Archbishop under attack for the grave sin of running a successful diocese

Toulon: Monsignor Rey soon to be condemned by Rome because his Diocese is functioning?

Paix Liturgique dedicates an investigation to the situation in Toulon, where ordinations have been blocked for two years now - and to the situation of Monsignor Rey, who is engaged in a tug-of-war with the Roman authorities... who reproach him, in short, for the fact that his Diocese works, attracts vocations and has numerous parishes, uniting the last living forces of the Church, traditionalists and charismatics.

"Any day now, lightning will strike Bishop Dominique Rey, whom the Pope should probably deprive of his episcopal faculties by appointing a coadjutor with "special powers".  He is guilty, gravely guilty, of having turned his Diocese into a crossroads for traditional and charismatic currents, a haven for young non-conformist priests, with a flourishing seminary, a young clergy of 250 active priests, parish priests and vicars for all the steeples.  It is unbearable!  At the end of a merciless hunt led by Rome, the nuncio, the Bishops and the confraternity, the horns are ready to sound the kill.  Perhaps a little too quickly.  The Bishop of Fréjus-Toulon is not yet dead.

A priest of the John Paul II generation

Dominique Rey was born in 1952 in Saint-Étienne, into a Catholic family of seven children (one of his sisters held a senior position with the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny).  He holds a master's degree in political economy and a doctorate in tax economics.  In 1975 and 1976, he worked for the Chadian Ministry of Finance.  There he discovered the fiery Pentecostalism of pastor Jacques Giraud (as a Bishop, he became interested in the "megachurch" of Californian Baptist Rick Warren).  In Paris, when he became a tax inspector at the Ministry of Finance, he discovered the Emmanuel community, founded in 1972, of which he became a first-generation member.

He decided to become a seminarian for the Diocese of Paris, but not in the then very progressive seminary of NNSS Marty and Gilson, but in a community hosted by the Dominicans on rue du Faubourg-St-Honoré.  He was ordained in 1984, as a member of Emmanuel, for the Diocese of Paris, which had become Portuguese.  Appointed to the Lycée Stanislas, whose chaplaincy was entrusted to the Emmanuel at the time, he then became superior of the chaplains at Paray-le-Monial, the hub of the Community's overflowing activities, and a priest accompanying its seminarians.  In 1995, he returned to Paris and was appointed parish priest of the large parish of La Trinité in Paris, entrusted to the Emmanuel, whose large congregation is comparable in age and family size to that of traditionalist churches.  He revitalised the liturgical assemblies - in a rather traditional sense - and the numerous activities, notably the famous "Christian café" in the heart of Pigalle.

In 2000, the nuncio Baldelli, keen to protect the Castille seminary, which had been taken over in 1983 by Bishop Joseph Madec, appointed Dominique Rey, aged forty-eight, Bishop of Fréjus-Toulon, with the task of making the major seminary flourish.

 A Bishop who understands the power of tradismatics

"Monsignor Rey, le start-upper of evangelisation", was the headline in Les Jours on 13 June, written by Timothée de Rauglaudre, who explained: "The charismatic Bishop has turned his Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon into a laboratory for American-style re-christianisation against a backdrop of conservative ideas".  In short, he would be the best user of these famous tradismatics, whose stance is analysed as follows by Gaël Brustier in an article for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès (https://www.jean-jaures.org/publication/les-tradismatiques-a-lassaut-du-pouvoir/): "Tradismatics have inherited from the 'tradis' a keen interest in politics and from the 'chachas' a self-assurance that enables them to reach out to others quite easily.  In 2013, tradismatics will appear as the little brothers of the 'John Paul II generation', who gathered at the 1997 WYD, and as the Benedict XVI generation, who gathered in Madrid for the 2011 WYD." Monsignor Rey understands them perfectly: "Monsignor Dominique Rey is in no way a traditionalist.  Let us emphasise that.  A true charismatic, a Bishop of Catholic shock, an outstanding political entrepreneur, he is the spearhead of a French Catholicism that has decided to compromise on nothing.  An intellectual, a missionary and an organiser, as well as a fine politician, he sensed and felt, probably better than anyone else in the French episcopate, the strength and power represented by a widespread and diffuse spirit: the tradismatic spirit...".

A Bishop of "Catholic reconquest", said Le Point on 3 November 2017, who wants to implant the Church by evangelising in discotheques and on sports fields, while presiding over traditionalist processions in the Muslim neighbourhoods of Toulon.  The magazine Golias, which gives him two dunce's caps in its Trombinoscope, is choking on the fact that its Socio-political Observatory, run by Abbé Louis-Marie Guitton, invited Marion Maréchal to the 2015 edition of the Universités d'été de la Sainte-Baume.  And Golias does not know that Monsignor Rey married the heir to the Orléans family and that he is the chaplain of Catholic families in Gotha who also willingly support tradismatics.

Le Point spoke to one of his collaborators - Abbé de Boisgelin, whose ancestors fought in the Crusades - who praised him, but with nuances, as a clergyman: "When you collaborate with him, you have to accept the poverty of spirit that consists in changing your ideas when he changes them.  [...] In our Diocese, there is a welcome for all ways of living one's faith, no one is left on the sidelines, it's rich, even if it sometimes upsets."

The Bishop took risks, including financial ones, opening the doors wide, welcoming some twenty new communities, Brazilian charismatics, but also traditionalists such as the Missionaries of Divine Mercy, whose church of Saint-François de Paule became the seat of a traditional personal parish in the centre of old Toulon, i.e. the Muslim town, a community dedicated to the evangelisation of Muslims.

The Bishop has no qualms about "shopping around" in Latin American communities, but also in traditional communities, so much so that the number of his seminarians in the Castille seminary, a wine-growing estate near Toulon, where jeans and cassocks rub shoulders, but also placed in communities outside the seminary, has exceeded ninety in some years.

Summorum Pontificum, in 2007, was very well received in Fréjus-Toulon.  It is even the only Diocese in France where the motu proprio was truly applied, i.e. where parish priests had complete freedom to say the traditional Mass, at the request of "stable groups", without referring to the Bishop, and of course to Rome.  That was before synodality...

Benedict XVI could have transferred Archbishop Rey to a larger Diocese to extend his experience, or even made him a Cardinal.  Instead, in 2008, he simply appointed Marc Aillet, Vicar General of Fréjus-Toulon and a member of the Communauté Saint-Martin, at the urging of Monsignor Rey, Bishop of Bayonne.

Putting Bergoglionism to the test

The climate in the Church changed, as we know, from 2013 onwards.  It was a sort of climatic chill for prosperous Dioceses, communities and seminaries, which were now labelled "clerical", dangerous places to be suppressed.

In Albenga, Italy, the Bishop was forced to resign by the appointment of a coadjutor who was given full powers to govern the Diocese.  To the very classic Bishop of San Luis, Argentina ("Did you say Amoris laetitia?  I have not heard of it, nothing is changed in my house"), the Pope asked for his resignation.  The Bishop of Ciudad del Este, in Paraguay, has been dismissed, and his flourishing seminary, St Joseph's, has been brought back into line.  In San Rafael, Argentina, another seminary was closed for being too "rigid".

As a result, the most critical of Bishop Rey's French confreres felt they had wings.  The "questions" sent by the Roman congregations to the Bishop multiplied, because with such a large number of young communities, there is bound to be room for crises and malfunctions.  On 11 January 2020, for the first time since the era of John Paul II, a determined progressive, Monsignor Celestino Migliore, was appointed Nuncio to France.  On 3 May 2020, the Bishop was stabbed in the face by a public letter sent by Abbé Arnaud Adrien, former Rector of the Castille Seminary - the very opposite of a leftist, but one who gets hives from traditionalism, addressed to the deans, the members of the presbyteral council, the canons, Monsignor Aveline, the metropolitan, Monsignor Beau, in charge of seminaries at the Bishops’ Conference, a letter in other words destined to be circulated in the Bishoprics of France and the dicasteries of the Roman Curia. The letter made a single accusation: Monsignor Rey was guilty of giving his seminary "an increasingly traditionalist line" without consulting the Vicars General.  The proof: the dismissal of Abbé Mallard, a very "open" professor of fundamental theology, by Abbé Dubrulle, of the Missionaries of Mercy, who had been appointed prefect of studies at La Castille.

From then on, events were to unfold rapidly, particularly in the context of the Comité de Salut Public (Public Safety Committee), which was preparing and then publishing Traditionis custodes, intended to destroy supporters of the traditional liturgy.  Monsignor Rey had to explain himself before a kind of tribunal presided over by Cardinal Stella, then all-powerful Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, and before the main members of his Congregation, in particular Monsignor Mercier, Secretary of the Congregation, and the very formidable Louis Menvielle, member of the Institut Notre Dame de Vie.  This was followed, still in 2020, by a "friendly visit" from the future Cardinal Aveline, Archbishop of Marseille and Metropolitan of Fréjus-Toulon, at the instigation of the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal Ouellet and Jean-Marc Aveline, an old friend of Monsignor Rey, who tried to mediate, inspiring a "charter" that would make it easier to discern the vocations that arose.

But Rome, which had decided to kill him, was astonished by the Bishop's resistance.  He did not resign like his peers in Albenga and San Luis, spoke of "dialogue" with the CEF and Rome, and dropped a few sandbags to raise his airship.

Then came the astonishing news that Cardinal Ouellet was banning the ordinations that Bishop Rey was due to perform in June 2022.  As with the Traditionis custodes offensive, the conservative Catholic world was moved: "Rome's unprecedented decision to 'suspend' the priestly ordinations that were to have been celebrated on 26 June by Monsignor Rey is causing turmoil in the Catholic Church", wrote Jean-Marie Guénois in Le Figaro on 3 June 2022.  "In the memory of theologians and Bishops, we have never seen such a sanction in the Catholic Church.  The suspension - ordered by Rome - of priestly ordinations planned for 26 June in the Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon must be called a sanction.  In other words, a brutal means of imposing a message from Rome on the local Bishop, Monsignor Dominique Rey, 69, who has been in charge of the Diocese for twenty-two years.  Compliant newspapers such as La Vie, clearly tipped off by Ouellet's offices, were meanwhile listing "dysfunctions".  The main one being "the restructuring of the seminary and the diocesan welcome policy".  Too much room for tradis.

And on 13 February 2023, a canonical visit began, a real one this time, made to kill, under the guidance of the Congregation for Bishops, with two visitors, the most hostile ever to the local Bishop, Monsignor Antoine Hérouard, former secretary general of the CEF, former rector of the French seminary in Rome, former apostolic delegate for the sanctuary of Lourdes (from whom the "clerical" Monsignor Brouwet had to be removed), recently appointed Archbishop of Dijon, and Monsignor Joël Mercier, former Secretary of the Dicastery for the Clergy, who knew the Rey dossier admirably well. No one doubted that the report that would be drawn up would, at the very least, make Monsignor Rey a puppet Bishop with no powers.  Since he decidedly did not want to resign.

 An "ecclesiastical scandal

"The word 'ecclesiastical scandal' is a strong one," thundered Jean-Marie Guénois in the above-mentioned article, "but it is justified.  How can the Vatican and those who endorsed this decision, which a priori targets the ecclesial options of the Bishop of Fréjus-Toulon, hold hostage ten young seminarians [4 future priests, six future deacons] who are not responsible for the problem?  There are undoubtedly too many priestly ordinations in France...".

And he continued crescendo: "If there are contentious cases among the ten ordained, the Church has every means of withdrawing approval from the ordinands in question.  If there is a problem with the Bishop's management, this issue can be identified and dealt with as such.  But collective punishment in an authoritarian way does not go down well with the French Catholic community.  Even on the left, which does not hold Bishop Rey dear, and which says it is surprised by the "violence" of the procedure.  The authoritarianism deplored by many in the Vatican at the end of Francis' pontificate must not be allowed to create a kind of clerical terror in the Catholic Church at a time when all that is being talked about is synodality!

It has to be said that "left-wing" Catholic thinking has become completely out of step with the expectations of what remains of the Christian people in France.  A questionnaire entitled Synode sur la synodalité (Synod on Synodality) revealed that 92.9% of those questioned expect a priest to dispense the sacraments as a matter of priority, 87.6% are in favour of priestly celibacy, 70% criticise the Church for "not accepting its opinions and keeping the truth to itself for fear of offending", 74% expect it to promote "a bioethical model that ensures full respect for the human person from conception to natural death", 70% expect it to "defend the family in its traditional form".

In short, practising Catholics believe that mainstream ecclesiastical thinking has got it all wrong.  Dominique Rey understood this.  In Les espaces du catholicisme français contemporain (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021) Vincent Herbinet devotes an entire chapter to analysing the Fréjus-Toulon case and its different Bishop.  He spoke of a "fourth way", neither progressive nor fundamentalist, nor even a "third way" like that of Cardinal Lustiger in the 80s and 90s. V. Herbinet, who "hypothesised that a more visible Catholic militancy would henceforth take shape in relation to family, ethical and doctrinal issues", rightly attached decisive importance to the link between classicists and traditionalists and made it the central point of the Rey attempt.

This was the most subversive point of the established ecclesiastical order and therefore the main charge against the Bishop of Fréjus-Toulon: in tune with the current reality of what remains of French Catholicism, Dominique Rey was helping to blur the boundaries between conservative Catholics and traditional Catholics.  For Vincent Herbinet, as for Jean-Marie Guénois, the Rey experiment in Fréjus-Toulon, despite its weaknesses, was a laboratory for the future.

A Bishop who was banking on the future of the Church?  The men of the past, in Rome and in the French episcopate, wanted to make him pay for it.

So one last remark: who could be the impeccable hero who could succeed Dominique Rey?

The faithful who have seen what episcopal appointments have been like for several decades are wondering... and worrying!

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