Reassessing Ronchamp: Pius XII and the Postwar Inquisition

1.3 Pius XII, The Holy Office, and the Postwar Inquisition

The Postwar Resurgence of the Vatican

When Le Corbusier first visited Ronchamp in the spring of 1950, a major confrontation was brewing between the Dominican Order and the Catholic hierarchy. During the first years after the war, the Dominican Sacred Art movement, headed by Pierre 'Marie-Alain' Couturier (1897-1954) Raymond ‘Pie’ Régamey (1900-1996) in Paris, had publicly challenged and at times openly flouted Roman Catholic Canon law. Their words and actions were thus soon brought under the scrutiny of the Vatican. In the months and years that followed, Pius XII and the Holy Office in Rome attempted to bring the Dominicans in line through the use of covert surveillance and official sanctions, but their insubordination continued. In the end, this ideological struggle led to severe condemnations of the Dominican Order in France. It also formed the implicit foundation of the discourse about the Chapel of Ronchamp in ways that have never been detected. It is important to understand how this occurred.

Roman criticism of the French Dominicans rose in step with the Vatican’s postwar political power. The Holy Office first responded to the Dominican Sacred Art movement in February of 1947 by denouncing deformed or grotesque representations of Christ's crucifixion.?

One month later, the French Dominican priest Pierre Henri-Marie Féret (1904-1992) was sanctioned for excessively liberal teachings at the convent of Saulchoir,?where both Couturier and Régamey had been educated. But these early reprisals appear to have been isolated events, probably because the Vatican was then immersed in more urgent problems, including the assassination of Catholic priests?and the threat of Communist takeover on the Italian peninsula.

However, the political scene in Italy transformed shortly thereafter, in May 1947, when Christian Democrats, supported by US military and economic aid, forced Communists and Socialists out of the government, thereby dissipating the principal opposition to Vatican authority.?One year later, when Christian Democratic leader Alcide De Gasperi—a former Vatican employee with ties to the Roman Curia—was elected prime minister by majority vote, the threat of Communist takeover had all but disappeared.?

In November of 1947, amid the context of this new political climate, Pius XII delivered the encyclical Mediator Dei,?the first of several official addresses to include criticism of Dominican reforms.?In March of the following year, increasing Vatican conservatism led to public denunciations of leading members of the French hierarchy who had challenged the Pope’s authority.?Then, in June, less than two months after the ascendancy of the Italian Christian Democrats and a concomitant rise of Vatican power, the social theologian Jacques Maritain, whose writings had served as a manifesto of wartime resistance,?resigned from his position as French ambassador to the Holy See.?Under pressure from conservative French bishops, Maritain also resigned from the committee in support of the Basilica at La Sainte-Baume, headed by Couturier.?One by one, the political advantages of a wartime resisters began to fade away.

The onset of the Cold War had, by contrast, enhanced Pius XII's political prestige,?and he used his heightened international status to exert pressure upon all political factions opposed to Catholic power. His central concern was communism, which the pope redressed with a special decree on 13 July 1949 that excommunicated any Catholic “who knowingly and freely defends or spreads the materialist and anti-Christian doctrine of communism.”?

These words were a direct response to recent events in Eastern Europe;?they were also an indirect rebuff of French efforts toward a more 'social' Catholicism, most persuasively expressed by Dominican writers like Dominique ‘Marcel Marie’ Chenu (1895-1990) and Yves Congar (1904-1995), whose nouvelle théologie embraced class struggle as a necessary component of Christian liberation.?The Pope's decree thus threatened two of the most influential theologians in postwar France, who, like Couturier and Régamey, had emerged from the Dominican school at Saulchoir.

By the spring of 1950, when Le Corbusier accepted the commission at Ronchamp,?the authority of his Dominican patrons was under siege: their doctrines were being attacked; their chief theologians were threatened with excommunication; and after the Sainte-Baume affair, their Sacred Art movement led by Couturier and Régamey was under close surveillance by the Holy Office—and the situation would only get worse.

Dominican Art and Doctrinal Error

In the summer of 1950, as Le Corbusier’s first designs for Ronchamp began to take their definitive form,?the Dominicans inaugurated the first work of 'modern' sacred architecture, the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grace at Assy.?The liturgical art for the church had been commissioned to prominent members of the French avant-garde, including the atheist Germaine Richier, the agnostic Marc Chagall,?and the Communist and anticlericalist Fernand Léger.?

Several features of the program again flouted Vatican doctrine: Richier’s crucifix typified the grotesque depiction of Christ that had been condemned by the Holy Office as "an offense to the doctrine and the dignity of worship", and the table-like altar, modeled after early Christian precedents, openly defied condemnations set forth by Pius XII in his recent encyclical, Mediator Dei.

Eight days after the inauguration, Pius XII responded with his encyclical Humani generis, which spelled out the rules of future engagement in no uncertain terms. Priests who were "desirous of novelty" and "presumptive enough to question theological methods," he wrote,?were referred back to the Code of Canon Law, and reminded of the price of doctrinal error:

“It is incumbent to flee all those errors which more or less approach heresy, and accordingly ‘to keep also the constitutions and decrees by which such evil opinions are proscribed and forbidden by the Holy See’.”

True to his juridical training, Pius recited Canon Law whenever church doctrine was at stake. He also disarmed all attempts to question his judgment, including the Dominican tradition of democratic predication, by first asserting that only the Roman Catholic Church could provide a "living Teaching Authority" in matters of dogma. Pius thus insisted that the content of his encyclical was closed to "discussion among theologians."?Church historians would later characterize these assertions as evidence of the Pope’s "creeping infallibility," due to the almost unlimited power that they granted the Roman pontiff.?

Pius XII’s next encyclical, Menti Nostrae, delivered in September of 1950, applied a similar set of parameters to sacred art. Within this oration, Pius lamented the presence of priests "infected" by a contagion of "errors," who had commissioned "monstrosities of art that pretend to call themselves Christian."?Such men, he claimed, had allowed themselves to be "carried away by the mania of novelty."?The solution to this problem in his mind was clear: "the future priest," he insisted,

“must learn to give filial and sincere obedience to his superiors, in order to always be ready, later on, to obey his Bishop docilely, in accordance with the teaching of the invincible Athlete of Christ, Ignatius of Antioch: ‘Obey ye all the bishop as Jesus Christ obeyed the Father’.”

With these words—"Obey ye all the bishop"—Pius insisted upon a form of ecclesiastical submission that members of the Christian resistance had repeatedly refused to obey, both during and after the war. His encyclical thus appeared on a political level as an attempt to redress the problems of postwar Catholic authority: the trend toward novelty, relativism, and insubordination must, he claimed, defer to the authority of the diocesan Bishop and the Holy See.

In making these assertions, Pius had also taken a stand that was diametrically opposed to recent efforts of the Dominicans. In Chenu's theology, for example, dogma had been described as subject to historical change and therefore open to argumentation;?and in Couturier's personal philosophy of sacred art, novelty was desirable, an essential component of creative freedom that expressed the historical development of humanity.?Such Dominican philosophies thus inevitably drew the critical attention of Rome: Chenu had been barred from teaching and had his teachings placed on the papal index during the war,?and Couturier's position was also increasingly tenuous.

In the months that followed, Couturier publicly conformed. Following diocesan regulations, Le Corbusier's designs for the Chapel at Ronchamp were twice subjected to the liturgical review of Lucien Ledeur, Secretary of the Diocesan Committee,?and shortly thereafter, a model of the Chapel was brought before Archbishop Dubourg for official review.?

Despite such formalities, however, the architect had already been told privately that he would be free to do what he wished —encouraged, in other words, to pursue the "mania of novelty" that the Pope so despised.

This tactful duplicity, in which Couturier gave the public appearance of conformity while privately seeking his own aims, was soon brought to light. In January 1951, just as the Chapel of Ronchamp was being submitted to the Diocesan Committee of Besan?on for official approval,?a group of antimodernist French Catholics—including Monsignor Marmottin, an ardent Pétainist?who had been targeted by Bidault’s purge committee for demission —staged a protest against the Dominican movement.?

The ostensible focus of the protest was Richier’s crucifix, which Couturier had included as a full-page spread in a recent edition of L’Art sacré;?but deep political resentments also lingered beneath the surface. Art and architecture had become symbols of rival ideologies.

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Holy Office and the Inquisition

The antimodernist faction of the French hierarchy quickly brought Richier’s crucifix to the attention of Monsignor Alfredo Ottaviani (1890-1979), inquisitorial assessor at the Holy Office,?who would thereafter work tirelessly, with the help of his colleague Monsignor Celso Costantini, against the Dominican Sacred Art movement. Their protest set in motion a bitter war of words that persisted throughout the Ronchamp commission.

Inquisitorial powers were also turned at this time against the worker-priest movement, which the Dominicans had commenced during the war, sending young Catholic seminarists into Nazi work camps to share their doctrine of salvation.?During the postwar Liberation, as more young priests were sent into the industrial sector of French society in an effort to spread the Christian faith among the working class, the movement had steadily grown.?But the Vatican viewed these developments with great alarm, and quickly forced the French episcopacy to gather these young priests, much like their counterparts at L’Art sacré, under the authority of diocesan bishops.?Both Pius XII and his secretary of ordinary affairs, Monsignor Giovanni Montini (the future Pope Paul VI), would later remark that they saw these parallel Dominican developments, involving both the ministry and sacred art, as a "general line of errors."?

In the two years that followed the protest of the Richier crucifix, from June 1951 to July 1953, a tense ideological struggle was waged between the Vatican and the Dominican Sacred Art movement , in which the rival factions defined their respective aims and pronounced their grievances in print: members of the Holy Office voiced authoritative opinions within its official, international journal, the Osservatore Romano; while Couturier and Régamey responded within the pages of the Dominican publication L’Art sacré.

It began in the summer of 1951, when Cardinal Costantini launched an attack on the Dominicans' artistic program that was widely disseminated in both Italian and French.?Father Couturier responded in the next edition of L’Art sacré with a smug retort:

?“In the future, it will be recalled that the renewal of Christian art took place on 20 January 1951, when a Diocesan Committee for Sacred Art, presided by the Archbishop and his Auxiliary, reviewed and unanimously approved seventeen sketches by Fernand Léger, the layout of a large mosaic by [Jean René] Bazaine, and Le Corbusier's plans for a church at Ronchamp. When such projects, representing what is purest and strongest in the living arts, can be accepted by high ecclesiastical authority, we can be sure that something has changed in the Church of France.”

In response to Costantini's prior attack, the Dominican presented a group of the most controversial members of the French avant-garde, united under the cause of Gallican Christianity, and working loyally under the Diocesan Committee, the Archbishop, and Canon Law. Couturier's remarks within this heavily scrutinized context were also the first public recognition of Le Corbusier's commission—a disclosure that would have deeply troubled Vatican authorities. He evidently relished controversy.

And so it went over the course of two years: while Le Corbusier pursued his creative process in near complete freedom and Vatican authorities grew increasingly incensed, the editors of L’Art sacré held steadfast by their principles, engaged with unabashed confidence in a trenchant ideological struggle that they could not possibly win.

Vatican Spies and Official Sanctions

Pius XII and the Holy Office had two distinct advantages in this war on words. First, throughout the struggles of the Second World War, Pius had cultivated a highly disciplined papal entourage characterized by secrecy, allegiance, and mastery of modern of techniques of cryptography and espionage,?which were soon turned upon the Dominicans. Information was thus repeatedly extracted from the nuncio, Monsignor Marella, from several French ecclesiastical moles, from provincial bishops with diocesan authority, and from well-placed spies in significant locations. A victim of the latter technique described this aspect of Vatican policy as a true police system, which was as extensive as it was effective, and strategically aimed at individuals whom the Holy Office deemed "dangerous."?Couturier, Régamey, and their former colleagues at Saulchoir were thus under heavy surveillance.

Secondly, the Vatican had ultimate authority over the Dominican Order and its members, and could impose this authority through punitive sanctions when needed. Throughout the critical period of this ideological struggle—which corresponds almost exactly to the duration of Le Corbusier's design work for Ronchamp—sanctions thus fell with increasing frequency and severity. The discipline of the worker-priests in the summer of 1951, mentioned above, was the first such instance, followed by many others: Couturier was sanctioned for his promotion of the Chapel at Vence in January 1952;?the published works of theologian Yves Congar, who had criticized Church hierarchy, were banned shortly thereafter;?and the worker-priests were finally recalled from active duty in the following year, in September of 1953.?

One week later, the construction of the Chapel at Ronchamp broke ground just as the worst Papal repressions commenced.?Later that same month, the Vatican ordered a partial termination of the worker-priest movement;?and then in October, Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo (1877-1970), Secretary of the Holy Office, railed against the "spirit of insubordination and indiscipline toward official authority" that he had seen in certain religious orders.?Shortly thereafter, the aged Cardinal Feltin—who had been the first among all French bishops to profess loyalty to Vichy —lambasted former members of the French Catholic Resistance, who had learned from the BBC that they "must not obey the demands of established authority, but follow their own conscience," a practice that had taught them only to "doubt so strongly the Holy Father."?The tables had turned; the rule of renegade priests was over.

Two days later the convocations began: three Dominicans, including Father Boisselot, publishing director in charge of the journal L’Art sacré, were summoned to Rome by the Holy Office.?The following week, the three French Cardinals Feltin, Liénart, Gerlier were brought before Pius XII in order to surrender the "general line" of doctrinal errors to Vatican authority.

Back in France, the dénouement befell: on 19 January 1954, the worker-priests were formally disbanded, and informed by the French episcopacy that their Christian faith should "lead them to submission."?Father Chenu, informed of the event in advance, privately penned a cogent response: "when I made a vow of obedience," he wrote,

“it was for a defined purpose… Obedience is not an empty vessel, a 'voluntary' imperative, in which one first obeys, and then sees what happens.”

He and his confrères subsequently refused to submit. Two weeks later, members of the movement published their final manifesto in the Parisian press, in blatant rebellion against Vatican authority. The text condemned the injustices of capitalism and the bourgeois religion said to support it. The Church hierarchy, the authors claimed, had become "habituated to place religion in the service of their own interests, and the prejudices of class."

The Vatican received word of their manifesto on February 4, 1954. The severity of the Roman Curia’s response was unprecedented: Dominican insubordination had become so widespread that the Holy Office threatened to suppress the independence of the Order by abolishing their historical right to elect their own provincial leaders through democratic processes,?and to curtail their theological independence by closing their teaching seminaries. These decisions had been made under the pressure of a dominant current of the both the French and Roman hierarchy who were adamantly opposed to the revolutionary developments in Gallican Catholicism.?

Couturier was immediately notified that the journal L’Art sacré was, from that day forward, suspended from publication and formally suppressed by a Roman interdict.?However, the Dominican had shrewdly foreseen during the Sainte-Baume affair in the autumn of 1953 that his actions might bring official sanctions against the publication, so he had moved it from a production facility that had close ties with the Vatican into a secular press, La Tour-Maubourg, over which Rome had no authority. The journal was thus saved from official termination.?

Two days later, the Head of the Dominican Order was sent to Paris to oversee a "grand purge" of Catholic dissenters.?Provincial leaders in Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse received their demission,?and five preeminent members of the Order were suspended, exiled from Paris, and forbidden to publish: Fathers Chenu and Congar, the preeminent French theologians; Father Féret, the chair of the Catholic Institute in Paris; Father Boisselot, the director of L’Art sacré; and Father Couturier, its most outspoken theorist.?All of them had been educated and remained associated with the Dominican teaching school at Saulchoir,?which the Holy Office had evidently targeted as a center of insubordination. The leaders of both the worker-priest and sacred art movements were removed from their posts, and their collective efforts were condemned as an example of "disobedience to the Holy Office and to the Hierarchy."

The news of Couturier's own demission evidently took the Dominican by surprise. While recovering from a chronic illness in a Parisian hospital, he received word of his pending exile, fell into an asthmatic fit and died at the age of 56.?A second wave of condemnations soon removed Régamey from the editorial staff of L’Art sacré.?Struck by the resurgent power of a postwar inquisition, the leaders of the Dominican Sacred Art movement fell silent.

It has been frequently claimed that Couturier died without having heard the news of these Dominican condemnations. However, the condemnations took place within his monastery and directly involved his colleagues, who then immediately launched a communal response in which word was quickly disseminated to all those affected. This suggests that Couturier would very likely have been informed. There is evidence of this transmission in a letter that Le Corbusier wrote to his mistress two years later, in which the architect stated that Couturier "died very suddenly in the hospital […] following the violent shock he received when Rome took her dramatic decisions against the 'worker priests'.”

Archbishop Dubourg also died suddenly in the tense days that followed the suppression of the worker-priests. Dubourg was one of three French bishops who knew of the pending suppressions, and had been in close contact with the Vatican authorities, who had just promoted him to ‘Assistant to the Pontifical Throne.’?Dubourg had written a few months before that “a Bishop must live for the Church and be ready to die for it”. Father Saurez, another high-ranking ecclesiastic who had served the Vatican’s cause, also died suddenly in similar circumstances in 1954. Both were involved in the suppression of the worker-priests, a coincidence that seems to merit further investigation.

? Dunlap, Richard Stockton (2014) Reassessing Ronchamp: the historical context, architectural discourse and design development of Le Corbusier's Chapel Notre Dame-du-Haut. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science

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