THEY crowded into Notre Dame and cathedrals throughout France last week for commemoration services for the seven Trappist monks murdered in Algeria. At a time of national mourning, the proudly secular French people turned to their national Catholic Church for consolation.
The key word here is "national". Fewer than 10 per cent of French people attend Mass on any semi regular basis; in many urban working class areas attendance is virtually nonexistent. But for the two thirds of people who still call themselves Catholic when asked by pollsters, the Catholic religion is a part of that ancient French culture and identity to which they are so passionately attached.
"Culturally we're all Catholics," says Father Antoine de Vial, the parish priest of my local church in the 7th district. "Clovis [the first Frankish leader to become a Christian in 496], whose baptism the Pope will come to France to celebrate in September, is part of our heritage. The Catholic kings who made France great are part of our heritage. Even an atheist has to accept that."
This national religion can even encompass agnostic, socialist leaders like the late President Mitterrand. The eulogy at his state funeral was given by the conservative Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger.
There is an obvious tension between a strongly secular state, born out of an anti clerical revolution, and a Catholic church with which the majority of French people still identify as part of their national identity. But it is probably less strong now than at any time since the anticlerical upheavals of the first decade of this century led to religion being banned from schools and other public places.
Since Vatican II the French church has finally learned to coexist with, and even learn from, France's secular culture, says Father Cormac O'Hora, a Passionist priest from Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, who ministers in Champigny, a mainly working class parish in the eastern Paris suburbs.
"It's like the early days of the church, when Christianity was a leaven in society," he says. He likes many of the results of the total segregation of church and state: for example, that civil and religious marriage are completely separate, rather than the confused situation in Ireland where the priest acts as registrar for the State.
There are both negatives and positives. Only around 30 per cent of children in Champigny's state schools make their First Communion and Confirmation. However, a long tradition of lay involvement in a disestablished French church means that much of the preparation of children, as well as of young people for marriage and parents for baptism, is done by lay people.
Another plus is that homilies are usually of a much higher standard in France. This, says Father O'Hora, is probably due to the study of philosophy in second level schools and the greater value put on intellectual attainment in French society.
A large proportion of Father O'Hora's parishioners are Portuguese or West African. Fifteen per cent of its people might turn up for Mass on the year's principal holy days. Around 5 per cent would be weekly Mass goers.
The final collapse of Catholicism as a significant force in French society came in the late 1960s. First, there was the May 1968 revolution", with its powerful message of political, personal and sexual freedom. In its wake - and in direct contradiction to its whole ethic - came Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae ruling on contraception.
The result was that a new generation of highly educated French Catholics revolted against their church. "Tens of thousands of people got the habit of disobeying the church in the most important, secret, intimate area of their lives," says Christian Makarian, religion writer for the magazine Le Point.
"Then they started to ask: if the church teaching is not worth anything in this central, personal world of loving your husband or wife, what is it worth elsewhere? The result was that the church became just another institution, like parliament or the trade unions, and was no longer the unifying spiritual force which governed people's daily lives.
The consequence is that French Catholicism today displays all the a la carte diversity and indifference to church teaching which is the despair of Pope John Paul II. It provides an umbrella for everyone from ultra traditionalists in the Archbishop Lelebvre mould to radical social activists who revere the sacked Bishop of Evreux, Bishop Jacques Gaillot. Increasing numbers of its younger adherents are attracted by the "personal God" preached by the charismatics.
Recent opinion polls have shown that 61 per cent of French people still believe in God and 59 per cent believe Jesus is his son.
However, among French Catholics, only 3 per cent said they would follow the church's rules on sexual matters, and a tiny 1 per cent said they would first of all take into account the church's teaching - compared to 83 per cent who said they would rely first on their conscience - when faced with one of "life's big decisions".
However, there remains an unstructured spiritual hunger which is not being met by the institutional churches. Father de Vial expresses a common French view that in the new "high tech" Europe, which appears unable to see its citizens in other than economic terms, people will demand to be treated as fully rounded human beings with their own individual roots, cultures and values.