Resurrecting the Church: Catholicism as European Cultural History

Found in center of Paris’ Latin Quarter, the Collège des Bernardins was an unremarkable municipal building at the end of the 1990s.  A thirteenth century Cistercian college, it had been expropriated by the French state in 1789. In 2000, the late, charismatic archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, negotiated to purchase the building back from the city. The French Catholic Church now uses the space to host contemporary art exhibitions and intellectual debates. It is a project, the Church claims, of renaissance, of bringing back to life a space and an idea quietly buried beneath the city for centuries, awaiting resurrection.

In this paper, I explore the implications of this notion of renaissance. At the Collège, the Church is making a significant intellectual and financial investment in a “cultural” project devoted to rituals of art viewing, rather than those of mass or the sacraments. The building, they claim, is now serving the purpose for which it was originally intended. As this conference’s theme insists, however, all resurrections involve transformations. Through the Collège, I argue, the French Archdiocese is contributing to important shifts in Catholic practices today. It is also producing important shifts in those practices and symbols deemed “secular” or “cultural” today. At a moment when the European project appears troubled, the Catholic Church is offering an alternative message of unity in and to Europe, arguing that Catholicism, rather than a particular religion, is in fact the true source of European culture and history.