Emile Poulat died last Saturday at the age of 94. I do not know how well he is known by U.S. Catholics, apart, that is, from those who have taken a more than average interest in the sociology of 20th-century Catholics. They know him for his many works on the encounter between the Catholic Church and modern culture and society, especially in France.

Ordained a priest in 1945, he joined the ranks of the “worker priests” who departed from traditional ways of exercising the ministry and went to share the lives and fortunes of workers in factories and on docks.

Rome ordered the experiment ended in 1954, and Poulat left the priesthood and married a year later. His first published book was on the worker priest movement.

He enrolled in the prestigious National Center for Scientific Research where he worked under the pioneer sociologist of French Catholicism Gabriel Le Bras; he would become one of the founders of the Groupe de sociologie des religions. His doctoral dissertation, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste, was one of the first and one of the best studies of the modernist crisis and the intransigent response to it, research areas he continued to explore in many books and articles. He did not, I think, have much interest in grand theories, preferring instead close, detailed studies of particular moments or events. He tended also to take a long view of things, and at least at one time did not think that Vatican II represented anything like the great reversal that many people saw in it. Although he could note, as I often have quoted him, that the Church changed more in the ten years after Vatican II than it had in the previous century, he wondered whether it had altered its fundamental suspicion if not hostility to the modern world. In the century he had studied, from the modernist crisis on, he once said, he had witnessed "the collapse of the Catholic culture" of France.

Of his books my favorites were Église contre bourgeoisie; Une Église ébranlée : changement, conflit et continuité de Pie XII à Jean-Paul II; and L’Église, c’est un monde. They helped me to elaborate an argument about modernity and the construction of Roman Catholicism that I still use in trying to explain the event-character of Vatican II. I met him once and remember his kindness. It's too bad that his major works never earned an English translation.

The tributes that I’ve read in the last day or two all refer to his association with the Community of Sant'Egidio and his friendship with its founder Andrea Riccardi. “I have made my own their formula,” he is quoted as often saying: “Prayer, the poor, peace.” Here in Italian is the tribute that Riccardi published; two other obituaries, in French, can be found here and here.