Last year across France an average of one crucifix each day was restored by SOS Calvaires, a flourishing apostolate of young French Catholics committed to safeguarding France’s Christian roadside heritage. For years broken or vandalised crucifixes have scarred the French countryside, sending a discordant and inaccurate message at a time when French Catholic baptisms were actually rising. Having worked as a teacher in a Catholic state school in East London, and now working part-time for the Catholic Herald, I was intrigued to see this youthful crucifix repair movement in action.
The discomfort of a 30-hour bus ride from Malaga in Spain, where I am occasionally based, to northern France to attend my first SOS Calvaires event added to the sense of going on a pilgrimage. Upon arriving, I met Jeanne Cumet, SOS Calvaires’ communications director. She was also heading up the event that had drawn me, along with various religious and hundreds of laypeople: the placement of two new 10-foot-tall crucifixes.
One crucifix would be carried as part of a five-km procession and placed in the abbey grounds of Mont-Saint-Michel, the famous island topped by an abbey looking over the surrounding bay. The other would be placed nearby in the grounds of the priory of Ardevon.
“It is action,” Cumet says of what they are doing. “Erecting or restoring large crucifixes requires physical strength, as they are heavy. Yet, there is also a moral strength required – to be bold enough to undertake something that isn’t being done, and often in a public space, where it might face scrutiny.” She believes that this pro-active approach addresses what young people are seeking: challenge; with Church, faith and belief in God being manifest in challenging actions.
SOS Calvaires was founded in 1987 in a small town in the Pays de la Loire region of northern France. Initially established to maintain roadside crucifixes (calvaires in French) and other religious symbols, in 2014 the carpenter who had previously helped restore many of the crucifixes took over, while the organisation began attracting younger members. In 2020, when the current president Julien Le Page took the reins, the association decided to go even further and set itself a challenge: to restore or build a roadside crucifix each month.
Three years later, they are averaging more than one per day and have 65 regional affiliate groups across the country. Members are noticeably young – most being in their 20s – and with a large cohort of teenage siblings and friends attending events as potential future successors of this energetic apostolate.
Attending an SOS Calvaires event is undeniably a French affair, and one that is responding to a very French problem: the maintenance of thousands of roadside crucifixes across a country which has at least in theory banned them. The 1905 law on the separation of church and state prohibits the display of religious symbols on public land.
I asked Cumet about the state of the Church in France, whether the work of the Calvaries is a physical symbol of restorative spiritual and pastoral work that needs to be done in the wake of the sex abuse scandal that hit France hard. She acknowledged that, like many other European countries, the Church in France is in decline: “We need more priests; there are not enough men going to seminary. We also need more young people; there are not enough young people active in the life of the Church.”
The group certainly seems to be addressing the latter problem. Volunteers come to the group from across the world, and often embrace wearing berets and gilets – sleeveless jackets – as an unofficial uniform. And the organisation’s reach is international too now.
“This summer, we went to Ireland to erect Celtic Crosses,” Cumet says. “We wanted to support Catholics there because we are aware that the abuse crisis was a very difficult experience for them, and the Church needs assistance. We placed the crosses at five important Irish sites. We are human, and we need tangible examples of our Church and our God.”
Alexandre Caillé, general director of the apostolate, points to the paradox of increased international interest in the group at a time when church numbers are tumbling. “Of course, it will look very different depending on the culture,” he says. “But the essence is the same, building a cross to share Christ with the world and bringing people together to do it.”
The success of the Calvaries movement is at odds with France’s increasingly secular creep and its attitude towards its Christian heritage. France has a depressing recent history of church vandalism. In 2022, more than 800 incidents of anti-Christian incidents were reported, many involving damage to Church property, though that does mark a drop since 2019, where 996 events were reported. Perhaps French Catholics are standing up; perhaps SOS Calvaires is a call to arms – or rather, a call to protection. Cumet, however, does not view her group as vigilantes: “Due to the law, we are only permitted to restore calvaires on public ground, not to build. On private land we can of course build, and we are often asked to.”
The group wields an impressive catalogue of options, with landowners able to choose from 13-foot-tall crucifixes to two-foot-tall statues of Our Lady.
Alongside this surprising movement, France boasts another religious phenomenon: it has the highest Latin Mass attendance per Catholic in the world. This perhaps influences SOS Calvaires, which appears to have a traditionalist leaning. But it is not militant or overtly right-wing. In the advertisement for the event I attended, it stated that the Mass will be in the ordinary form, and Cumet prefers to stay out of the liturgical wars.
“We try to create unity,” she says. “Of course, we know that you have the Latin Mass group and the Novus Ordo group but these groups cause division in the Church. Here we want everybody, not just traditional Catholics and not even just Catholics. We want to show people who Jesus is and what the cross represents, and for that, we want everybody.”
Cumet explains to me that the group is fundamentally evangelical, embracing a very practical form of evangelism. Rather than presenting an argument or a leaflet, it comes back to her original summarisation of the group: “It is about an action and action leads to reaction from those around us.” Another point she emphasises is that the group is preserving a universal national heritage. “It is everybody’s heritage. Yes, it is a Christian heritage, that is a fact, but it is all of our [French] history. If you destroy your heritage, you have no history.”
What seems certain is that the organisation is growing at a time when vocations are in crisis and church attendance levels in Europe are dropping alarmingly. “Since I joined last year, we have doubled in size and it is showing no signs of slowing down,” says Cumet.
The physicality and dedication of SOS Calvaires arguably holds up a mirror to the efforts – or lack thereof – of other Catholics living in the West. Increasingly within the Church, we are encouraged to fast in the most palatable way, to pray when convenient and to go on pilgrimage when sunny. But if we come to Christianity looking for an easier and softer way to live our lives, 21st-century secular modes of living win on every count. If faith is easy, it is less valuable.
The moral relativism of a secular world affords comfortable living on a scale that Christianity can never and should never compete with. SOS Calvaires is a challenge to express one’s faith in action, and a difficult action at that, but that is where its success lies.
“If we don’t see the cross, we don’t think about God,” Cumet says. “Seeing crosses is certainly very helpful for French people, so we believe it will be helpful for everyone.”
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