Maritain and Mounier: A Secret Quarrel Over the Future of the Church

The hesitancy of French Catholic intellectuals to engage in public quarrels, and speak ill of their dead, has led to the forgetting of arguments and divergences of great importance to the background of Vatican II. It has been widely assumed that France's two most influential Christian intellectuals of the mid-century, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, worked hand in glove to promote what one historian has called a common “French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World.”* In fact, however, letters and diaries only known after the two principals were dead, have revealed deep differences between the two men at a decisive point in the evolution of modern French intellectual life. Maritain's reservations about the left-wing Catholicism and ecumenism of his younger friends remain quite relevant in our own day. In fact Maritain had, and kept, serious reservations about the new kind of Catholicism which Mounier and his new review Esprit articulated in the early nineteen-thirties but kept them private largely because of the secret danger of a known ecclesiastical condemnation for Esprit.