Death of journalist Henri Tincq: religious information in mourning

Text by: Geneviève Delrue

The journalist Henri Tincq, who died on the night of March 28-29 at the age of 74, from the aftermath of Covid-19, is saluted by the entire profession, who loses one of his great feathers. The presidency Emmanuel Macron paid tribute this Tuesday in a statement to "one of the best connoisseurs of Catholicism and one of the finest observers of the Vatican".

Publicity

He was the dean of a profession that had become rare in newsrooms: that of religious informant. For more than 35 years, first in the daily newspaper La Croix where he entered in 1972, then in 1985 until 2008 in Le Monde , Henri Tincq covered the section Religions with an "s" as he wished to remember. Very early on, he established himself as one of the great feathers of the profession by his in-depth knowledge of the Church, whose great developments he analyzed with passion and intransigence, from Vatican Council II to the pontificate of Pope Francis. This outstanding Vaticanist had announced before the Cardinals' 2005 entry into the conclave of the election of Benedict XVI. Just as he had planned his historic resignation on February 11, 2013, which had earned him the applause of his colleagues from the Vatican press room.

Behind his journalistic "exploits": a meticulous study of the files, hard work, the coverage of around fifty papal journeys despite a renal insufficiency which forced him in full reporting to be dialyzed once his "papers" written. Henri Tincq, whom some of his close colleagues from around the world amused themselves by calling "Monsignor", was one of the best connoisseurs of the pontificate of John Paul II of which he was also an admirer, even if he later recognized the errors in the prevention of pedophilia and also in the management of the Curia. It was during the long pontificate of the Polish Pope marked by the outstretched hand of Catholics to the Jewish world that he asserted himself as the specialist in Judeo-Christian dialogue with in particular his book The Star and the Cross (Lattès). And later after his departure from the World , he devoted an imposing biography to Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (1), the archbishop of Paris, born in Judaism and of which he was a faithful admirer.

A journalist hired with a very wet pen

The hired journalist had a strong temper and his pen without compromise for a Church he loved that so much admonished was feared by the institution while it was greeted by left Catholics, his political and religious family. Born in 1945 in the north of France, passed through the Christian student youth, Henri Tincq was an ardent defender of the reforms of Pope Francis and castigated with his sharp pen the detractors of the Argentine Pope. He looked at "his Church", that of Vatican II and his youth, with nostalgia, writing in his penultimate book The great fear of Catholics (Grasset) " that he no longer recognized her ". In a dechristianized society often indifferent or even hostile to religion, not only the breath of Vatican II had died down, but it had given way to a fearful Church, withdrawn into its convictions and allowing itself to be dragged into a right-wing identity drift.

Sex scandals in the clergy, commonly known as the “pedophilia crisis”, as well as the double lives and double talk on homosexuality of high dignitaries revealed in the book by Frédéric Martel Sodoma / Investigation in the heart of the Vatican (Robert Laffont ) deeply affected the religious informant and the practicing Catholic. In the brilliant introduction to his latest Vatican essay , The End of a World (Cerf) last October, Henri Tincq compared " the world of yesterday " of the famous Austro-Hungarian writer Stefan Zweig, this world before 1914 who did not see the storm of the Great War coming that would engulf the brilliant Viennese society, with " the world of the Church of yesterday " rich in spiritual, intellectual and artistic heritage on which an unprecedented storm had just fallen. Brutally swept away by the coronavirus, Henri Tincq, who has written so much and passionately about it, will not see the Church of tomorrow rebuild.

(1) The cardinal prophet (Lattès / 2012)

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