Annas' wrote:

twistor59 wrote:Maybe sometime you can give us an idea of what your opinion on what the state of catholicism in France is. Is it declining rapidly ? Are most people just nominally catholic but don't really take it seriously ?

It's not that easy to answer the question. Figures differ a lot on the topic, probably as they rely on self-declarative surveys. The ones I have are coming from an online quantitative one (so?), published in "Le Monde des Religions, January 2011 & September-October 2011". Respondents ought to be French people.

In accordance with the article, religious practices and opinions can be representated as followed:
- Atheists: 34%
- Believers (not detailed per religion) : 36%
- Without established opinion, but asking themselves the question: 22%
- Without neither established opinion, nor asking: 8%

Furthermore:
- 34% of the Catholics are presenting themselves as ones, while not believing... (Tradition, loyalty, need to belong to a community?...)

Some other figures may give a more liable overview of the Catholic practices evolution:
600 priests were ordered in France in 1966, while they were only 89 in 2099, in accordance with the church establishment itself. That shows a strong decline.

Other survey, other figures, which stated that 42% of the French people declared themselves as Catholics in 2008, while atheists and agnostics were 24% each (Futuribles, 2009 (?)). In a last one (IFOP, 2009), 2/3 of the French people were said to be Catholics.

Checking if "Le Monde des religion" articles were available in free access (and they are not), I also found a few figures about the evolution of Christianism worldwide. They show that the average part of Christians is quite stable: from 35% in 1910 to 32% in 2009, with a major increase in Africa and America.
Most of the figures are in %, and with that century gap, ... it may lead to a lot of interpretations and misinterpretations, I think.
http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Globa ... -exec.aspx

What I can end with is my own experience. Il live in a part of France which is said to be traditionally catholic practicing. Here less and less services are done by lack of priests; the participants are getting fewer and fewer, and more and more aging. Marriages and baptisms are still a part of the familial traditions, confirmations also but most part of the children stop catechesis after it (so when they are about 9).

The teenagers I know are coming quite reluctantly on the topic. It's too far from their own interests and lifestyle, what also mean that their opinion is not really done, yet.

And what about adults: it's not an easy subject of discussion; adults are quite reluctant to go on it too, not such as politics, for example. The people I know are often quite negative toward the religious institutions, but what about believes? It’s not that clear.