"The worker-priest movement was a novel experiment by the Catholic Church in France. (Peter Collins SJ a staff researcher at Uniya reflects on an important but short-lived initiative..) IN 1944 the first worker-priest missions were set up in Paris and then in Lyons and Marseille. Sharing the grime and toil of an often oppressed social class was a frustrating mission but gradually the barriers between priests and workers broke down."

"This sometimes happened in surprising ways. One priest sacked in front of the workers had a fellow worker come up to him and say: 'You can stay with me. Now you are one of us'."

"In 1944 Father Henri Perrin and other volunteers met and with the support of Cardinal Suhard of Paris began working anonymously in factories. There they emulated their previous life in the wartime camps. By sharing in the labour and suffering of the workers they hoped first to gain interest in the Gospel by lives of credible witness and then (and only then) to draw people back to the Church."

"This was a radically new way of being a priest one far removed from ordinary parish duties. But it fitted Cardinal Suhard's own concern that France far from being a Christian country was in reality mission terrain and required new methods of evangelisation."

"As their work and friendships developed the priests' thinking about the Church changed sharply. Educated in a traditional theology that sought to "interest" people back to the sacraments and the life of the Church the worker-priests began to talk of being evangelised by the poor in 'sharing in God's preference for the little ones'."

"They began to see that the absence of the poor from the Church signalled not simply a gap to be filled by "bringing them back" but a radical rethinking of the whole mission of the Church - as essentially a witness to the kingdom and the proclamation of Good News to the poor. Sharpest of all they discovered first-hand the complicity of the Church in injustice."

"As the priests came to live out this Gospel they began to join in agitation for improvements to wages and conditions for workers. Perrin became prominent in the industrial discontent that simmered in France in 1952 and 1953 heading the strike committee at the Isere Arc dam site near Radens."

"Catholic industrialists and factory owners traditionally reliant on the Church for support complained bitterly to the French Bishops and then to Rome accusing the priests of being partisan and divisive of being 'political' and Marxist because they belonged to the pro-Communist unions. For the worker-priests belonging to unions was unavoidable. Unions were the only available avenue to reform."

"Faced with a directive from their bishops to give up full-time work return to their parishes and resign from their union commitments the priests pondered their future. Some with deep regret complied. But 78 issued a public statement asking Rome and their own bishops to reconsider. Some 50 chose to stay on at their work preferring as Father Perrin put it excommunication from the Church to what seemed to them a betrayal of the world of the poor."

"For Perrin it was a bitter end to the novel experiment he had helped found. Back in 1943 he had volunteered for a clandestine mission to join French workers then being conscripted for labour camps in Germany. There to his shock he faced hostility and derision from working class people who said they had never met a priest but who regarded him as bourgeois."

"By 1953 the position of the worker-priests had become untenable. In November the Papal Nuncio in Paris passed on the Vatican's demand that superiors of religious orders recall their priest-workers. Despite protests from some French bishops the priest-workers were instructed to leave temporal responsibility to lay people. This meant leaving the unions and their work."

"For many to resign and retire to a parish was to lose contact as well as credibility with the workers. It was an impossible demand. For Henri Perrin it appeared a sell-out not only of the priests but also of the poor. Shortly before he died in a motor cycle accident he wrote a bitter epitaph:
'One thing is certain: the voice of the poor is not listened to in the church and if you do [listen], you come under suspicion. Our hurt is nothing compared to that of the millions of workers who feel they have been abandoned by the church of Christ.'"