to the newspaper, I no longer know who informed me of the fact that Frédéric Lenoir was directing The World of Religions. The detail had completely escaped me. How naive I was! So that was why Plon had sent me his book: between people of the same Worldthey were counting on me… Well no. Not from the same world. But from then on, courageous but not foolhardy, I packed up my article. I will end up finding it again.
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