Can Anything Good Come from France?
“Blessed be the womb that bore thee, and the paps that gave thee suck” (Lk. 11:27).
Anniversary celebrations of both individuals and societies enable us to judge whether the expectations accompanying their birth have or have not been fulfilled. I would therefore like to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Society of Saint Pius X and take stock of its achievement with reference not to its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, but, rather, to the broader womb from which both he and it emerged. And I think it appropriate to do so in response to a question that I already once asked sixteen years ago in the pages of another Catholic journal: “Can anything good come from France?”
Why would I even dream of approaching this “stock taking” by posing such an odd sounding query? I feel compelled to do so for two reasons, the first of which is that I am always upset by the disdain for France that seems to be a prejudice deeply ingrained in mainstream pluralist American life. Such disdain most powerfully comes to the fore whenever that mainstream attitude is confronted with any effort to defend that nation’s traditional possession of a truly distinct, substantive, and therefore thoroughly anti-pluralist culture. My second reason is the fact that my whole career has been a battle against this pluralist mentality and its inevitably nihilist conclusions under influences so many of which are French in origin that I feel myself to be an adopted child of Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX’s natural mother, whose honor and culture producing skills I therefore must defend.
The Deposit of French Culture
Our common natural and adoptive mother’s chief cultural concern has always been expressed in a passion for education and the perfection of society at large, through which the people living in it are lifted upwards as well. Nothing could be more destructive to pluralist nihilism, built as it is upon the vision of a world where toleration of an anarchic individualism is the key to happiness, than the kind of socially educative and uplifting alternative to formless openness that French culture has represented through the ages. For the breeze wafting in from a tradition-soaked Gaul has always nudged—and still in many ways continues to nudge—people into a pilgrimage towards a clear, exalted, and common goal that pluralist America cannot help but recognize as dangerously alien to its drab, materialist, individualist raison d’être.
What is it that most perfectly shaped the traditional French understanding of this clear goal and the passion for offering the kind of education needed to reach it? Catholicism; Catholicism in all of its fullness; the Catholicism that appreciated every “Seed of the Logos” that came before it, and therefore worked together with those precious elements in a Greco-Roman culture that had already rooted itself deeply in the soul of the educated classes of ancient Gaul. And since that Catholicism was universal in its mission, those to whom it gave such an education recognized their need not to keep this treasure hidden under a bushel, but to spread it to the very ends of the earth.
A charitable Christian sharing of both her spiritual gifts as well as the beautiful wrapping in which she learned to offer them has always been Catholic France’s most glorious contribution to the enhancement of the Mystical Body of Christ at large. She gave of her abundance in the eighth and ninth centuries, when the greatest of her contemporary prelates and teachers, inspired by men like the Carolingian Bishop Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766), lovingly accepting the Roman Rite, enriched the universal Church’s rather Spartan liturgy, endowing it with a more appropriate and lasting splendor. She added still further to this largess by means of the reform of the tenth through the twelfth centuries, which began with the monks of Cluny from Burgundy, who then went on an international march through Christendom, strengthening the Holy Roman Empire politically, and the Papacy in spirit and administratively, so as to allow both to work for the transformation of all men in Christ. Gallic gifts of the mind followed those of the spirit, with Paris soon providing the theological and philosophical guidance that gave the grand culture of the High Middle Ages the means not only to use of all of nature for the greater glory of God but also to explain why and how it could do so.
The French Catholic Reformation
As we move into modernity, the land that for my purposes here I should now refer to as the Eldest Mother of Christendom continued her charitable and universal labors in two distinct phases. The first of these came along with the French Catholic Reformation and a mammoth contribution to the education of the faithful, both clerical and lay, and in a myriad of ways.
Education of the clergy to a sense of its dignity and its lofty responsibilities was the theme of Cardinal François de la Rouchefoucauld (1558-1645) in his De la perfection de l’état ecclésiastique (1597). This was put into practice through the unofficial seminary set up by Père Adrien Bourdoise (1584-1655) at a certain Parisian Church to which we will return below, and more formally by Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575-1629) with the French Oratory, Jean-Jacques Olier’s (1608-1657) through the Company of Saint Sulpice, and St. Jean Eudes’ (1601-1680) Congregation of Jesus and Mary.
Meanwhile, colleges of French Jesuits and Oratorians, and, a bit later, those of the Brothers of the Christian Schools of St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle (1651-1719), sought the elevation of laymen. Laywomen, whose education was more and more considered to be crucial to the improvement of family life, were also formed—to begin with, by the Ursulines, and later, backed by the encouragement of Louis XIV’s (1643-1715) second wife, Madam de Maintenon (1635-1719), and the great François de Salignac Le Mothe Fénelon (1651-1715), Bishop of Cambrai.
General education was continued through the development of the episcopal pastoral letter and the perfection of the preaching art, which reached its apex by the end of the century with Fénelon, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet of Meaux (1627-1704), and the Jesuit Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704). The fathers of the Society of Jesus, worked to the same purpose through such pious guides as Nicolas Caussin (1583 -1651), confessor to King Louis XIII (1610-1643). Orders founded by French-speakers, including St. Vincent de Paul’s (1581-1662) Congregation of the Mission and the Visitandines of St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) and St. Jeanne de Chantal (1572-1641), played a significant role here as well.
The Jesuits were inventive in the number of educative tools that they utilized, especially those theatrical, and the period also saw the widespread dissemination of devotional and catechetical works. The Jesuits, St. Jean Eudes, and the Congregation of the Mission, convinced that France itself was a mission country in need of evangelization, organized highly sophisticated sweeps of the countryside to teach, preach, and firm up commitment to practice of the faith. Each sortie was repeated at regular intervals to make sure the good seed had not fallen by the wayside.
A rich French strain of mystical writing soon emerged, including the Capuchin Benoit de Canfield’s (1562 -1660) Règle de perfection (1609), Pierre de Bérulle’s Discours de l’état et des grandeurs de Jesus (1623), Olier’s Journée chrétienne (1670), and the posthumous (1694) compilation of the teachings of the Jesuit Louis Lallemont (1588-1635), the Doctrine spirituelle. Marie Guyard (1599-1672), an Ursuline active in Canada under the name Marie de l’Incarnation, and many others, taught mystical concerns by example.
Different in their specific approaches, all urged some form of meditation on Christ’s Sacred Heart and His love for mankind, self-abasement before His majesty, grace, and goodness, imitation of the Holy Family, friendship with Mary, and specific penitential and eucharistic practices. One type of devotion to the Sacred Heart received especially powerful support from the revelations to Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) and the writings of her Jesuit confessor, Claude de la Colombière (1641-1682).
Devout Humanism
But were personal and corporate prayer life alone sufficient for education and elevation of the soul to union with God? A resounding “no” came from different pious circles. What was referred to as “devout Humanism,” as found in the Jesuit Pierre Coton’s (1564-1626) Intérieure occupation d’une âme dévote (1608), or the spirituality of Saint Francis de Sales’ Introduction à la vie dévote (1609) and Traité de l’amour de Dieu (1616), spoke volumes about the need for active individuals to raise themselves to God through their particular vocations in the world. All Christians, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louise de Marillac (1591-1660), and their friends argued, had charitable responsibilities to perform for the sick and the poor, educating them in this regard.
All these prelates, priests, and religious were aided immeasurably in making their influence felt by an army of laywomen, among them Madame Barbe Acarie (1566-1618), who eventually entered religious life as the Carmelite Marie de l’Incarnation, and St. Louise de Marillac whose work with St. Vincent de Paul led to the creation of the Daughters of Charity. Louise’s uncle, Michel de Marillac (1563-1632), was one of the most important political figures from the large pool of laymen in the dévot camp. While Jesuit Marian congregations, and sodalities sponsored by other priests and religious, were often the locus for lay involvement, private homes also became dévot foyers. Nobles such as Henri de Lévis (1596-1680), Duke of Ventadour, created and fueled the lay Company of the Blessed Sacrament, which operated in France almost as a kind of Catholic Freemasonry.
The 19th Century Catholic Revival
I have dedicated a lot of space to the Eldest Mother of Christendom’s first stage of modern educative largess, all of which resonated round the entire Catholic world, because it is much less known to most believers. Nevertheless, there was a second stage, reflecting France’s crucial role in stimulating the general Catholic revival of the 19th century. Interestingly enough, this French role followed and responded to what might be considered a corruptio optimi pessima of the overall national commitment to a universal cultural mission—the one that erupted violently in 1789 in support of a recipe for the destruction of all of mankind under the aegis of the naturalist Enlightenment and Revolution.
Here, too, the evangelical and broadly educative fruits that were produced and spread freely throughout the globe were too many to number, among which were: the massive labor for the revitalization of the foreign missions, built upon both clerical and lay pillars; the further and more intensified encouragement of devotional life, not just through increased commitment to the Sacred Heart but to that of Eucharist Adoration as well; the restoration of Gregorian Chant which was the life work of Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875); the general battle for freedom of education that characterized the entire century and mobilized parents through Europe; the flexing of the muscles of the Press as an educative tool, by means of Catholic athletes like Louis Veuillot (1813-1883); the decisive support given to the Ultramontanist Movement on behalf of the strengthening of the Papacy as the supreme teacher of the individual and society as a whole; and, finally, that mass of Catholic political theory discussing how to defend the Catholic religious mission in the secular realm which has been the nourishment of believers outside the borders of France everywhere.
The SSPX Continues the French National Mission
Has the SSPX continued the French national mission, cultivated its international responsibilities, and given its mother cause for great pride? I do not see how anyone with a single honest bone in his body could answer this question with anything other than an unqualified “yes”! Certainly Père Bourdoise must be looking down with pride over the more formal clerical education under very difficulty circumstances offered by a Society connected so intimately with the Church of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, where he set us his unofficial seminary in the first place. St. Chrodegang and Dom Guéranger must both be rejoicing as well, knowing that sons of France had maintained the role of Gregorian Chant within a Roman Rite enhanced in splendor through the influence of Gaul, and recruited followers the globe over to aid them in the task of raising the minds and hearts of the faithful through the educative power of the Divine Liturgy. And we can certainly at least hope that the great nineteenth century supporters of Ultramontanism are recognizant of the fact that the Society’s founder and all of his disciples have illustrated just how much commitment to a strong Papacy, loyal to the whole of the Catholic Tradition in general and the First Vatican Council’s teaching on Papal Infallibility in particular, benefits from the presence of a religious fraternity ready to point out the necessary limitations on papal authority gone mad.
“My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trials” (Sirach, 2:1), Sirach told his fellow Jews in the days of the Old Covenant. The whole of Church History proves this to be true for the New Covenant as well. But there is a special character to the torment inflicted upon those coming to serve the Lord in New Covenant days that applies to the work and the glory of the SSPX: the treatment of those defending the fullness of the Catholic Tradition as though they were somehow actually straying from the fold. This redefinition of Tradition on the part of Catholics who are real and dangerous innovators is a phenomenon that true “reformers”—-believers who fervently seek to “restore all things in Christ”—have regularly faced through throughout the Christian centuries, including such heroes as the monks of Cluny, Pope St. Gregory VII, the men behind the Observant Movements seeking the restoration of the discipline of the older orders in the 1400s and 1500s, and the early promoters of the Catholic Reformation.
Although I myself never felt the mainstream American disdain for French culture, and had been introduced to many of the spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic achievements noted above in my undergraduate university career, I nevertheless have to confess that I was not prepared for the personal experience of the full meaning of them, which came through my first trip to France in the early 1970s. It was love at first sight, and unlike other such love affairs it is one that has endured. That love affair is strengthened every time I lecture at the SSPX seminary or worship at an SSPX altar, whether that of a tiny chapel or a large church like St. Nicolas du Chadonnet. My adopted mother has been good to me, both directly and through the assistance of one of the finest of her natural sons, Archbishop Lefebvre. Blessed indeed is the womb in which he and his society were born, and blessed be the paps that gave them suck!
Viva Cristo Rey!
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