The encounter baffled me at the time. But I can now see that Camus played an important role in the postwar era, a time in which Catholicism, too, worked to relax its strictures and make itself more open, “smaller,” and more ordinary. It embraced a demotic vernacular version of the Mass and adopted a horizontal, this-worldly style of architecture for its churches. Some of the most influential documents of mid-century Catholicism advocated a close alliance with postwar humanism, so close that it could seem as though the Church’s transcendent faith had been reframed as an immanent project of
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