Author Archives: Pierre de Lapérusse

At the beginning there was marketing. What a strange idea to organise a summit on global warming in the middle of December in a city of the North! The joke went round the whole of Paris: the Copenhagen summit is a success! The proof? Since the beginning of the summit the temperature in France has gone down by 10 degrees. But the climate counter is worth nothing: if the question of global warming is more complex than it appears, then it does… Read More

In a column published by Le Monde on 28th October 2009, the Swiss theologian Hans Kung violently attacked Pope Benedict’s approach to the Anglicans favourable to Rome. Kung’s main argument was of practical order: “We are speaking of about one million Anglicans and about twenty to thirty bishops. What about the other 76 million?” In clear terms, this approach to a certain kind of Anglican, perhaps too conservative would jeopardize the… Read More

The ecumenical jubilee year of Saint Paul ended on the 29th June 2009. Claude Levi-Strauss died on 31st October last. The question of national identity has resurfaced again. Bad sign. Apparently nothing is more urgent than to define or redefine national identity. The debate has revealed the republican contradictions. As Pierre Nora underlines in “Les Lieux de memoires”: “the Republic was the completed form of nation. In this way she was… Read More

A social tendency in times of crisis, the conspiracy theory is back again in full swing. “Everything is hidden from us, we are told nothing/ the more we learn the less we know/ we are informed about nothing”. Thus sang Jacques Dutronc. Less poetically, Pierre Andre Taguieff defines the plot, conspiracy as being “an explanatory recital which permits all who believe in it, to make sense of whatever happens, especially what never happened,… Read More

The investigation of the memorial case started against Pius XII does not remain in the scope of a column “society”. I will only wish, from a political point of view, that the historians could have a non-restrictive access to the archives. In this case as in other ones, the Church has nothing to be afraid of the truth. The interest in this case is what it reveals what the world as it goes is waiting from us, as Christians. The reproach… Read More