MEETING MARCELLIN CHAMPAGNAT
I always begin talks like this by saying, "I'm not here to give you a conference about Marcellin Champagnat. I'm here to introduce you to a friend of mine".
He wasn't always a friend. Meeting him as I did through Bro. Jean-Baptiste's 19th-century biography, which we read as novices without comment, explanation or background, I pictured him as a cold, hard, insensitive, demanding person.
I met the real Marcellin Champagnat for the first time in Rome in 1965, when I listened to Marist researchers like Fr. Jean Coste and Br. Alexandre Balko. I came to know him better still in the mid-seventies, when as Postulator General I had access to all the testimony given for the cause of his beatification, by his former neighbors in Le Rosey, his former parishioners in La Valla, and brothers who had lived with him at Notre Dame de I 'Hermitage.
The man who emerged from these accounts was warm, loving, understanding, compassionate, and dynamic -- an exciting and challenging person to know, admire and imitate. That's the Marcellin I want to introduce you to today, as he was in himself, as he related to his God, as he related to other people and especially to the brothers, and as he envisioned Marist life and ministry.
What was Marcellin Champagnat really like?
He was a man who accepted everyone -- himself, God, other people -- very simply, just as they were. That simplicity made him an amazingly free person in a world that was extremely class-conscious, status-conscious and prejudiced.
About himself, he was totally realistic. He was a peasant through and through: six feet tall at a time when the Frenchman stood only 5' 4", physically strong, rough-cut by any standard, of average intelligence, sensitive, stubborn, strong-willed, self-disciplined, and rather poorly educated.
It was that lack of education, more than anything else, which inspired his later efforts on behalf of others, as he described in a letter to the minister for public instruction in 1837, when he was seeking government recognition of the Marist Brothers:
I became aware, because of the extreme difficulty I encountered in learning to read and write, of the urgent necessity of creating a society which could; with less expense, provide for the rural areas the good education which the Brothers of the Christian Schools provide for the cities.
Having been raised to the priesthood in 1816, I was sent as associate pastor to a rural parish. Once again, I saw for myself the importance of putting into immediate execution the project I had been thinking of for a long time. I therefore began to train some teachers.... (Letter 159, to M. De Salvandy)
The difficulty he refers to was faced by most country boys of Marcellin's day, when the few one-room schoolhouses that existed were often presided over by men who were at best incompetent (some were even illiterate) and at worst criminals hoping to evade the law by hiding out in the mountains and posing as respectable citizens.
Marcellin spent all of one day in such a school in his home village of Marlhes. When the teacher hit another student, Marcellin told himself "today him, tomorrow me" and never went back. That was the sum-total of his formal education until he entered the minor seminary at the age of sixteen.
He never really overcame that early handicap, a fact which his critics were not slow to point out, as one of the early Marist Fathers noted in his memoirs:
Father Champagnat indeed had everything that was humanly necessary to prevent the success of his undertaking. Someone said to him, "How is it that you want to have your brothers approved? You are their leader. Consequently, you are supposed to be more educated than they are, and yet your letters aren’t even in good French!" (Fr. Maltrepierre)
But the obstacles he encountered, whether because of his background or because of the circumstances of the times, never turned him aside from pursuing his goal. In his biography of Marcellin, Br. Jean-Baptiste quotes him as saying,
Were the whole world against me, I should not flinch. It is enough for me that God will the matter and that my superiors approve it. Then the contradictions of men and difficulties are of no importance. I take no notice of them. If we had to come to a halt every time human means failed or any other obstacle barred the way, nothing would ever be done. (Life, p. 549)
Despite his determination and drive, Marcellin, as we learn from one of the resolutions he took in 1812 as a 23-year-old seminarian, was only human after all, and found it no easier than the rest of us to put up with others' humanity:
I will speak indiscriminately to all my fellow-students no matter how repugnant I find them, since I now realize that it is only pride that stops me from doing so. Why do I despise them? Because of my talents? I am the last in my class. Because of my virtues? I am very proud. Because of my good-looking body? God made it and it's still badly-enough put together. Anyway, I am nothing but a pinch of dust.
That resolution also gives us a glimpse of another of Marcellin's endearing qualities, his sense of humor. He enjoyed a good time and a good laugh. Soon after entering the minor seminary he became part of a group known by their companions as "the happy gang". Unfortunately, one thing that made them happy was their occasional visits to the local cabaret, from which they returned somewhat the worse for wear. That unacceptable conduct, along with his poor scholastic record, got Marcellin expelled from the seminary at the end of his first year.
His mother's prayers and the pressure she exerted on her parish priest to write a new letter of recommendation, plus the recognition on the part of the seminary staff that there was a lot of untapped potential in this young man, got him readmitted. A good talking-to by one of his teachers, plus the shock of the sudden death by drowning of one of his closest friends, did the trick. Marcellin's grades would never be good, but his conduct from then on was exemplary.
And, be it noted, his sense of humor emerged intact. In their beatification testimony, several of the brothers describe his ability to deliver remarks and reprimands with pointed but gently humorous words or actions that enabled them to "hit home" without offending. Not everyone, however, shared that opinion; Fr. Colin, the founder of the Marist Fathers, in one of his letters to Marcellin, urged him to "avoid all sorts of joking, which I consider to be contrary to the religious spirit".
Another very important aspect of Marcellin's makeup is that he was not an original thinker, but primarily a man of action. We all live and act to varying degrees out of our head (intellect and will), our heart (emotions) and our gut (instincts). For most of us, it's a combination of head and heart or head and gut. Marcellin was one of those rather rare individuals who operated mainly out of his heart and gut. That gave him tremendous dynamism and freedom of action, but also got him into a lot of trouble!
How did Marcellin relate to God?
Since he wrote comparatively little, and not all of that has come down to us -- a few sermon outlines, some retreat resolutions, a draft of the brothers' first rule of life, and about three hundred letters (mostly official correspondence) -- and since he produced no new "school of spirituality", we have to seek an answer to that question in his words and especially in his actions.
From these, we learn that Marcellin's God was a God of love, and that he was powerfully conscious of that love at work in his own life and in the life of others, to the point where he was "seized" by it, as the constitutions of the Marist Brothers put it.
The basis of his spiritual life was his awareness of the presence of God, not just at times of formal prayer, though it was powerfully evident there; and not in the way many of us were taught to understand it: turning in on oneself and shutting out the external world in order to repeat ejaculatory prayers; but primarily in his constant (awareness) of God, present and acting and loving in every person and in every circumstance of life.
I think that attitude comes through very clearly in something he said in a conference he gave to the brothers in 1837, just three years before his death.
Why is there so little real fervor in communities? I think there are several reasons. The main ones are: first, our lack of interior motivation leads to routine which spoils so much of what we do. Second, we don't see ourselves as God's children: we don't know him, we have totally wrong ideas about him, we think of him as a hard and demanding master, we act as if we were his slaves; attitudes like that shut our hearts and stifle our piety and any loving sentiments we might have. Third, we don't know Our Lord and we are unaware of the infinite riches we possess in him, because we don't meditate on his life and try to acquire his way of thinking. And finally, we are ungrateful and we forget to give thanks.
I find that a very beautiful and very revealing statement, not only for what it contains, but still more for what it does not. There is none of the negative, Jansenistic, sin-and-fear-centered spirituality so common in Marcellin's day.
No, to Marcellin life was a very simple matter: God either willed something or He did not. All that he had to do was to try to carry out as best he could whatever God was asking of him, and then leave the rest in God's hands. His attitude brings to mind the oft-repeated words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who when reminded· by an interviewer that she couldn't possibly hope to succeed in caring for all the destitute and abandoned people around her, replied, "But God did not ask me to succeed -- only to be faithful".
That inner calm didn't necessarily come easily; by temperament he was impetuous, a "force of nature", a "coiled spring", as Br. Balko has described him. But he also had a real lover's sense of the presence of his beloved, and that kept him at peace in the depths of his being, despite his difficulties, his failures, and all the changes of direction in his life.
And changes there were! At first he seemed destined to follow contentedly in his father's footsteps as a successful village farmer. Then a roving diocesan recruiter stopped at the Champagnat home and after a short conversation with Marcellin, told him, "God wants you to be a priest"; from then on, he thought of nothing else. After eight years of minor seminary, in the major seminary he became involved with a group of fellow-students with whom he would eventually found the Society of Mary. Their plan envisioned a single congregation with three branches: priests, sisters and an apostolically active Third Order. It was Marcellin who insisted on adding a fourth branch of teaching brothers.
Ordination and assignment to La Valla put those plans on the back burner as he threw himself into renewing the parish, some 2000 souls, "like sheep without a shepherd". Because of their woeful religious ignorance, he also founded the Marist Brothers on January 2, 1817. He was 27 years old and had been ordained less than six months.
After eight years of very demanding but very rewarding ministry, he realized that he would have to abandon parish work in order to give all his time and attention to training the brothers as religious, catechists and teachers. This he did for the remaining sixteen years of his life.
In the span of fifty-one years, a second career as a priest ... a third as co-founder of the Society of Mary ... and a fourth as founder of the Marist Brothers. There's much truth in the saying, "The best way to make God laugh is to tell Him your plans"!
Through it all, Marcellin struggled to know and carry out God's will. At times he questioned, doubted, and grew discouraged; but he also learned, and grew bolder, because he always remained focused. He passed his secret on to the brothers in another conference:
Rich and prominent people, have several houses, villas or chateaux, where they live according to the seasons of the year, to enjoy the beauties of nature. The saints, Jesus' friends, also have several homes, but the ones they love best are the stable of Bethlehem, where they meditate on the incredible mystery of the Incarnation ...; Mount Calvary ... where they meditate on his sufferings ... but even more on his tremendous love; and finally and most often, the altar, where they go every day to love and adore Jesus, to keep him company, and tell him what they need.
There's something very down-to-earth in those last phrases. It's easy to picture Marcellin keeping Jesus company and telling him what he needed. Jesus was friend and family, and Marcellin felt totally safe and at ease with him, wherever he was and whatever was going on around him.
How did Marcellin relate to other people?
Basically, he saw others as souls to whom God had already given so much love, and to whom He would give far more if they would only let Him. Listen to part of another conference:
"Joyfully you will draw water from the springs of salvation" (Is 12, 3) Brothers, go to the Savior's springs and draw from them abundantly! Did you hear that word, "draw"? Don't say that grace is measured out for you, that it is given to you in miserly fashion, or that you have to wait for it; don't complain that you ask but receive nothing. It's not the priest who gives it to you; it's not even the generous hands of Jesus -- it's you, yes, you yourself, who draw it freely. You can take as much as you want, so if you have only a little, it's your own fault, because your bucket is too small, your heart is too closed, too narrow for love. So go to the Lord's fountains often, and always draw from them freely and abundantly.
He understood others so well because he never lost touch with his own roots. That understanding showed itself in his ministry.