Eugène de Mazenod: Saint for the New Millennium

Fr. Harry E. Winter, OMI (adapted from America, December 2, 1995 pp.22-24)

When Pope John Paul II canonizes Eugène de Mazenod on December 3^rd (1995), he will be continuing his program of preparing the Catholic Church for the new millennium. The Pope may have chosen to canonize this bishop of Marseilles, who founded one of the largest and least known missionary communities, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, because of de Mazenod’s role in the re-evangelization of France after the French Revolution. Certainly de Mazenod’s spirit and even some of his techniques are relevant to the task of re-evangelization today. But the Pope has also chosen a very human saint, who in many ways anticipated the problems and challenges of our own era.

Feminists, for example, may welcome this canonization because de Mazenod was strongly influenced by several strong women. In turn, he notably influenced some very intriguing women.

Today, Charles Joseph Eugène de Mazenod would be described as having come from a broken family. Born on August 1, 1782 at Aix-en Provence, he spent much of his youth in Nice, Turin, Naples and Palermo – exiled because of the French Revolution. Certainly that exile helped shatter his parents’ marriage, but the differences seem to have been there from the beginning. His father and two paternal uncles belonged to the nobility and had some education, but little money. His mother, aunt and a rather strange cousin belonged to the monied class but had little education. When Eugène’s mother finally divorced his father after the Revolution, she wrote him bluntly, “You now have nothing.” If he ever returned to France, she added, he would find that he had all the debts, while she had all the property.

Like many children of divorced parents, Eugène attempted to stay close to both. On one occasion, when he was vicar-general of Marseilles, he traveled with his mother and his only sibling, a sister, across the Alps from Turin to Nice in a horse-drawn carriage. The snow was so deep that Eugène had to trudge for five hours “with snow above our knees and, lower down, mud and water above the ankles.”

Years of Exile

During the years in Palermo, Sicily, when the de Mazenods were separated, the Duke and Duchess of Cannizzaro took Eugène into their family and treated him as one of their own children. This arrangement lasted several years. When Eugène was 19 the saintly duchess died and the heartbroken youth wrote his father: “This wound will never heal. I was awake all night. I shall never be able to shed enough tears for such a kind mother.”

When Eugène returned to France in 1800, his first impulse had been to seek a rich and beautiful wife, so that his family fortunes could be quickly restored. His romantic inclinations were, however, twice shattered – first when a quite suitable girl died of “consumption” and again when the next candidate came up with insufficient funds.

Some years later, he decided to study for the priesthood at Saint Sulpice Seminary. He was ordained in 1811 and after six years of service in Aix began the work of preaching missions. This led to his founding of the community from which the Oblates of Mary Immaculate developed. When his uncle became bishop of Marseilles in 1823, he made Eugène his vicar-general. In 1837 de Mazenod succeeded his uncle as Marseilles’ bishop and continued to direct the Oblates as they began to work overseas. On May 21, 1861, this wonderfully active and apostolic bishop died in Marseilles.

Two very different women affected his career as religious leader of Marseilles. During the exile in Palermo, the Duke de Berry had befriended the young Eugène. When de Berry was ambushed and assassinated on February 14, 1820, de Mazenod prescinded from both his royalist leanings and his friendship with the duke in order to counsel the people of Marseilles in the peaceful language of the Gospel. Men who had been screaming for bloody reprisals later said it was because of the young priest that they held back.

In 1832 the duke’s widow, Marie-Christine, secretly visited Marseilles to seek support for a legitimist coup against Louis-Philippe in favor of her son, the Duke of Bordeaux. Eugène, by now vicar-general for his uncle, the Bishop of Marseilles, avoided her completely, even though he knew her well. He would involved himself in politics only when the church was directly affected.

Another woman who affected de Mazenod’s ministry at this time was the picturesque and intrepid Elizabeth Picot, nicknamed “Babeau.” Known as “Queen of the Fishmongers” at Marseilles’ market, she was endowed with great physical strength. “To bring a woman to her senses means less that nothing to me,” she boasted, “but to flatten a man with my blows, even if he is in the gutter, and to do it just as long as he can take it – that’s my meat.” Her language matched her strength. Her insults, it was said, outraged even the most elementary politeness.

The Jesuit preacher, Joseph Barrelle, converted her through a sermon on the Prodigal Son. She then repudiated her common-law husband, and to the wonder of the city, apologized to her former victims. She even took the lead in forming a sodality for the fishwives. By 1845 this Sodality of Saint Anne numbered 900, and its members became some of the bishop’s most fervent supporters. At the time of the 1848 Revolution, when it was rumored that the Republicans, furious over the election results, were planning to attack de Mazenod, Babeau and her sodality rushed to the episcopal residence and took up positions around it.

Ministry

Jean Leflon, de Mazenod’s principal biographer, wondered whether the experience of domineering female relatives might have made the young Eugène “something of a misogynist.” If that were so, would the founder of the Holy Family Sisters of Bordeaux, Abbé Pierre Bienvenu Noailles (1793-1861) have asked de Mazenod to assume leadership of this dynamic community of women? Ordained in 1829 after training at Saint Sulpice, Noailles found the Oblates interested and the contract was signed in January 1858. This arrangement lasted until 1903, when the constitutions of the Holy Family Sisters were definitively approved and Rome removed the provision that the Oblate Superior General serve also as the general of the sisters. The two communities have, however, remained very close; and the sisters, who now number 2,755, work side by side with the Oblates in many missions.

In several other areas, de Mazenod seems to have been ahead of his time. Although he did not have the benefit of the modern liturgical movement, he did have a deep sense of liturgy. When he was a bishop, he could separate his Mediterranean love of baroque trappings from genuine worship. In 1835, for instance, the manner in which washing of feet was done on Holy Thursday angered him. He wrote to his close friend and partner in the founding of the Oblates, François de Paule Henry Tempier: “I was at the Archbishop’s Palace (Aix) for the washing of the feet; an insipid ceremony, denatured as it is here. What sign value is there in washing the feet of giggling choirboys, sniggering at this great commemoration of the great example given by the Saviour. As much as I am moved when I do it at Marseilles, it has left me here with a sense of disappointment.”

His sense of worship was also shown during the critical national elections of 1848. Universal male suffrage was then being exercised for the first time, but one had to vote in the capital of the canton or in a major city. A peasant, for instance, had to walk to the county seat, which for some was a great hardship. De Mazenod, who had succeeded his uncle as Bishop of Marseilles in 1837, sent a pastoral letter to his parish priests, telling them to instruct the faithful to make every effort both to attend Mass and to vote. “Where this is not feasible, they are dispensed from the obligation to assist at Mass, because of the great importance of their electoral duty.” Those 1848 elections, it should be noted, took place on Easter Sunday.

Early Ecumenism

De Mazenod did not have the benefit of the modern ecumenical and interfaith movements, but his instinct was ahead of his time. When the first Oblates in Canada decided in 1843 to burn Protestant Bibles that had been distributed to Catholics, he supported the local bishops’ rebuff of such actions. (There were protests from Montreal and even to New York.) By 1857, when he was 75 years old, his own actions were stronger, although his language reflected the times. He visited Oblate missions in England, Scotland and Ireland. Fascinated by the Oxford Movement, he sought out Cardinal Wiseman and the celebrated convert Henry Manning, and he narrowly missed meeting Newman. One evening de Mazenod visited the London parish of the “Catholic Apostolic Church,” or Irvingites, as they were sometimes called – one of their founders had broken away from both the Anglican and Presbyterian Churches. The elderly French bishop carefully watched Vespers and then sought out the sacristan. Later he wrote to some of his priests who were in charge of publicly reciting the Divine Office: “It is shameful to hurry the recitation of the official prayers of the church, as is done in our chapters. One must watch these poor heretics at prayer to see with what solemnity and with what tone of supplication God’s creatures should address him when they invoke his aid.”

When de Mazenod and several other French bishops accompanied the relics of St. Augustine to Bône, Tunisia, in 1842, he kept a complete journal. He succeeded in attending a service in a mosque, where he keenly felt the rejection of Jesus Christ by the Moslems. But he also found much that was positive – “their silence, their prostrations, and their beseeching invocations.” These he called “profoundly religious feelings.” And twice he noted: “Would Christians imitate them…all the unworthy Christians should be embarrassed, who don’t know how to pray and who daily profane our holy temples by their irreverent behavior.”

After the terrors of the Revolution and the reprisals (particularly severe in Provence in the summer of 1815), de Mazenod found there were no organizations to help the poor. He resorted to re-establishing and improving trade guilds, confraternities and mutual-aid societies, by which the poor organized themselves. He thereby anticipated today’s concern for social justice and the option for the poor.

For instance, the fishwife queen’s husband, to whom she had by now been married in church, was persuaded both by her and by de Mazenod to form a religious society of working men. In 1846 this Confraternity of St. Joseph had 1,000 members; in 1865 it numbered 2,000.

It was above all as a preacher that de Mazenod excelled. He knew how to reach the citizens of Provence, particularly the poor. He literally spoke their own language to them, the dialect called Provençal. He also forbade his priests to sprinkle their sermons with Latin expressions, unintelligible to most of the listeners.

This did not go over well with the nobility; de Mazenod had betrayed them, they felt. But the accounts of those early parish missions, and of the response of the people, still move us today. The picture of the aged bishop, pleased to have the fishwives stop his carriage, exchanging repartee with them in Provençal, brings a smile to our faces.

The goal of those parish missions, and of the foreign missions later on, was to restore people to the church through the sacrament of penance. The enthusiasm of the early Oblates for hearing confessions, not in the severe Jansenist style but in the compassionate manner of St. Alphonsus de Liguori (whose writings de Mazenod promoted), is still legendary.

Oblates Today

Oblate membership peaked at 7,628 on January 1, 1965. Thirty years later, the community had declined to 4,973. Canada, the United States and Europe have seen the greatest loss, although both Italy and Poland have significant numbers of seminarians today. The three regions of Latin America, Asia-Oceania and Africa-Madagascar are growing. All three now have more seminarians than ever.

The vitality of a religious congregation does affect the decision to canonize its founder. If a group’s numbers were everywhere decreasing, that would reflect upon the effectiveness of it founder. On the other hand, the prayer and study that go into the decision to canonize can mean a rebirth of spirituality and vigor. The living tradition that de Mazenod began gives courage to the Oblates in those regions that are currently coping with diminishing numbers and gives strength to the regions that are expanding.

Until quite recently, no American-born Oblate had served as a bishop in the United States. Since 1985, however, Rome has appointed Oblates as bishops of the dioceses of San Angelo, Texas (Michael Pfeifer, 1985), Duluth, Minnesota (Roger Schwietz, 1990, currently archbishop of Anchorage, Alaska) and Yakima, Washington (Francis George, 1990, currently cardinal archbishop of Chicago, Illinois). World-wide, there were 44 Oblate bishops and archbishops as of January 1, 1995.

American Oblates recently (1995) undertook the short-term missionary project of ministering to the Cuban refugees at the Guantanamo military base. One Oblate, himself born and raised in Cuba, found this experience to be “the greatest thing that has happened to me in my ministry as a priest and a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate. I can sympathize with the refugees, since my own vocation as an Oblate arose from my own refugee experience as an exiled child living in similar camp situations in the early 1960’s.” Unfortunately, political divisions and conflict with Protestant fundamentalists forced an early end to this work as civilian chaplains.

Eugène de Mazenod was himself no stranger to conflict. In 1974 Cardinal William Baum, who was then archbishop of Washington, helped the Oblates in that city celebrate on February 17 the anniversary of the papal approbation of their community in 1826, only 10 years after its founding. The Cardinal recalled that New York’s Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had recently been challenged by some students complaining that our times are too turbulent and chaotic. Senator Moynihan had urged these young people to read Balzac and Stendhal to see how truly chaotic the period after the French Revolution was. Turning to us, Cardinal Baum urged that we read our founder whenever we are tempted to think that our times are unredeemable.

In fact, when de Mazenod was beatified in 1975, Jean Guitton called him “the stormy bishop,” not only because of his quick temper (for which he apologized quickly), but because of the role he played in French and Vatican politics in a very stormy period. According to one survey, Eugène de Mazenod will be the first French bishop canonized since 1588, no mean accomplishment.

Many readers discovered the delights of Provence when Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence was published in 1990. This December 3 (1995), the Catholic world will be reminded of a man and a missionary order whose roots are in Provence. That man, Eugène de Mazenod, is relevant today. May his canonization inspire not only his religious community but Catholics everywhere as we prepare for Christianity’s third millennium.