SANCTIFYING OFFICE

Cardinal Aveline’s approach to his sanctifying office are not widely reported, however some insight into his approach to this area can be garnered from a homily he gave at a thanksgiving Mass after being made cardinal in 2022.

He focused on the importance to listening, humility and prayer and quoted Ben Sira, the Jewish sage and author of the book of Sirach from the readings at that Mass: “My son, do everything with humility. The greater you are, the more you must humble yourself.” Most especially, he said, it was important to note Sira’s words: “The ideal of the wise man is a listening ear.”

The Church’s mission begins, Aveline said, by “listening and putting oneself at the service of others.” And he insisted on the importance of being in communion “with the joys and sorrows, the hopes and anxieties of all humanity.”

He stressed that for Christians, truth is not an idea but a person. Christ is the way, the truth and the life, he stated, adding that because Christ is true God and true man, he is a “scandal to reason and madness to the pagans.”

But he also said it is important to recognize that the Christian faith is a “mystery that we will never finish exploring.” Quoting St. Augustine, he said: “‘Let us be like men who seek but who, when they have found Him, do not stop seeking again.’ […] Christ has this particularity,” Aveline said, “that when you think you have found Him, if you no longer seek Him you lose Him. Always seek, always seek.”

Aveline also referred in his homily to the importance of authentic prayer, whatever its form, as being “inspired by the Holy Spirit as John Paul II said.”

“To pray is not to recite an infinite number of prayers, that is easy,” he said. “To pray is to trust, to trust. That was the last step for me, because the path of the true disciple always passes through the cross. ‘Think that you must die a martyr,’” he said, quoting St. Charles de Foucauld, “and desire that it be today. Be faithful to watch and to carry the cross. Consider that it is to this death that your whole life must end. See by this [truth] the unimportance of many things. Think often of this death to prepare yourself for it and to judge things on their true value.”

He closed his homily by urging those present to have an attitude of the heart that has an “ear that listens to the reality of life, eyes that contemplate Christ and let themselves be drawn by his love. A heart that opens itself to hope for all by joining Christ in the last place. These are the vocations, the characteristics of the Church’s vocation to catholicity. Because catholicity is not a simple denomination or an achievement, and even less a privilege. It is a vocation to which we will never have finished converting because it is very demanding.”

Liturgy and the Vetus Ordo

Cardinal Aveline appears to be a flexible and open-minded prelate when it comes to questions of liturgy and worship.

The archdiocese of Marseille is home to a number of vetus ordo Mass celebrations, entrusted both to diocesan priests and to ex-Ecclesia Dei institutes.

At the time of Traditionis Custodes’ publication, he renewed his support for priests celebrating in the vetus ordo in warm, unambiguous terms. For example, he told the faithful attending the church of Saint-Charles in Marseille, entrusted to the Missionaries of Divine Mercy: “I greatly rejoice in what is being lived at Saint-Charles, thanks to the ministry of the priests who are at your service, and thanks to your responsible and generous assistance. I renew all my confidence in Father Éloi Gillet, who has accompanied you for a long time with great dedication and a concern for unity in the diocesan Church.”

He himself has twice celebrated a traditional pontifical Mass at the church of Saint-Charles. On one of those occasions, on January 9, 2022 and so after Traditionis Custodes was published, he thanked the Missionaries for their work in the diocese.

GOVERNING OFFICE

Decentralization

Cardinal Aveline is a believer in a “radical decentralization” of the Church which he defends at a time when Catholicism is fading, vocations are falling, and church attendance is shrinking. The cardinal sees the institution as more than just focused on its followers.

“The obsession with survival wearies the Church and its members,” he said, arguing that she should not be centered on herself as an institution. “Her role is above all to place itself at the service of God’s love for the world,” he told priests attending a Mission Congress in 2022. He likes to repeat that the Church’s “center of gravity is not in herself, but in God’s relationship with the world.”

Handling of Fréjus-Toulon

Cardinal Aveline has been called upon to help discern and deal with thorny issues in France, for example a crisis that shook, and is still shaking, the diocese of Fréjus-Toulon.

In 2020, he made a fraternal visit to its then-bishop, Mons. Dominique Rey, to whom he was close (they both studied in Paris at the same time). In 2020, Rey was under suspicion for his method of governance and lack of discernment in the management of priestly vocations. Archbishop Aveline’s fraternal visit led to the drafting of a charter to assist in the discernment of vocations and the establishment of new communities, followed in 2023 by an apostolic visit managed this time by Archbishop Antoine Hérouard of Dijon.

It was Archbishop Aveline who then celebrated the installation Mass in Toulon of Msgr. François Touvet, whom he managed to have appointed coadjutor alongside Bishop Rey — a decision that reduced the impact of the crisis by flanking Rey, who was judged to be failing, with an assistant without directly repudiating him.

While the question of the ordination of future priests attached to the vetus ordo and belonging to Rey’s Missionaries of Divine Mercy is still blocked in Rome, Cardinal Aveline is said to be working towards a way out of the crisis, which is slow in coming. In this sensitive affair, Cardinal Aveline is reputed to have played an intermediary and temporizing role between the diocese of Toulon and Rome.

TEACHING OFFICE

Dialogue and Mission

The question of interreligious dialogue is central to Cardinal Aveline’s thinking and work. He sees non-Christians has having a mysterious place in the accomplishment of God’s work. But he did not set out to make dialogue between faiths the focus of his life’s work; he did so out of obedience to his archbishop at the time, Cardinal Robert Coffy, and because he came from Marseille.

“People say I’m passionate about Islam and interreligious dialogue, but that’s not true,” he has said. “What I’m passionate about is Paul Ricœur, Christology and the challenges of secularization. It was Cardinal Coffy and my roots in Marseille that set me on the path to all this.”

The city of Marseille has played a decisive role in his interest in dialogue between religions: “The diversity of religions [observed in Marseille] and the legitimate claim of each of them to the truth call into question the Christian faith,” he said in 2023 in response to a question about why the field interests him so much.

In a recent book entitled Dieu a tant aimé le monde: petite théologie de la mission (God so loved the world: a small theology of mission)¹Jean-Marc Aveline, Dieu a tant aimé le monde: petite théologie de la mission, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 2023, 158 p., the cardinal focused on his attraction to mission, forged through three personal experiences which led to three “realizations” that reveal the balance he strives to maintain in his discourse and pastoral work.²The book was published just as Cardinal Aveline was preparing to welcome the Pope to Marseille for the Rencontres méditerranéennes.

These three realizations can be summarized as follows: the link between mission and revelation; the link between the Jewish and Christian faiths; mission and the Church’s vocation to catholicity.

The first realization concerns the “dialogue of salvation”, as Pope Paul VI put it in his encyclical Ecclesiam suam. The idea is not to set dialogue against mission, but to always consider the perspective of mission (a commandment) under that of dialogue (a spiritual attitude), in the image of God in Revelation. The encounter between dialogue and mission leads him to constantly strive to maintain a balance between two attitudes and avoid what he considers excessive in dialogue and mission, namely relativism and militancy. He warns against the excesses of dialogue, which he perceives as “a screen for the evil desire to bury mission under the artifices of prevailing relativism,” as well as the temptation of evangelization understood as “a banner of conquest” and “dominant identitarianism.”

The second realization concerns the very special place of Judaism, which in the words of Cardinal Aveline “will never, in the eyes of the Christian faith, be a religion among others, and even less a religion like any other.”

The third realization concerns the catholicity of the Church, which in his view is not confessional but theological, and thus justifies the universal message of the Gospel being brought to all nations, including pagans.

Although well versed in theology and often defined as an intellectual, Cardinal Aveline defends a theory of mission and interreligious dialogue rooted in concrete collaborative practices and everyday acts of charity.

In an interview with the Italian press in 2021, he explained the meaning of this approach: “The best way to foster acceptance and dialogue between religions is to act together, because actions are much more effective than words. That’s why, for example, priests and imams hand out meals to the needy side by side on the steps of our station. These are signs that warm the heart, and help to deepen the reasons for our beliefs.”

Relations with Judaism

In his reflections on dialogue with other religions, Cardinal Aveline emphasizes the specific place of Judaism. In his book Dieu a tant aimé le monde, he explains that the Christian faith is “grafted” onto Judaism. In his book Théologie, he writes:

“For some time, the first followers of Jesus of Hebrew culture were considered a new Jewish sect among others: Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Essenes, etc. The Gospel has its roots in Judaism. The Gospel has its roots in biblical and Jewish culture. The first Christians inherited the cosmology, anthropology and conception of God of the Old Testament. They retained the signs of belonging to Judaism: circumcision, dietary prohibitions, matrimonial rules, Temple prayer.”

Christians and Jews, he adds, must see themselves as heirs to the same biblical promise made by God to Abraham. “What unites us, Jews and Christians, what we live in the secret of our hearts or in the clamor of our liturgies, is absolutely more important than what separates us.”

Dialogue with Jews, Aveline believes, must form the basis of all Christian dialogue with other religions.

Relations With Islam

Islam occupies a very important place in Cardinal Aveline’s thinking, as he was confronted with it very early on, both in Algeria and later in Marseille, where it dominates large areas of the city. About a third of the city’s population of one million is Muslim. The city is also home to a sizeable Jewish minority. He explained to La Croix newspaper that, for him, the Marseille Church is “a small, atypical church that resembles that of the Maghreb.”

Cardinal Aveline does not give into naive optimism about Muslims, and repeatedly stresses the dangers of militant Islam in his speeches and writings. In a lecture given in November 2020 at the Lycée Notre-Dame de Sion in Marseille, he pointed to two contemporary evils, secularism and Islamism: “Citizens of France, let us be vigilant! Let’s not let emotion overwhelm reflection. Let’s not let fear extinguish hope. Let us not bend the knee before the idols of today: neither before the threatening terror of Islamism, that ideology disguised as religion, nor before the provocative demands of secularism, that intransigence disguised as moralism.”

He adopts the classic distinction between Islam and Islamism, stressing that the latter is an “ideology” that disguises the Muslim religion. In a lecture on Christian-Islamic dialogue given on October 19, 2021 in Boulogne-Billancourt, he recommended giving priority to sharing concrete initiatives with Muslims, rather than theological discussions.

“It is in doing and living together, rather than in discussion and theoretical debate, that interreligious life and Islamic-Christian action can and must develop,” he asserted. The aim of religions may initially be to find common answers to the great fundamental questions of existence: “What is life? What is death? What is suffering? What is evil? Happiness? For us in Marseilles, for example, today: How can we fight against the mafias that kill our children? Here we see the concrete case of Marseilles coming back into play.”

Himself of pieds-noir origin, as the Europeans in Algeria who were expelled at the time of Algeria’s independence in 1962 are known, he wants to draw on the example of his home community to prove that “brotherhood between Christians and Muslims” is possible, “just as when we lived together under the generous sun of Constantine, Oran or Algiers, before a nasty wind from elsewhere swept through the alleyways of our cities, arousing mistrust, shattering friendships and distilling hatred.”

No Need to Convert?

In a 2004 essay, Cardinal Aveline gave further insight into his approach to interreligious dialogue when he appeared to place the “mystery” of the plurality of religions above theology and gave little attention to conversion efforts. “To say that the plurality of religions is a mystery is also to recognise that no theology will be able, through formulas, to master what is really at stake in dialogue, because this dialogue is first and foremost the place where God himself sets a meeting for us,” he wrote. “Life experience shows that God often reveals himself to us in ways we don’t choose, and makes us bear fruit, as long as we are open to his call. The same applies to the experience of inter-religious encounter.”

He added: “If I had to use one word to describe what is at stake here, I would simply choose the word ‘friendship’, understood in all its spiritual depth. As Paul VI said in Ecclesiam suam: ‘The spirit of dialogue is friendship and, even more, is service.’ Indeed, what is friendship if not the profound and joyful acceptance of differences, with infinite respect for irreducible otherness and a bold commitment to reciprocal and fraternal questioning, always looking to the future? This is how friendship is a true service.”

Aveline continued: “Transposed to the field of inter-religious dialogue, this means that true dialogue is not naïve irenicism but mutual questioning, in the truth of a friendship that is both concerned to allow the other to be transformed by the power of the truth on which their faith is built, and yet capable of accepting that such questioning is also addressed to them in reciprocity. This also means that true dialogue leaves it to God’s truth to convert from within the false images that each person has of the truth. It is in this way that it is also service. In this way, the phrase from the Second Vatican Council that Father Coffy liked to quote resonates more clearly: ‘Truth is only imposed by the force of truth itself, which penetrates the mind with as much gentleness as power.”

Aveline concluded: “Such a spirituality of interreligious dialogue, founded on God’s freedom and on the sacrament of friendship, is quite simply a spirituality of sharing humanity that goes far beyond the realm of religions, because it refers to two fundamental elements of the human experience: otherness and commitment.”

Catholicism as a Happy Minority

Cardinal Aveline accepts that the Catholic Church has become a minority in our societies, but claims it to be a “happy minority,” rooted in “friendliness and fraternity,” like the governments of Israel, which in the past preferred to summon the happy memory of Sephardic Jews rather than the painful memory of Ashkenazim. “It is better to have a poverty that is offered than a prosperity that is satisfied. Catholicity, the happy memory of the Church, allows us to remain a minority, certainly, but prophetic and critical, and therefore free,” declared Cardinal Aveline on the occasion of the launch of his book Dieu a tant aimé le monde at the Sant’Egidio community in Rome. This “happy minority” must not be nostalgic, and must understand Catholicity not as a due or a strict inheritance, but as a “vocation” comparable to holiness.³Delphine Allaire, op.cit.

Secularism

Cardinal Aveline’s vision of the place of religion in society fully incorporates the concept of secularism as defined in France by the 1905 law of separation between Church and State: The State neither recognizes nor finances any religion, and guarantees freedom of conscience. He condemns the excesses of secularism “which would like to exclude religion from the public sphere, thus making it, paradoxically, even more dangerous” and advocates French-style secularism, which “on the contrary, watches over the freedom to believe and not to believe.”

Distrust of secularism is a frequent theme in his media appearances, as this interview with La Croix in August 2022, at the time of the consistory, testifies: “French secularism has its advantages, because it places citizenship above confessionality, but it also carries the risk of transforming itself into secularism, which is like a new religion.”

The Figure of the Priest

On the occasion of the remembrance Mass celebrated for the Foreign Legion on January 27, 2019, he drew a strong parallel between the priest and the legionnaire. Cardinal Aveline was born in Sidi bel Abbès, the headquarters of the Foreign Legion when Algeria was still a French territory.

According to him, for legionnaires and priests alike, the mission is synonymous with sacrifice, even unto death. “Not to deviate from one’s mission, even at the risk of one’s own life, is to experience salvation: you go to the end because of what you believe,” he explained in his homily. For him, the Legion is a model of welcome, comparable to the Church: at the Legion, we welcome young people who, despite their past, have promised to give their lives to France. As for the priests, they give their lives to God, trying to resemble Him to the end.”

The Place of Women in the Church

Archbishop Aveline asked Sister Christine Danel to give a meditation at the closing Mass of an Ignatian conference in Marseille on November 1, 2021. The idea was not to entrust her with the homily, which he delivered himself, but rather to demonstrate, through this modest participation, his wish to see women more present in the life of the Church. However, Cardinal Aveline remains cautious on the question of the place of women in the Church and their possible accession to the diaconate or priesthood.

Fighting for Climate and Ecology

In 2021, together with Cardinal Peter Turkson, Cardinal Aveline signed the global petition “Health of the Earth, Health of Humanity,” linking biodiversity and climate, in the run-up to the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow and the COP15 biodiversity conference in China. The petition was drawn up by 300 Catholic associations to call for a link between climate and biodiversity. Climate change is also one of Cardinal Aveline’s Mediterranean challenges. The Rencontres méditerranéennes, a meeting of bishops and young people from around the Mediterranean held in Marseilles in September 2023, was organized around four challenges: poverty, the environment, migration and geopolitical tensions. To date, however, his thinking on the subject remains very general.

Bioethics

Bioethics is not one of Cardinal Aveline’s main areas of interest. In 2018, however, he was a signatory to the collective document issued by the French Bishops’ Conference on euthanasia and “the urgency of fraternity.” In 2023, the diocese of Marseille under his leadership also associated itself with a communiqué deploring a right to abortion being inserted into the French Constitution.

At the 2024 Chrism Mass, he condemned “the steamroller of totalitarian ideology” that sows death, equating abortion, euthanasia, drug and arms trafficking and deaths caused by migration: “We must recognize that the steamroller of totalitarian ideology that currently dominates the West is powerful and formidable. Its strength lies in its ability to numb consciences. Our strength lies in never giving up on awakening them, for the sake of the Gospel and with respect for the complexity of each situation. This is true at the beginning of life on the question of abortion; it is true at the end of life on the question of the end of life; it is true on the question of young people whose lives are cut short by drug traffickers and by the tacit but murderous complicity of drug users; it’s true, in fine, for everything to do with the arms race, this deadly trade which, covertly, governs the world and throws thousands of destitute and frightened people onto migratory routes and paths of despair.”

Defending Migrants’ Rights and Opening Up to Others

The issue of migration was at the heart of the Rencontres Méditerranéennes in September 2023, during which Pope Francis visited Marseille.

In his address at Notre-Dame de la Garde, Cardinal Aveline condemned the smuggling trade as a “crime”: “when men, women and children, knowing nothing about navigation, fleeing misery and war, are robbed of their possessions by dishonest smugglers, who condemn them to death by putting them on dilapidated and dangerous boats, this is a crime.” He condemned governments that give orders not to come to the rescue of migrant boats, and paid tribute to the associations that collect migrants at sea, such as SOS Méditerranée which has been subject to accusations that they have collaborated with smugglers, accusations they deny.

The fate of migrants is a major point of convergence between Pope Francis and the Cardinal Archbishop of Marseille. Aveline defines welcome as his city’s vocation. “Marseille is more than a city, it’s a message. In every identity, there’s always an element of otherness. And it’s thanks to this that we can be welcoming to others,” he said at the September 2023 meeting.

Although he considers this question to be central, the archbishop has sought to propose a nuanced perspective on the migration problem, which he believes cannot be resolved by an unlimited welcome of the other. “We can’t solve the problems of immigration simply by saying we must offer welcome. Of course we must welcome, but we must welcome for the common good. It’s not just the common good of migrants, but also the good of everyone,” he explained to the French regional press at the time of the Pope’s visit to Marseille,⁴Christophe Van Veen, op. cit.

Also in September 2023, he shared with the French magazine Le Pèlerin his global vision of the migration issue, which he reiterated should not be seen as an absolute: “We need to think about welcoming people who migrate, but even more about their right to be able to stay at home,” he said. “People rarely leave their country, their culture and their roots with a good heart. But this right is violated for reasons that the Pope details. We must act so that people are no longer forced to migrate.”⁵Christophe Chaland et Samuel Lieven, op. cit. In this way, he has tried to defend Pope Francis against any accusation of naivety: “Some would like to discredit him, but his words go beyond an exhortation to welcome everyone,” he insisted in the same interview.

Marseille and the Mediterranean

Born in Algeria, raised in Marseille and having exercised most of his ministry there, Cardinal Aveline is very attached to the city of Marseille, which he sees as a place charged with meaning for the universal Catholic Church. “Marseille is a laboratory, where most of the problems of the Mediterranean converge,” he explained at a conference organized in Rome in September 2021 on the theme “The Mediterranean, a space for encounters and dialogue,” an initiative of the French Embassy to the Holy See. For him, the Mediterranean is not only a concept, but also a people.

Also for Cardinal Aveline, the Mediterranean region in general, and Marseilles in particular, has a special sensitivity to religion: “I think the Latins are more resistant to secularization,” he said. “The religious dimension, or, more simply, the conviction that human existence must take into account things that go beyond it, remains stronger with them. It seems to me that the sea and the sobriety imposed by the Mediterranean region develop a wisdom that resists the steamroller of secularization. (…) Mediterranean people are aware of their finitude. This brings us closer together.”⁶ Christophe Chaland et Samuel Lieven, op. cit.

He developed the idea of a “happy memory of the Mediterranean of shared friendliness,” based on a welcoming and peaceful cohabitation between communities, which needs to be rediscovered. He noted that peaceful coexistence is today under threat in several areas, such as Lebanon, where its different communities are threatened with disintegration, or in Israel, whose official discourse tends to erase the past of the Sephardic Jews, despite the peaceful cohabitation between Christians, Jews and Muslims in North Africa. He defined the Mediterranean as a “storehouse of wisdom that goes far beyond the Mediterranean area,” but also as an “art of living together.”

At the level of Marseille, he advocated peaceful cohabitation between communities, which must be embodied in simple, concrete ways. He said he was in favor of maintaining “small Christian communities,” which can involve “the presence of Catholic establishments where the population is no longer Catholic.” He believes that the city of Marseille must also play a role in supporting Catholic communities in the East, given the presence of multiple Christian churches (Chaldean, Coptic, Maronite, Orthodox…).

In 2020, the Italian Bishops’ Conference in Bari brought together 40 bishops from the Mediterranean region. In 2021, Cardinal Aveline called for the organization of a “Mediterranean Synod,” underlining his city’s “synodal vocation,” along the lines of what Pope Francis had done for the Amazon, as he explained in an interview with the Italian press.⁷ Giacomo Gambassi, op. cit.

In February 2022, in the wake of the Bari meeting, Aveline took part in a meeting in Florence of mayors and bishops from cities around the Mediterranean where they signed a “Florence Charter,” committing themselves to both the protection of their culture and the need for dignity in migration policies.⁸ Delphine Allaire, op. cit. The Florence meeting led to the introduction of a working method dear to Cardinal Aveline: “small structures of cooperation and communion.”

This experiment should pave the way for a Mediterranean synod, the convocation of which remains in the hands of the Pope. In Aveline’s view, this Mediterranean synod could be the starting point for a “theology of the Mediterranean,” which he defines as follows: “We live around this sea ‘between the lands,’ which represents a special link between Africa, Europe and the East, and which is marked by traditions of exchange, by a complex cosmopolitanism that can be felt on its shores, by old and new wounds. This is the starting point for a project of Mediterranean theology. A path that analyzes and bears witness to the way in which, in this corner of the world, the beliefs that have germinated there have been formed in dialogue with one another, how the human being has acquired an original definition, how a fruitful encounter between cultures has developed, how humanitarian or ecological crises also affect the foundations of our spiritual life.”⁹Giacomo Gambassi, op. cit

A Man of the Left?

Cardinal Aveline’s doctrinal and pastoral positions appear to have won him favor from the ecclesiastical progressives. An annual French directory of bishops, Golias Trombinoscope, regarded by many as having a strong left-leaning editorial position critical of the hierarchy, warmly welcomed Aveline’s appointment as archbishop of Marseille, saying: “How can we hide our joy? Because we are in the presence of a truly pastoral, intelligent bishop who listens to his contemporaries and does not judge them – something that has become rare in the French episcopate.”

They went on to describe him as a “team player,” someone appreciated for his “sincerity” and were surprised he was chosen as they thought he “seemed too open, too social, too pastoral, probably also too intelligent” for the French episcopate. “But Jean-Marc Aveline, who likes to dress in civilian clothes, has only one ambition,” the journal continued. “To allow people to ‘taste the savoury knowledge of the things of God.’ His theology is anchored in reality, in the lives of the people he meets.”

Despite being a pieds-noir who tend to be right-wing, pro-French individuals, many traditional Catholics in France consider Aveline to be a “man of the Left.” They say this was further underscored when it emerged that the progressive apostolic nuncio to France, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, wanted to give Aveline the Archdiocese of Paris, but Aveline allegedly refused on the grounds that wanted to be near his elderly parents.

Golias Trombinoscope calls him a “quasi-progressive.”

• 1
  Jean-Marc Aveline, Dieu a tant aimé le monde: petite théologie de la mission, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 2023, 158 p.
• 2
  The book was published just as Cardinal Aveline was preparing to welcome the Pope to Marseille for the Rencontres méditerranéennes.
• 3
  Delphine Allaire, op.cit.
• 4
  Christophe Van Veen, op. cit.
• 5
  Christophe Chaland et Samuel Lieven, op. cit.
• 6
  Christophe Chaland et Samuel Lieven, op. cit.
• 7
  Giacomo Gambassi, op. cit.
• 8
  Delphine Allaire, op. cit.
• 9
  Giacomo Gambassi, op. cit