One of the most noteworthy religious experiments since World War II has been that of the French worker-priests (TIME, Feb. 27, 1950)—young priests who take jobs and live as workers, saying Mass, hearing confessions and carrying on their pastoral functions in their spare time. The long-range aim of the movement: to reach anticlerical French workingmen who have been notoriously easy prey for Communism.
But to many a watchful prelate it has looked as though the worker-priests were more converts than converters. Two of them were arrested in last year's Communist-inspired riots against General Ridgway (TIME, June 23, 1952); others burst into print from time to time with letters to the Communist press criticizing Catholic labor-union policies as not militant enough.
Last week the worker-priest seminary at Limoges announced that its reopening was indefinitely postponed. Simultaneously, the official paper of the diocese of Chartres published a letter sent in July to all archbishops and bishops of France by Cardinal Pizzardo, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities in Rome. The worker-priest experiment, wrote Pizzardo, has "had a negative influence in the formation of young priests and, because of this, any further attempts of this kind are to be discouraged ... As a consequence, this Sacred Congregation absolutely forbids all seminary students in France to engage in any kind of temporary work."
Though only seminarians were so far affected, the 90-odd practicing prêtres-ouvriers in France could see the writing on the wall. A compelling reason for the change in policy was probably the need to conserve France's supply of young priests, which has been dwindling. According to Cardinal Liénart of Lille, the Seminary of Lille had an average of 53 students a year between 1930 and 1949 but has only 32 today; the Seminary of Carcassonne had 112 students in 1900 and has only 34 now; two other French seminaries recently shut down entirely. With seminarians so scarce, and young men so impressionable, the bishops are not for taking any chances.
At a recent gathering of the clergy of Toulouse, peppery, 83-year-old Cardinal Saliège pointed a blunt finger at a group of young priests sitting in the back of the room. "Nous vous avons à l'oeil, mes gaillards [We're keeping an eye on you, my lads]!" he warned them.