Word: french
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...Alive, perhaps, but just hanging on. Though some 75 % of French citizens are baptized, regular mass attendance is edging below 10%. Even Church weddings have dropped, from 147,000 in 1990 to 89,000 in 2006. Indeed, the most notable new religious energy in the country is increasingly coming from a growing Muslim community...
...wasn't always this way. French Catholicism is known as the "eldest daughter" of the Church, for having pledged allegiance to Rome in the Second Century; and in the 14th century, the southern town of Avignon even served as the temporary home to the papacy. But France is also where modern anti-clericalism became ascendant with the 1789 Revolution, which eventually led to the thick black line separating church and state known as laïcité, and the arrival of humanist reason as the guiding principle in contemporary culture...
...French President Nicolas Sarkozy has poked at this spiritual status quo, using a visit to Rome's Basilica of St. John Lateran to call for a "positive" conception of laïcité, which would also encourage public expressions of faith. Some critics, however, say that the twice-divorced Sarkozy sees the symbolic and historic identification with Christianity as a way to respond to the growing assertiveness of French Muslims...
...ground. Georges Kouakou, 50, remembers the Western missionaries when he was growing up poor in his native Ivory Coast. Having emigrated to France, Kouakou, a computer engineer and father of three, regularly attends mass at Notre Dame des Victoires church in central Paris. The pastor to the mostly native French parishioners there happens to be from the Congo. "There's been an evolution," Kouakou says. "Europeans went to evangelize Africans; today it's the reverse, and Africans are now evangelizing. These are the seeds that God planted...
...Optimists like Kouakou, and Cardinal Vingt-Trois, may see another hopeful seed in the arrival in the Enlightenment's birthplace of the Enlightenment of a Pope committed to reconciling faith and reason. Others may say the funeral on French Catholicism has already begun...