20

The movement of “catholic literary revival” which appeared in France in the early 1910’s is the result of the encounter between a group of inheritors whose reproduction is disturbed in the realm of major social changes, and of an institution, the Catholic Church, which has lost part of its force as a consequence of numerous crisis and which seeks new ways for spreading its ideology. For these young catholic writers, putting their thought and their works to serve on the Church means to insert their own individual fate in the collective fate of the institution. This claim of a “catholic revival” creates an identity frame. In fact, linking catholic art to Tradition dissimulates the invention of a new literary position, that of the “Catholic writer,” at at the very moment when the Catholic religion is moving from the public to the private sphere.