Heretic

The mathematics class was over, and the haggard, pale instructor gathered up his papers. One of the boys approached him and asked for the foreign stamp on a letter that lay on the desk. As the teacher started to oblige, the boy had an afterthought: "Please, would you give me the whole envelope with your name on it? It will be worth lots of money some day." Even in children's minds, Henri Dubois, 37, mathematics teacher at the Technical College for Boys in the French city of Albi, is a famous man. All through the French Pyrenees his name can start bitter argument: he is an unfrocked Roman Catholic priest, excommunicated for heresy. No religious affair for a long time has stirred up Frenchmen as much as the case of Henri Dubois.

"I Am Deeply Shocked." Almost five years ago, when Father Dubois first came to his new parish--a group of seven mountain villages 59 miles from Toulouse --his flock hardly knew what to make of the energetic priest. Sometimes he seemed to talk darkly of dogma, hinting that the Scriptures, not the church, was the only place where one should look for truth.

He talked about the goodness of God, never His wrath. "Why," he asked in one sermon, "should we attribute to God the capital sin of Anger?" He complained that there were too many flowers in the church: "When you smother the altar in flowers you take away from its original beauty." He even objected to feast-day processions. "I am deeply shocked," he wrote his superiors, "by the neopaganism of the masses." Father Dubois did not believe in collections, either, never pleaded for money to buy a new altar cloth or fix the roof, and packed his eight Sunday services with fiery sermons. As time went on, the peasants began to like their abbe. Watching him striding up the mountain trails, Bible in hand, the wind whipping his cassock about his knees, many thought he looked inspired.

"I Reject." When the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in 1950, Abbe Dubois decided he could not accept it. "I believe about the Virgin Mary everything that is contained about her in the Gospel and I reject all that is apocryphal," he told his parishioners. "I believe more in the efficacy of the example of her faith than in the legends of the Middle Ages." Word of this heresy reached 84-year-old Cardinal Saliege, Archbishop of Toulouse. The cardinal decided to give Father Dubois time to reconsider, but Dubois held to his views, and wrote a 75-page treatise attacking priestly celibacy. One Sunday last fall, Abbe Dubois mounted the pulpit of his church. His hands trembled as he read a letter from the cardinal announcing his own excommunication, depriving him of "passive and active administration of the sacraments." After the service, friendly peasants surrounded grim-faced Father Dubois.

"We are with you," they promised. "We have never had a priest as wonderful as you." A delegation from the villages went to Cardinal Saliege. Dubois pledged himself to preach the dogma he had already denied, because he said he found "nothing opposed" to it in the Bible. Cardinal Saliege did not change his mind. Henri Dubois took off his cassock, donned slacks and blue corduroy coat, and joined the French Reformed Protestant Church in Toulouse.

"He Will Suffer." Last week, in the villages and towns of the Pyrenees a pamphlet by Dubois was passing rapidly and secretly from hand to hand. Titled simply Excommunication, it presents the heretic's side of the story. Sample quote: "To leave the Roman Church is not to put one's faith in another institution but rather to put one's faith in no institution whatever.

It is to renounce belief in a church the way one believes in God, and to renounce this definitely." In his drab boardinghouse in Albi,* he gets about 25 letters a day; he has been forced to buy a rubber stamp to acknowledge them.

Some of Dubois' most devoted supporters still pleaded for him with Cardinal Saliege. Last week came word from the cardinal's office. "It's a sad case," said the Rev. Marius Garail, canon of the Toulouse archbishopric. "The boy is to be pitied, for I am afraid he will suffer very much. The ecclesiastical authorities were very lenient and waited as long as they could, but there was no other possible action for them to take."

* Center of the Albigenses, null century heretics who revolted against the relaxed morals and corrupt practices of the church, adopted a strict, otherworldly practice of Christianity, and were virtually exterminated by the church.

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