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the spiritualityof the institute

four contemplations

brothers of the sacred heart

preparation bookletsfor the bicentennial, 1821 - 2021

SECOND stage:To live the present with passion

3RD booklet:The Spirituality of the Institute:

Four Contemplations

br. bernard couvillion

september 30, 2019

Cover photo:Montage based on the 2000 general

chapter logo.

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brother mauriceThis attempt to trace out dimensions of our patronal spirituality as it evolves into its third century draws its inspiration from Reverend Brother Maurice Ratté.1 It was he who led us through a spiritual re-orientation during the decades when general chapters, after training their gaze on the founder and listening to every voice in the Institute, composed and life-tested our present Rule of Life. Maurice consecrated the prime of his life to leading our Institute’s conversion to an apostolic spirituality responding to God’s decisive action in the zealous heart of Father André Coindre.

Well before his three six-year terms as vicar and then superior general, Maurice spent the year 1952-53 in Rome in a sabbatical year at the grand novitiate.2 There he set as his goal to deepen in himself the spirituality of the Sacred Heart. Taking advantage of being at the general house to mine the archives, he read every circular letter about the Sacred Heart written by superiors general from André Coindre (1825) through Brother Albertinus (1948) so he could take inspiration from how they lived our patronal spirituality.

the windowintroduction

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Brother Maurice Ratté, superior general from 1970 to 1982, led the Institute through a conversion of its spirituality.

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Chosen afterwards as spiritual leader first by his brothers in Canada and then by the whole institute, he saw it as his responsibility to be a prophetic voice calling for conversion in our approach to devotion to the Sacred Heart. The teachings of Vatican Council II, his source of spiritual food even while they were in draft form, confirmed and amplified interior convictions that grew from his experience. In the Rome archives we find letters he wrote even before the Council, while he was provincial in Canada, articulating the need for conversion. He spoke for his brothers in asserting that the multiplication of devotions, acts of piety, and recited prayers risked becoming empty formulas irrelevant to their apostolic mission: “Because we belong to an apostolic community, our duty of state is to kindle directly in others the fire of the love of God so that they do not die from the cold. This means that the prayer schedule needs to be changed in such a way as to facilitate the apostolic works and to prevent excessive fatigue.”3

On the 157th anniversary of the foundation of the Institute, he wrote a circular4 whose subtitle is “The Sacred Heart in our Apostolate.” A misunderstanding Brother Maurice hoped to eliminate from our spirituality was the two-lane approach that puts prayer in one compartment of our lives and our ministry in a completely separate one: “The love of Christ should pass through our human love in such a way that the two become one.”5

VATICAN COUNCIL II That hope of his found an echo in the teaching of the Vatican Council in the decree Growth in Love6 about unifying prayer and work: “The members of every community, seeking God solely and before everything else, should join contemplation, by which they fix their minds and hearts on Him, with apostolic love, by which they strive to be associated with the work of redemption and to spread the kingdom of God.”7

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In the context of the prevailing teaching about spirituality in religious life and in the Church before the Council, those two citations make an extraordinary–and fully intended–omission. It’s worth re-reading them carefully. Note that they say nothing about the benefits of prayer for ourselves. We are not the object of contemplation or of intercession. Instead, they presuppose self-emptying even as we pray, calling us to contemplate God’s love and the needs of others, then to find ways to serve as a channel of communication between the two.

Pope John XXIII deliberately chose to announce the Vatican Council on the Feast of the Conversion of Paul in 1958 to underline that the whole Council would be a call to conversion.

Exactly what was it about spirituality during the 1960’s that made the teaching of the Church and of Brother Maurice a call to conversion?

The Vatican II Council (1962-1965) promoted in the Church a synthesis of

prayer and action.

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The promotion in the Church of devotion to the Sacred Heart over time relied on the offer of indulgences as incentives or rewards for those who recited certain prescribed prayers. For example, the twelfth promise linked to Saint Margaret Mary assured a place in heaven for those who go to communion on nine consecutive First Fridays. The proliferation of such indulgences in the Church produced a culture of earning grace to secure good real estate behind the pearly gates.

Among the brothers, this merit-based approach to spiritual practices had become institutionalized. For example, Annuaire articles over the years published opportunities for earning indulgences; one issue devotes nine pages to cataloguing categories of indulgences– plenary, partial, attached to prayers…–some of which required that a specific religious article be held by the one seeking the indulgence.8

The brothers’ Constitutions and Rules in vigor in 1964 at the start of Brother Maurice’s service in Rome said the purpose of the Institute is to be “a common discipline … to attain eternal happiness” and “a means of [the brothers’] laboring for their own sanctification.”9 Grace had to be earned. Mass attendance had to be enforced by the pain of sin. Acts of penance were prescribed.

What had accrued over time was what can be called a spirituality of the mirror, before which we do good works and adopt religious practices which reflect back to us. We make ourselves holy. So that we can assure our progress in personal holiness, we look at ourselves in the mirror that is the Rule to compare ourselves to the ideals and virtues it holds out to us: “If you keep the Rule, the Rule will keep you.”

The Church in 1964 called religious life “the state of perfection,” and the Rule it approved for us was our path to perfection. Such a self-absorbed spirituality betrays anxiety about our salvation. At its root lies a lack of trust in God’s too-good-to-be-true promise of love, holiness, forgiveness, and eternal life.

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The call made by Vatican II to conversion by jettisoning the spirituality of merit had to do with abandoning any consideration of what we get for ourselves through our piety. It was in Light to the Nations,10 the dogmatic constitution on the Church, that the challenge to abandon the spirituality of the mirror was most emphatic: “The followers of Christ are called by God, not because of their works, but according to His own purpose and grace. They are justified in the Lord Jesus, because in the baptism of faith they truly become [children] of God and sharers in the divine nature. In this way they are really made holy. Then too, by God’s gift, they must hold on to and complete in their lives this holiness they have received.” (40)

The sound we can imagine is that of a mirror shattering, and with it the Rule and all the commands that absolutized it. The Church withdrew its sponsorship of the imperatives “Save your soul” and “Make yourselves holy.” It abolished the pedagogy of guilt and the system of rewards and punishments. It declared our Rule obsolete and mandated a new one in which all is grace.

Another sound arises. It is the mourning of generations of Catholics, among them brothers, who grew up following the spiritual map which, after incentivizing us through fear, merit, and indulgences, was discarded along with Latin and the sin of meat on Fridays. The conversion from a merit system was not easy. The sound of the mourners was a wail of resentment for being told they’d been waiting all their life in the wrong line.

There is a third sound: shouts of liberation from those, among them Brother Maurice, who had been waiting a long time to enjoy “the sublime and unending and ‘glorious freedom of the [children] of God’” (Rom. 8:21) proclaimed by Pope Paul VI.11

Fifty years after Light to the Nations changed forever the fundamental principles of the Church’s teaching on spirituality, the Catholic

Pope John XXIII proposed a new

spiritual paradigm for today’s world: an

open window.

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Theological Society of America floated its synthesis of Vatican II’s call to spiritual conversion: “God is always drawing us to deeper and deeper intimacy, away from a self-absorbed life to a Godward-directed life and to a way of living that embraces self-giving love—‘Love God with all your heart’; ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”12

Once again, our ego is not in the picture. The Church asks us to pray for conversion to a spirituality purified of me-anxiety enforced by a system of rewards and promises.

The Church fortunately didn’t just leave us there with shards of mirror around our feet on its marble floor. It exchanged the mirror for a window whose panes are clear glass—other-centered glass, if you will. On the day Pope John XXIII convoked the council, he said, “I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in.” That desire struck a deep chord. More than all the theological documents with Latin names, the image of Pope John’s window became an emblem of the Church’s conversion.

The two-way window is the Church’s new paradigm of spirituality for today’s world. In presenting a window, John intentionally didn’t propose the arched stained glass window of a cathedral. He was referring to ordinary windows like the often-shuttered ones in the papal apartments. He wanted the Church to look through transparent glass, the better to contemplate the ordinary people around us. Pope John holds up for our prayerful veneration the beautiful light of divine potential that imbues the hearts of our contemporaries. We fix our eyes, ears, and heart to contemplate “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted.”13

Brother Maurice took his light from the window of Vatican II as he promoted a decade of dialogue throughout the Institute leading to a complete rewriting of the Rule of Life during the 1970’s and 1980’s.

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John XXIII’s call to conversion gave the 55 year-old Maurice relentless energy to promote the spirituality of the window in a new approach to our patronal spirituality. He heard Jesus telling him: “Lift up your eyes and see the people, the poor, those thirsting for justice. Here is my heart; from it draw the living water for which they are searching.”14

THE HEART-CROSSUnder his leadership, many brothers, looking for a distinctive sign to express our communal conversion, began wearing a small metal cross with an open heart at its center designed by Brother Anicet Paulin of the District of Australia.

That cross quickly spread through Canada and the wider institute as an emblem of the new Rule’s point of reference for our spirituality: the open heart of Jesus on the cross. Since its design, this cross has been adapted to different cultures around the world. Later, in the U.S., Brother Anicet’s cross was slightly modified, but its significance remained unchanged: the open heart of Jesus is the window through which we look out upon our contemporaries and the wounds of their hearts.

Before long, the general chapter of 2000 gathered in Rome fifty-three brothers from thirty-three countries to join the Church in celebrating the year of the Great Jubilee. To start the Holy Year, French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray15 evoked the pierced heart of Jesus at the ceremony of opening of the Jubilee door at St. Peter’s basilica. Inspired by that ceremony, our general chapter’s preparation team commissioned a logo to set the theme for the chapter. The logo widens the open heart of our distinctive cross into the window of Vatican II.16 The cross remains, but the outline of the heart expands to form a window of four panes. In our spirituality of the window, we want to gaze on those around us through the open heart of Jesus on the cross.

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Through it, the chapter delegates contemplated how to respond to the needs of youth poor and without hope at the threshold of the third millennium. Today the same window can help us undertake four contemplations indispensable to the development of our converted spirituality.

We can call them “cardinal contemplations” because they are indispensable. Cardinal comes from the Latin word for hinge, like those on the shutters and casement windows that Pope John threw open. Our spirituality hinges on four life-long, often-repeated, and life-giving contemplations through Pope John’s open window.

Now, with the open window of the heart of Jesus as our vantage point, we will undertake four cardinal contemplations crucial to our spirituality. With spiritual ancestors important to our identity as an institute, we will

Brother Anicet Paulin designed our distinctive cross as a sign of the Institute’s new spirituality.

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deploy both of the movements of contemplation implicit in the teachings of Vatican II and of Brother Maurice: looking beyond ourselves and reaching out to respond.

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The first contemplation that Brother Maurice makes in his circular about our converted spirituality opens a window on the scene of the soldier piercing the side of Jesus. He asks us to gaze with him on those at the foot of the cross.17

He starts with the disciple whom Jesus loved.18 John had been with Jesus at some of his most intimate moments, seeing him cry over the death of his friend Lazarus and, at the last supper, resting his head on Jesus’ chest while they reclined at table.

We watch the beloved disciple interact with someone else beloved to Jesus, Mary of Magdala or Magdalene. We know less of her than we do

the beloved disciples john and magdalene

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Anton van Dyck’s “Crucifixion with

the Virgin Mary, St. John and St. Mary

Magdalene” (1619).

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of him. She had been a disciple of Jesus from the start.19 For centuries, spiritual authors depicted her as a former prostitute, conflating her with the anonymous sinful woman mentioned by Luke. However, since 1969 the Church holds that she was a distinct person, a woman of a certain social status and wealth who travelled with Jesus, helping him and the other disciples with her considerable resources. To show her importance among the disciples, Pope Francis recently elevated her feast to a par with the liturgical celebrations of the male apostles.20

As we contemplate the scene, we also discover who is not there: no Peter, no James, no Twelve. John and Magdalene are the only ones from Jesus’ band with the courage to stay close during his crisis of vulnerability and shame. To do so, they had to empty themselves of fear, doubt, and human respect. We see their resolve. They stand for “all men and women” (Rule 3) who deliberately draw close enough to Jesus to “follow the lance with their eyes.”21

THE SACRED HEART EVENTAs eyewitness to that historical event, John deliberately set out to proclaim that what he saw really happened.22 The opening words of 1 John are direct testimony.23 The two beloved disciples glimpsed “eternal life” in this “Sacred Heart event” and made it a central part of the proclamation of salvation made to, and then by, the succession of Jesus’ disciples through the ages.

Our Institute can claim to be a direct descendant of John’s proclamation of the Sacred Heart event. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, a contemporary of the beloved disciple, personally knew John and his community in nearby Ephesus. He had often heard John preach about the historicity of the Sacred Heart event.

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Polycarp passed the word on to his student, Irenaeus, who, in turn, brought it to Lyons upon being named bishop there. In that role, at about forty years of age, he quoted John’s proclamation in a letter he wrote before 200 AD.24 So Irenaeus testified to the Sacred Heart event in Lyons, where it makes its way into the preaching notes of André Coindre.25

St. Irenaeus (2nd century) testified to the “Sacred Heart event” in Lyons, where it makes its way into the preaching notes of our founder.

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DEVOTEES OR DISCIPLES?Being close to Jesus, rapt in prayerful contemplation of the mystery of his complete self-emptying, is the aspiration of a devotee. If there is anything crystal clear in the writing of Brother Maurice, it is that being a devotee is not enough. Our response must make us beloved disciples of the Sacred Heart.

What does it mean to respond as a disciple? There are Christian devotees who show their devotion by wearing the jewelry—like our distinctive cross—saying the prayers, making the retreats and devotions, and even publicly avowing their adherence, but not making the sacrificial option to live their lives with, as, and for Jesus Christ in his saving mission.

To make the spiritual journey with Brother Maurice requires disciples, not mere devotees. Disciples are like apprentices in relationship to their mentor artisans in crafts and trades. The choice to be a disciple involves a rigorous process of disciplined growth to the point of perpetuating the master’s life work. Each stage of growth is a step to the next level. The master commissions disciples to complete the work he or she has started; the master trusts the disciple to remain inspired by the ideals and original beauty he or she has introduced into the world.

At the premiere of the opera Turandot at La Scala in Milan in 1926, two years after the great composer Puccini’s death, the conductor Arturo Toscanini stopped the performance at the end of the third act, put down his baton, turned to the audience and said bluntly: “Here is where we finish the opera. At this point the master died.” By his blunt gesture, the conductor wanted to honor the great composer, of whom he was a fierce devotee. Not heard were the final two scenes, written by Franco Alfano, whose orchestration the dying master himself had directly commissioned Alfano to complete, along lines suggested by Puccini himself.

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After fifty-six years of Turandot’s being performed around the world using Toscanini’s truncated ending, an opera scholar unearthed and produced the original ending written by Alfano, whom Puccini had personally chosen. Opera critics raved, “This original is lusher, more grandly laid out, and altogether more satisfying.”26

Toscanini was a devotee; Alfano was a disciple whose contribution still lives after generations of performances. Our apostolic work as disciples was commissioned by the Master, who wants us to trust ourselves and our gifts. As disciples, if we can stay connected to Jesus at the heart, we can be faithful to his inspiration and effective in prolonging his noble mission.

To point us to true disciples, Maurice took us to the foot of the cross. The others, devotees, lost their inspiration. Of the cross, like Toscanini, they said, “This is where the master died.” Fortunately, there, beside Jesus’ mother, stood those who made the option to be disciples beyond death: John and Magdalene, who accepted the task of proclaiming his self-emptying and of taking his mission to the world.

As we convert from devotee to disciple, we need to learn from them and ask them to pray for us to become disciples like them. Praying for and cultivating an identity of disciple in their manner is the core of Brother Maurice’s message. He calls our spirituality “discipleship of the heart.” We pray to be given the heart of a disciple which grows, as with John and Magdalene, from an “experience of deep friendship with Jesus.”27 We express our spirituality not only in devotional times of prayer but in the heat of active service in our mission.

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PROCLAIMING THE RESURRECTIONAfter Nicodemus lays Jesus in the tomb and while the former disciples remain paralyzed by fear, we continue our contemplation of the two true disciples.28 As they were at the cross, they are the first responders at the grave, where the risen Jesus is awaiting Magdalene with tender patience. At pre-dawn she awakens with one thing on her mind: to find his battered body and console it with balm. Seeing the tomb open and empty unhinges her. Stolen! Desecrated! Then, hearing “Mary” pronounced in the tone of voice she knows so well, she falls to her knees and tries to throw her arms around Jesus’ legs.

After that, it’s all running and elation. She rushes to find the others: “I have seen the Lord.” John, running headlong before everyone, is the first man to reach the tomb and the first among the men to believe

An essential part of our mission is proclaiming our faith in the resurrection to the young. Biblical session in Senegal.

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what Magdalene was shouting: Not stolen, risen! Something about the conviction in her voice and about the way the linens are disposed convinces him: He is risen! Besides, grave robbers don’t leave the wrappings behind.

What does our contemplation tell us about how to respond? First, to identify ourselves as descendants of John and Magdalene, as beloved disciples who constantly keep before our eyes as our reference point the pierced heart flowing with the love of God. Then to resolve to become a source from which the living water flows.

On one level, the living water is forgiveness. John and Mary heard the risen Jesus’ commission to forgive others in his name.29 In consequence, they pardoned the other disciples who fled, who disowned Jesus, who hid, who doubted, who betrayed, who regressed into the mode of every-man-for-himself. Forgiveness is a historical saving event that works two ways: we drink in the consolation of being forgiven ourselves, and we forgive others in the name of Jesus.

According to the Church’s daily prayer, the knowledge of our salvation comes from the forgiveness of our sins.30 We don’t know we’ve been saved until we experience forgiveness. Nothing spreads the living water of salvation to young people more effectively than forgiveness. We correct them, we have them make amends, we form their sense of right, and then we forgive them. Those steps are saving acts–living waters. The experience of forgiveness is the beginning of young people’s awareness of God’s salvation. They need us for that awareness. The Lord needs us to give them that awareness.

As beloved disciples, we also respond in a second way; we broadcast the glimpse of eternal life that John and Mary witnessed while following the lance with their eyes. We proclaim their good news. As we’ve seen, our distinctive cross is one way to proclaim the centrality of the Sacred Heart event for us. That cross does capture his self-emptying

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on Golgotha, but our contemplation of Mary and John goes beyond Golgotha to the scene during which the beloved disciples shout about Jesus’ rising from the tomb.

An essential part of our response is proclaiming to the young our faith in the resurrection, which means that the world has felt an influx of the risen Christ. Like the beloved disciples, we believe that the risen Jesus is the New Adam who involves us and the whole of humanity in his destiny of newness.31

IMAGES OF JOHN EUDESSince it is not our vocation to be preachers or ministers of the sacraments, one way we can proclaim the resurrection to the young is through images. We can present images of the Sacred Heart to the young as post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. In the 17th century in France, John Eudes32 imagined the power of such images. He promoted the first versions of an icon of Jesus with his arms raised in blessing and his pierced heart exposed on his chest. Margaret Mary knew that image, as did a mystic in the Eudist tradition, Sister Mary of the Divine Heart. We have all seen variations of such an image in the form of the statues, pictures, and banners that gained wide currency in the French school of spirituality and later throughout the world. They have inspired artists and sculptors of many cultures. One is on the cover of Brother Maurice’s circular.

The exterior heart is important in the spirituality of John Eudes. It might be helpful to look at it the way he did. He believed that the true mystery of the heart is interior. However, not being a contemplative mystic but an active missionary, he was a realist. What he sees in the image are two hearts, one exterior and one interior: “In the interior is a permanent disposition of availability; nevertheless it is always expressing itself

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The Sacred-Heart image, widespread since the XVII century, is an expression of our faith in the passion, death and resurrection of Christ.

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through active external gestures in real time and in changing ways. The inner heart generates active initiatives of love to express its inexhaustible riches. Thus, the loving disciple can, at one and the same time, dwell within this expansive double heart, rooting himself in a lasting home–a state of being–while forging outward to invent ways of living the inner mystery through outgoing public action–a state of doing.”33

John Eudes’ icon of Jesus with an interior heart and an exposed one is an undeniable proclamation of the resurrection. It says that the Risen Lord is still present in the world. What the outer heart adds is a reminder that the resurrection didn’t happen without the events of his passion, his wounds, and his death. It also emphasizes how central to our salvation was the visible Sacred Heart event.

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andré coindre and brother xavier

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We open our second cardinal contemplation by looking in on Brother Xavier34 at his desk in the Pieux-Secours, the providence for at-risk boys that André Coindre founded in the Croix-Rousse sector of Lyons. The young priest relied heavily on Xavier, first as a layman and then as a brother. So caught up in the founder’s hopes and charismatic vision was he that he came to personify the mission of Pieux-Secours. He was the founder’s beloved disciple.

After spending twenty-one years immersed in the work which was the visible heart of our founder, it is he now who, like John the beloved disciple, takes the role of eyewitness-evangelist. The whole project of Pieux-Secours, which André had endowed with his own money, inspired with his original spiritual vision, and given up his health, is in danger of collapse due to labor unrest and financial uncertainties. Xavier wants

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to proclaim and immortalize it for us. He starts his memoirs with these words: “In 1817, Father Coindre, seeing the hospitals and prisons of Lyons filled with young people, resolved to form a sanctuary to gather them together, away from all danger.”35

What Xavier is doing is extraordinary. He is describing André living the spirituality of the window. He is contemplating André in the act of contemplating young people who languished in the hospitals and prisons of Lyons. In our first cardinal contemplation, we watched Jesus’ final days in Jerusalem through the eyes of the two beloved disciples. We will now crisscross Lyons to contemplate our founder through the eyes of the disciple who knew him best and loved his vision first.

French Brothers Jean-Pierre Ribaut, expert editor of critical editions of five volumes of Father Coindre’s writings with Brother Guy Dussault; Rene Sanctorum, in his paper “Born in Prison”36; Our Institute was born

from the prophetic imagination of our founder,

Father André Coindre.

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and, before them, Jean Roure, in his illustrated Chronology37 continued and deepened the contemplation Xavier began. They, along with Spanish Brothers Jesús Ortigosa and José Luis Gómez and Canadian Brothers Guy Brunelle and Louis-André Bellemare, added compelling detail that could be discovered only by intense prayerful research undertaken with loving contemplation.

ANDRÉ COINDRE’SCONTEMPLATIVE GAZEWe watch as the thirty-year-old priest climbs into a raised pulpit to preach, as his clerical superiors attested, “with exceptional talent.” This he did countless times, to outstanding effect. His preaching has a theatrical flair, as a report by a lieutenant on duty shows: “He suddenly takes off his surplice saying he is not worthy to wear it, puts a rope around his neck and declares that he deserves the shame. Holding the end of the rope with one hand and a candle in the other, he delivers a timely oration. The Sisters and prison administrators present are all holding candles. One of the prisoners condemned to a life sentence begins to cry and wail; others are drawn in. Even the Sisters get caught up in it.”38

After that sermon, one of André’s colleague priests who was an eye-witness wrote to their common superior to report what no one else saw. “Coindre was suffering shooting pains of gout to the point of being unable to walk. … It takes magnanimity and courage to be with these unfortunate prisoners, who are often embittered and rebellious. It also takes tact and special aptitudes that are not given to everyone.”39

André’s sensitivity to and contemplation of the plight of prisoners heightened as he regularly visited the penal houses of Lyons. What especially caught his eye and filled his heart was the number of young

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boys incarcerated together with what he called “perverse men.” There were no cells. Prisoners of all ages roamed in vast halls and yards. They slept on straw covered with tattered rags, passing the day in idleness. Records from the period show that there were 155 children under twelve years of age in the Charity hospice; there were 20 boys and 180 men detainees in the prison of Saint Joseph.

André felt urgent compassion for the boys, especially the youngest: “They need personal attention to restore their dignity. They’re guilty at an age when boys are more reckless than incorrigible. They need to be surrounded by good and separated from the contamination that’s closing in on them.”40

On June 2, 1817 he visited the hospice of L’Antiquaille. That day, he made a life-changing contemplation of his own. He describes it in

The Hospice of L’Antiquaille, a critical turning point in André Coindre’s encounter with youth in prison.

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one of his sermons: “I see young modest people who are led to visit these prisoners. I see their serious demeanor, their poised attitude, their smiling faces and the serene manner which are their distinguishing features and which form a striking contrast to the hideous faces of the incredulous young people within. They approach. The locks open with great noise; it opens into a dark holding pen. I hear the noise of the chains as the bodies move and I see an unfortunate one stretched out on the straw, raising his shackles; perhaps he thought that it was the visit of a harsh guard whose job was to ensure his discomfort. The young prisoner’s face is fearful. But he notices that these are angels of peace coming to visit him. Then joy is reborn on his face. Life flows in his veins, he smiles, he hopes, he has a moment of happiness. He kisses the hand of his benefactors. It pains him to see them leave …”41

André’s gaze on the suffering prisoners changes to contemplate of a group of young lay people. He learns that these “angels of peace” are members of a lay congregation, an affiliation led by a banker named Benoît Coste. This association, guided by a church-approved charter, delighted the prison administration. As time went on, the Royal Society of Prisons asked some of its members to form a permanent prison advisory commission. One of them, Mr. Forcrand de l’Isle, a property owner of the city, was asked to lead that commission.

Later, André is touched by one of the improvements that Coste and Forcrand de l’Isle were able to show him: a large hall for children under sixteen where twenty of them are busy with different tasks under the supervision of a prisoner, condemned himself, whose demeanor is appropriate to his role. Besides lessons in religion given by the chaplain, on Sundays the children receive instruction from the young men and women visitors. These were well-meaning, but André sees that their rote method of hammering catechism into them would need softening.

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EMPATHYHe is moved to admiration and consolation. He can see the possibilities. Yes, in the prisons there are men “corrupt to the bone,” in the words of Mr. Coste, but André’s gaze discovers youths who are simply lost, whose weakness, hunger, or misguided sentiments led them to commit a first offense. He meets children with no parental discipline or support. In Coste and the other members of the lay congregation, André finds kindred spirits who believe that hope in the transformation of these child prisoners must never be lost.

That day at l’Antiquaille, André’s faith in the divinizing power of baptism merges with feelings of empathy that have passed into him from the heart of God. A kind of prophetic imagination awakens. His zeal ignites. Couldn’t the children be given real teachers who can teach them to read, write, and calculate and give them moral instruction? Wouldn’t they be freed from vagrancy and vice by learning an honest trade? Couldn’t they be taken from the prison into a place of refuge and useful employment?

André’s seminary formation had put him in contact, through the Sulpicians, with the spirituality of the French school. Its leader, Cardinal Bérulle, insisted on the mission of the Church to the poorest: “As often as you do it to the least of my brothers, you do it to me.” (Mt. 25:40) Yet André’s clerical superiors, jealous that “he consecrates himself entirely to good works, notably in the prisons,” deplored among themselves that he was “wasting on small projects an exceptional talent for preaching.”42

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PROPHETIC OPTIONAndré is caught in a dilemma. His heart is in a tug-of-war between loyalty to his priestly duties and his zealous compassion stoked by a haunting quote from Jesus, “I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were blazing already” (Lk 12:49). He resolves his dilemma by making an act of total self-emptying. He will dedicate every free moment he has outside of his priestly ministry and will find the money and staff to rescue as many boys as he can.

After two preliminary trials at other locations, he founded Pieux-Secours, gathering the leaders of the lay congregation and the prison commission into a board of benefactors and managers to administer it. That was a bold prophetic decision. It meant buying a silk factory and engaging Guillaume Arnaud as foreman. They called the new venture a providence: a sanctuary of second chance and a school for life.

This process, through which André arrived at his second vocation to be an advocate for despairing youth, reveals four movements of the spirituality he bequeathed to us. First, he enters the world of those marginalized, then he contemplates them with attention. Thirdly, like the prophets, he unites himself to God’s feelings of compassion and empathy, and finally he acts with prophetic decisiveness.

He doesn’t settle for simple humanitarian gestures to solve an immediate need; he seeks a long term, definitive solution. He starts by trying to place the released boys in existing schools, but the doors of “respectable establishments” are closed to them. Those are led by adults who will not take responsibility for such street kids, considered to “have delinquency in their DNA” … to be “intransigent.” André doesn’t see boys that way and believes that God doesn’t either. He formulates a pedagogy based on trust in the possibilities of their baptism and of their innate human dignity.

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A Jacquard loom, similar to those bought by Father André Coindre for boys to apprentice in the silk industry of Lyons.

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Today we place André Coindre’s initiative among works of justice because it goes beyond the comfort charity offered by the “angels of peace,” down to the roots of an unjust system needing transformation in light of the Gospel. Yes, André was touched by those rescuing youth in prison. All the same, he invested himself in preventive solutions, inventing an institution to rescue young people from idleness and ignorance in order to keep them from landing in prison in the first place. Inspired by the lay congregation, he, as an apostle of Christian hope, made a unique contribution to the reform of the French penal system and to the lives of the children it detained.

We move our contemplative gaze out from Lyons to the provincial towns, where André and his missionary team are preaching parish missions. There he becomes preoccupied by the pitiful post-revolution deterioration of village primary schools. Middle-class children in cities had at least some opportunities for education, but rural ones, often conscripted for field labor, couldn’t read or write. Where schools did exist, pupils suffered the violence of unscrupulous teachers with little education and less pay.

André began working with village pastors to assure what would become a faith-based school system born of his spirituality: taking a God’s-eye-view of the unjust suffering of children, feeling God’s heart beating for them, then acting decisively to make systemic change. He founded and staffed an impressive network of schools in towns whose flagging faith or precarious means had robbed them of hope. With only fifty brothers, most of whom he had personally recruited, he opened twelve schools in three years.

To denounce evil and injustice and then imagine a more humanizing, hope-filled alternative is the work of a prophet. In the United States Province, its 2017 provincial chapter adopted a Core Statement, calling the province to contemplate those at the periphery. By doing so, it was

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asking the province’s brothers and lay partners to follow the spiritual movements of our founder. It was not easy for him. But, despite the pressures his superiors kept on him to forsake his “little projects” in favor of mainstream sacramental ministries, it was never an “either-or” choice for him. He would feed both fires the Lord lit in his passionate heart even if it meant burning out in an early, humiliating death not unlike the one the beloved disciples of our previous contemplation witnessed, mourned, and proclaimed.

OUR CONTEMPLATIONIn this contemplation we watched Brother Xavier compose the first line of his memoirs: “In 1817 Father Coindre, seeing the hospitals and prisons of Lyons filled with young people, resolved to found an

Like Andre Coindre, we are looking for long-term solutions to the injustices of the world. A group of young people from Lagunas, Peru, march on the

anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si”.

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establishment to gather them together, away from all danger.” From that one sentence we can re-learn how to contemplate in the manner of our founder, who, inspired by the French school of spirituality, prayed in two movements, each with progressive steps:

SEE with our heart:

1. Contemplation through the window: gaze attentively upon youth at the periphery.

2. Empathy: ask the Spirit to place in our heart God’s feelings for those whom we regard.

ACT by using our gifts:

3. Go out: enter their world to meet them face to face and speak to them heart to heart.

4. Resolve: with prophetic imagination, consider how to respond in lay-religious collaboration.

5. Invest: commit time and money and mobilize the gifts of support persons.

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To make the third cardinal contemplation through the window of our cross, we travel back in time to Lyons in 1818. From the Saône River we climb the switchbacks of a pedestrian passageway to arrive at the quarter of Croix Rousse. We reach a solid rampart anchored to Fort St-Jean, which once protected an extensive Carthusian monastery. Its former land holdings have been sectioned off into privately owned parcels of businesses and estates. The corner parcel nearest the fort is our destination. André Coindre has made a silk factory there the keystone of his vision for the boy prisoners. He bought it with his father from a silk merchant because of the possibilities offered by its seven room-sized industrial looms ideally equipped for boys to apprentice in Lyons’ silk industry.

jean, vincent, lespinasse and stéphanie

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37Jean, Vincent, Lespinasse and Stéphanie, four teenagers whom Father André Coindre met, welcomed, and guided.

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BUILDING A SANCTUARYThe final line of Rule of Life 6 speaks of our vision of “building the earthly city so that it will be founded on and renewed in Christ.” We are here to contemplate the very first establishment inspired by that vision of an earthly city rebuilt on Christ, which the general chapter of 2006 called “the sanctuary of our mission.”

André named this innovative sanctuary Pieux-Secours, which in English translates as Godly Help. The awkwardness of the hyphenated name takes nothing away from its genius. It is perfect short hand to describe our spirituality of two movements. The first word, an adjective, describes us, bonded to God. The second word, Help!, the cry of a person in need, elicits our response. We, saved, reach out to save. We, grateful, pay our gifts forward. We, faith-filled, do works. André wanted Godly Help to be a permanent human institution whose name professes its divine origin so the boys living there might know that God sends real help, not just lovely sentiments, in the form of the compassionate and competent adults who make up his Body.

We linger at Pieux-Secours to look through its rows of tall windows at the boys inside at serious work on sophisticated looms alive with noisy hope. André contemplates, then describes the young weavers to the civic community and its leaders, from whom he is seeking funding pledges and moral support: “Some are children who have in the past given their parents serious cause for concern due to their intransigence or the gravity of their offenses. Some of them, free-spirited and independent, are reluctant to give themselves over to any sedentary occupations; they often wander on the docks and public squares, a prey to all the evils of vagrancy and to the wiles of unsavory characters. Others have recently been victims of the behaviors from which it is our aim to shelter them. They were young prisoners who, having been incarcerated for a more or less lengthy period, find that no one will give them work. However, they

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are deserving of the special concern and of individual attention which has for some time been exercised on their behalf in an effort to set them on the path of goodness.”44

FOUR YOUTHSResearchers at André Coindre International Center45 have discovered the names and stories of some of the young people, all early teenagers, whom André knew personally. We contemplate them with the help of an artist’s rendering46 and a thumbnail sketch drawn from Lyons’ municipal archives.

Jean Corroi was twelve when his father, a lumberjack, died, and his mother, a washerwoman with no means, brought him to Father Coindre so he could be enrolled. In place of usual primary school classes, Jean and several companions his age learn reading, writing, calculating, and religion while learning how to operate looms. He works several hours a day weaving cloth to be sold. The money from his work is saved in an account held for him until he finishes his eight-year program at the age of twenty. In this way he would have both a skill and a bank account at the time of his graduation. Jean died of an unknown illness before he completed his contract. The name written over the drawing comes from a list of names in the founder’s handwritten notes.

Vincent Briançon was thirteen when he met Father Coindre. In his town, Annecy, there was strong Catholic-Protestant animosity. His father, a stout Protestant, who operated a hardware store, threatened and beat Vincent because he wanted to abandon his father’s faith to join the Catholic side of the family. But Vincent was headstrong. To escape the violence at home, he ran away to stay with his Catholic relatives. When his father came looking for him, they hid him for four hours in a closet of the church sacristy. Eventually they disguised him as a girl, spirited

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him out of town, then passed him to other relatives until he made his way to Lyons, where a priest gave him clothes and brought him to Pieux-Secours. There he encountered about twenty other boys. Eventually the police tracked Vincent there and brought him back to his family. His signature comes from a police form.

Lespinasse. We only have his last name. Father Coindre writes of him in his letters, once complaining that Lespinasse liked to pry into everybody’s affairs to ferret out news. The name on the drawing is in the founder’s handwriting. Lespinasse was an accomplished weaver. He taught other boys and new brothers how to work the looms, state-of-the-art industrial technology in 1818. He resisted discipline; one night he slipped out of the dormitory and was on the verge of being expelled,

View of Lyons from the Croix-Rousse sector, where André Coindre founded Pieux Secours

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but Father Coindre persuaded the brothers to keep him, correct him, and bring him around.

Stéphanie Simon was the youngest of four sisters. Both parents died when she was an infant; Father Coindre got to know the girls when he was assistant pastor in Bourg. Her legal guardian, an uncle, neglected her, so her oldest sister took charge of her, but Stéphanie did not want school. By the time she was fourteen she had been to five. Nothing was working out, so she writes to Father Coindre for help. The signature we have comes from a letter to him in which she tells a lie to manipulate him so she can leave school again and be an apprentice. Two of her sisters, fearing for her virtue, become very upset when their eldest sister gave in to “Fannie” by letting her live unsupervised behind a dress shop. Father Coindre asks a young woman, a florist, to take her in and give her work.

OUR GAZEAs we contemplate them, we ask for the grace to see these teenagers as André—and God—did. Rather than dwell on their sneaky, insubordinate, and ambiguous behaviors or their illiteracy and immaturity, he saw their possibilities, which he called “noble hopes.” By working closely with them, he discovered that the best approach is to avoid taking their manipulations personally and instead to contemplate their wounds. By doing so, he learned that their endurance of pain was a gauge of their deeper worth.

Our first contemplation was of Jesus’ wounds. André’s example shows that it doesn’t rest there. For us as educators, contemplating the wounds and sufferings of Jesus inevitably turns our contemplative gaze from him to the cries inside the hearts of young people: of those spiritually and materially rejected, of those with parents distant due to death or indifference, of those running away from violence, of those pierced by

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syringes, of youth for whom Christian images are superficial emblems like brand names rather than icons of deep interior realities...

The active phase of our spirituality needs to deploy itself in institutions where we can salvage today’s Jean Corrois before they become dispirited and callow. Can we also find ways of rescuing the Stéphanies, allergic to institutions, who know more indifference than love, along with the Lespinasses, wounded by contact with delinquents? Can we also welcome the Vincents who are running away from a religion that threatens or manipulates them, or who don’t frequent “respectable establishments”? Our spirituality properly lived will send us to the highways and byways to contemplate youth needing a sanctuary of healing and safe structure for growing up.

THE FIVE WOUNDSThe Rule of Life holds up for our contemplation five wounds of youth: ignorance, neglect, dechristianization, misery, and injustice.47

Ignorance is an intellectual wound. Jean Corroi was of the hardscrabble generation thwarted by revolutionary war convulsions. With no schooling, no father, and a mother doing full-time servile work, he was illiterate, unskilled and consequently vulnerable to every type of exploitation. Today the wound of ignorance scars growing numbers of unschooled children, drop-outs and victims of sub-par systems of education.

Neglect is the fruit of indifference. It creates affective wounds like the estrangement of Stéphanie, a burden for her indifferent guardian and an object of contention among her sisters. Starved for affection, she had no place to call home and no capacity to make friends except through manipulation and flirtatiousness.

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At his Nobel acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel, who spent his childhood in Nazi death camps, said, “Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be at the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that’s being dead.”48

Dechristianization is a spiritual wound that André saw incapacitating all four teens, with the possible exception of Vincent, who made the Catholic restoration an intentional part of his identity in opposition to his father. The banning of religion had been a rallying cry of the revolutionaries; it left children without a spiritual or moral compass. Today’s generation, often getting no religious upbringing at home, stays away from the Church in reaction to religious hypocrisy, judgmental pastors, and abuse by clergy. Many believing youths feel the wound of ridicule from peers. Dechristianization’s twin sister is materialism, a fascinating seductress with no depth or conviction.

Misery is a material wound. The word in English connotes an emotional state of unhappiness or woe; we feel miserable about many things, like misfortune, illness, or failure. The Rule’s original text, though, is French, where the first meaning of misery is material poverty verging on destitution. Jean Corroi and his mother were reduced to misery. Today extreme poverty may not be overt in some countries, but everywhere we see child mortality rates rising and the gap between the rich and the poor widening dramatically. Poor children are wounded by malnutrition, unemployment, immigration, neglect, and, like Jean, early death.

Injustice is a social wound, one we saw festering in the prison system of Lyons in a way disproportionately oppressive to children. Another flagrant social injustice to children which André Coindre sought to

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address both at Pieux-Secours and in the villages where he opened schools was the plague of child labor, which was stripping illiterate youth of their right to education and their hope for a productive future.

THE WOUND OF INJUSTICEOf those five wounds, the most resistant to healing is injustice. In our 200-year history, there have been heroic efforts of prophetic response to crass injustice. Mr. Maurice Hartstein, an alumnus of the successor school to Pieux-Secours, Saint Louis College, documented what happened to him, a Jewish boy during the Nazi occupation of France in 1943. At the age of eight, he was standing in line with his grandmother to board a bus secretly destined for Auschwitz when a family friend stole him away to Lyons. Another family contact who lived near the school asked Brother Vital Freycenet, principal, to take Maurice in for hiding and schooling. Vital’s act of civil disobedience saved the boy’s life.

“In accepting me,” said Mr. Hartstein, “Brother Vital was taking big risks in occupied Lyons; Klaus Barbie49 was in charge of the Gestapo in [nearby] Caluire. If I had been discovered, Brother Vital also would have been arrested. He was aware of that from the beginning. I remember how touched I was the day of his death in February 1945 when we students went up in groups to kneel next to his bed and hold his hand. We all loved him dearly for his help during those difficult times.”50

On the basis of Hartstein’s documentation of what happened to him, the French association for recognition of the Just Among the Nations enrolled Brother Vital in its Book of Guardians of Life in December 2002. The purpose of the honor, as the award certificate says, is to preserve the memory of his courageous justice for generations to come. Brother Vital’s story awakens us to the heroic possibilities of working

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Brother Vital was recognized as one of the “Just Among the Nations”. His story awakens us to the heroic possibilities of

working for justice as an educator.

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for justice as an educator. He was 100% educator, spending fifty-three years at St. Louis as prefect, teacher and director. He and the brothers who hid children in other schools in France at the time didn’t flinch at taking risks on the road to justice at a time when the merging traffic included machines of war and trains of death.

We have been contemplating the five wounds of youth cited in the Rule of Life and encountered in our stories. What is important to our spirituality is Jesus’ word that the wounds of youth are inseparable from his own five wounds. It is certainly not a stretch to add another line to the blessing he spoke in Matthew chapter 25: “As often as you have contemplated the scars of the least of my brothers, you have contemplated mine.”

Far from being a morose exercise, our contemplation of children’s wounds is for them a gage of hope: “Finally somebody cares about what I’m going through!” “At last, someone’s listening!” “I found a doctor who asked me where I hurt.” Carolyn Byers Ruch, a child victim of abuse, tells us how important it is to recognize a child’s wounds: “I was just four when a hired teenage field hand attempted to molest me. Miraculously, I got away, and I told my dad. My father made three important choices that day: he listened to me, he believed me, and he took action. I was one of the fortunate ones—I had a childhood.”

Jesus wanted to understand what the epileptic boy in Mark’s gospel was suffering and so he took time to listen, without flinching, to the boy’s father’s stories.51 “Bring him to me. … How long has this been happening to him?” He made the boy’s convulsions the subject of his prayer, then scolded the disciples for not doing so themselves.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray to God for what they need: daily bread, forgiveness, delivery from evil. In the Gospel story of the epileptic boy he teaches them how to pray for what a wounded child needs. We, disciples of Jesus’ compassion, have particular interest in learning what he is trying to teach his disciples

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about prayer. It is this: since we are active disciples in a city of youth, a large part of our prayer has got to be the contemplation of their wounds and addictions. Our spirituality, kick-started by the contemplation of Jesus’ wounds, runs on the fuel of God-given empathy for the pains of youth.

THREE PHASES OF CONTEMPLATIONThe prayer for the young which Jesus proposes to us in this story has three distinct phases:

1. At the window: we contemplate their personal suffering and the social evil that wounds them.

2. In our place of prayer: we ask for the grace of two kinds of empathy

- to feel a heartfelt connection with their suffering, and

- to experience the same emotions God feels toward them.

3. In the earthly city where we encounter them: we transform our prayer into action

- by silencing our voice and our defenses to listen actively to them, and

- by entering their life and advocating on their behalf against evils that wound them.

Perhaps that outline feels like a sterile prescription. There is a remarkable Caravaggio painting52 that can breathe some life into it. The artist paints a wholly human scene, without halos or mystical embellishments. The risen Jesus has contemplated Thomas and accepts the apostle’s disbelief as well as his isolating himself from community. Then, in the scene itself, Caravaggio depicts a double contemplation—of the wound of

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Caravaggio’s masterpiece gives us a model for our contemplation of young people. We will not believe in them unless we probe their

scars and contemplate the wound in their heart.

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Jesus and of the incredulity of Thomas. Thomas’ tattered garb expresses the disgrace he feels about his refusal.

In the scene, Jesus makes no reproaches, but meets the doubter on his own terms. He presents his own wound as an honor and a part of his identity. He actively draws the doubter’s hand to touch it. The three men’s concerted gaze demonstrates the dynamics of contemplation: curiosity, surprise, wonder, and intimacy. The atmosphere is suffused by a pleasing light from above casting an Easter glow.

In the scene that follows this one in the Gospel, Jesus speaks first to Thomas and then to us: “Blessed are you who, not having seen with your eyes, have contemplated with your heart and grasped that new life passes through a wound, yours and that of others.”

Caravaggio’s masterpiece gives us a model for our contemplation of difficult young people. We put impulsive youth in the place of Jesus. We are their doubters. We will not believe in them unless we probe their scars and contemplate the wound in their heart.53

Accepting children and teenagers often involves having to overcome our tendency to reject them when they behave badly. It involves getting beyond conduct that repels us. Our spirituality can help us resist defining them by their behaviors. André Coindre’s approach was to avoid taking their self-inflated stands personally and instead contemplate their wounds. Negative behaviors and refusals are teenagers’ ways of acting out their sufferings. In accepting a teenager as she or he is, we don’t condone repulsive behavior; we correct it, all the while trying to appreciate and heal the wound which it disguises.

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brother albertinus

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In the first contemplation, we witnessed the Sacred Heart event through the eyes of the beloved disciples John and Magdalene. In the second, we joined Xavier observing André Coindre as he contemplated boys languishing in the prison-hospice of l’Antiquaille and the villages of Haute-Loire. In the third, we contemplated wounded youth.

This fourth one affords us a glimpse into the heart of one of the brothers who served a long term as superior general.54 It is not his length of service, however, which calls us to know him better, but the depth of the theology from which he drew his spiritual life.

All of the circulars Brother Albertinus wrote during his prolonged tenure formed a series on the spirituality of the Mystical Body, a theme onto which he grafted each aspect of our religious and apostolic life. He was the only superior general ever to adopt for his circulars an overall plan and a spiritual vision that was both theological and practical. The

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Brother Albertinus, superior general from 1937 to 1952, as a young brother took leave of France in order to save his prophetic identity.

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series is a remarkable synthesis on which we need to dwell as we refine our spirituality for a new century.

The Rule of Life’s first chapter, of which Brother Maurice Ratté was the principal author, makes allusion to Brother Albertinus’ spiritual keystone in article 3: “With all men and women we are called to holiness in keeping with a personal vocation in the Mystical Body.” The Rule evokes the Mystical Body again in the chapter on the Sacred Heart—this time not in relation to our holiness but to our participation in Christ’s sufferings55.

Albertinus expressed his keen spiritual awareness of being mystically attached to the risen Body of Christ not just by his written and spoken words—which were profuse—but by the story of his life.56 Let us contemplate both.

EXILEDuring the days when the Masonic French government was systematically strangling the freedom of Catholic education, the so-called “law of the associations” was passed in 1901. It informed religious congregations that they could no longer continue to exist in France without express official recognition. The law was applied with unheard-of rigor, and any request for authorization was rejected without appeal. The brothers, then, had only two alternatives: to leave France in exile or to abandon their vocation and run secular state schools. Brother Albertinus, teacher at the novitiate of Paradis at the age of 23, didn’t hesitate an instant: “I will take leave of France and save my vocation.”57

At the beginning of 1903, the government ordered the brothers to vacate Paradis. Shortly afterwards came the dreaded visit of the process-server to take inventory in preparation for a public liquidation auction. Brother Austin, a postulant at the time, fills in some interesting details.

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“We had hurriedly removed a good part of the furniture, which we hid in barns belonging to our friends in town. The most difficult thing to save were the pews from the chapel; they were made of solid walnut.

“The boarding students were sent home. A number of postulants and novices had already returned to their families since their parents would never consider letting them be exiled. The rest of us, about twenty, were placed in the charge of Brother Albertinus to get ready for our exile to America. With the departure date close, we were given permission to bid farewell to our parents and friends. Albertinus himself went to his family home in Haute Loire.

“It was quite natural that his family would use any stratagem they could to dissuade him from leaving France. ‘It’s just too sad,’ kept repeating his sister Augustine, ‘to see you leave us just like that.’ Everyone was telling him, ‘You’ll easily find a place here; stay with us.’ But all of those efforts, instead of unsettling him, made him laugh. His response to the urgent pleas from his own flesh and blood was, ‘The boys who are leaving with me have absolutely no hesitation about sacrificing everything. I’m like their father, so I must set an example and be a model.’ And he returned resolutely to Paradis.”

The exile of religious congregations from France was the final solution of the masonic government, after onerous laws of regulation, taxation, persecution, and mandatory military service failed to break the congregations’ resolve to perpetuate education based on faith. Over fifty orders in France were dissolved and their properties, including churches, confiscated. About 30,000 religious men and women fled the country in exile,58 so Brother Albertinus and his group of twenty leaving their homeland in 1903 were a microcosm of a multidirectional caravan of religious educators who chose their vocation over their homeland.

“After we returned,” continues Austin, “we took off our cassocks and put on secular clothes that someone bought for us in Le Puy. We were all

Cartoon of the Minister Émile Combes illustrating the French government’s persecution of Catholic education, as published in «Le

Pèlerin» in 1902.

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dressed in different colors, black being predominant. Brother Albertinus wore a gray suit, in which he seemed to be drowning. Everyone knows that he had no clue about how to buy clothes, then or later. Those of us going to Metuchen were eight postulants, six novices, two scholastics, and two young brothers.

“We were to depart from Le Havre March 21 [1903]. We took the train from Le Puy to Paris, where we stayed two days in the brothers’ school there. We visited the city and made a pilgrimage to Montmartre. Brother Albertinus stayed with [us] even though he had a cousin in Paris whom he would very much have liked to visit. Later he received a letter from that cousin saying, ‘I would have loved to see you. ... You’re at the head of a column of refugees like a true Moses leading his people across the desert to the Promised Land to escape the wrath of Pharaoh. You, dear cousin, have escaped the hatred of people who are more evil than Pharaoh.’

“After our visit to Paris,” Austin continues, “we took the train for Le Havre and boarded the steamer La Champagne, a vessel which, next to the United States or the Queen, seemed tiny, and had no chance of winning the blue ribbon in a race across the ocean. It was going to take us nine days to reach New York.

“We had a good start; Brother Albertinus put on a charming demeanor during the whole crossing, letting no one see his pain at being deported into exile. On March 31, we finally docked at New York, where Brother Stanislaus of the U.S. province was waiting to drive us to Metuchen.”59

Albertinus’ biographer picks up the story.60 Right away, the young Frenchmen began studying English under the direction of the provincial. From the outset, the newly-arrived exiles mixed well enough with the American postulants and novices. Brother Albertinus served all as master and director. From the beginning, he lent himself generously to

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the task of formation director and didn’t hold anything back in making life agreeable within his group and among the young Americans.

As master of novices he was also in charge of the professed brothers in the house. He regularly had interviews with the young men in formation, and he was also conscientious about spending time listening to the older brothers. He consecrated all the time they needed for each one to share with him their difficulties and their complaints. He listened sympathetically and offered sound counsel. It is not always an easy thing to keep the peace among the various members of communities in large houses like Metuchen. Nevertheless, Albertinus had a knack for it.

The years of World War I from 1914 to 1918 passed peacefully enough at Metuchen. All the same, at the beginning some heated arguments threatened to drive the brothers apart. Albertinus, who was at his best in managing difficult situations, convinced everyone to avoid speaking of the partisan controversies of the war, which most did judiciously for the sake of peace in the community.

The year 1921 marked the centennial of the foundation of the Institute. The brothers had a gala private celebration at the novitiate on the feast of the Sacred Heart. On the following Sunday, Church dignitaries from far and wide came to the parish to join the brothers in celebrating the glorious centenary of the Institute.

The story of Albertinus’ exile and spiritual leadership is a critical—even legendary—stage in the Institute’s spiritual voyage. Formed at Chirac, Paradis and Metuchen, his stature increased when he spread his wings in the wider Institute. After six years as provincial, in 1931 he was elected to the general council, headquartered in Renteria in Spanish Basque country. Six years later, the general chapter chose him for the office of superior general, which he fulfilled with charisma and stamina during the most trying of times.

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His fifteen years at the head of the Institute coincided with the fratricidal and demoralizing era of the Spanish civil war and World War II, during which the general council was marooned in Paradis. In France and Italy, fighting was carried on with all the bitterness of despair. Many young French brothers were interned in Germany; France was occupied; fifty French brothers died. Nazi officers headquartered themselves in our buildings in Paradis. Communications with the Institute were stifled. Discouragement reigned.

Being unable to travel, Albertinus was ironically exiled within France. This second exile cut him off from the brothers on four continents whom he was called to hearten and unite. It was only in 1942 that he contrived to make his way across the Atlantic to relieve the anxiety of the North American brothers as well as those in South America.

Brother Albertinus sailed to the USA in March 1903 on the steamer “La Champagne.” He was in charge of around twenty young men.

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PROPHETIC SPIRITUALITYThe letter he had received back in 1903 at the outset of his first exile comes back to mind: “You are a true Moses…” Weren’t those words written by a cousin calling him a prophet, ultimately a call from God?

When he announced, “I will take leave of France and save my vocation,” it was not so much his state of life that was imperiled. It was his identity as a prophet. The French Third Republic was exiling teaching congregations because they were dangerous to its values, most importantly Church-state separation and the government’s desire to run a school system based on republican tenets. Albertinus could not conceive of purging from education all that had to do with faith. He could not see himself as an instructor in a faithless school or as a promoter of secular culture. He would resist, and rail against, exiling God and spiritual formation from the school.

In contemplating Albertinus as prophet at the end of the first century of our Institute, we have much to consider about heightening our spiritual identity as prophets at the end of the second. The single ordinance of the general chapter of 2012 was a call from God for us to be prophets: “That the whole Institute—brothers, local communities, partners in mission, and educational teams—commit itself with renewed determination and in a spirit of ongoing conversion, to highlight the prophetic dimension of its mission.”61

In his report to the 2018 general chapter, Reverend Brother Jose Ignacio Carmona spoke of our prophetic mission to marginalized youth, which was a recurring theme in his circulars. The chapter itself, led by Reverend Brother Mark Hilton, turned us to the iconic Emmaus story as a path toward a challenging religious life. Its ordinance stressed ongoing collaborative formation in our charism and meaningful presence to the young to keep our hearts burning within us.

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Here, in a reflection about our spirituality, is not the place to explore practical decisions for living that ordinance in our mission; the chapter led a special discernment process to that end. This is the place, however, to consider the gifts of faith and prayer we must implore to be able to imagine and accept our prophetic vocation. The general chapter said that our mission will be prophetic only to the extent that it flows from a deep experience of God and from the perception that God is truly near to us. 62

BEING THE COMPASSION OF CHRISTFortunately, we have Brother Albertinus to help us to be prophetic. Seeking a message that would bring consolation and unity to the Institute during fractured and chaotic times, he drew from St. John Eudes and the French school of spirituality in order to spread in the Institute the rich theology of the Mystical Body of Christ.

There are two pillars of that theology that can help us acquire a prophetic spirituality. The first is that we, in all our diversity, are the one Christ. Albertinus wanted us to understand that, in the wondrous variety of gifts within the Institute and Church, we incarnate the post-resurrection body of Christ. We are a spiritual extension of Christ’s risen body: “By a divine, ineffable bond we are united with each other and with the Divine Head of the whole Body.”63

He is fascinated with the realization that Christ has need of us as his members praying and acting in the world. Christ is risen into us; outside of us there is no risen Christ. This is a deep mystery and an inexhaustible subject of meditation. Jesus’ salvation of young people depends on the prayers and gestures which we, as his members, offer.

The very point of the image of the Mystical Body is that it reveals God’s plan to unify incredible diversity into one. Welcoming great diversity

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into the inner circle of the adult mission teams of the Institute is an essential element of our spirituality. Our Institute has one mission: evangelization through the education of children and youth.64 During Albertinus’ time, that mission was almost exclusively the responsibility of brothers. Today, however, responsibility for our mission is shared by a mystical body of adults of many states of life and religious affiliation. Incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ means that all are included not just in a common mission, but also in a common spirituality.

Albertinus found prophetic courage to separate himself from his country when it veered from the gospel. Beyond our mission to the young, his example calls us in our adult lives as citizens to place evangelism ahead of patriotism. We engage in the political dialogue of our nation as voices of Gospel values rather than as members of a political party or movement. Our first citizenship is our belonging to the Body of Christ. Albertinus’ example also calls us to resist the false values of secularism and consumer-driven materialism that is so powerful in our democracies.

Besides unity as the Body of Christ, there is a second truth to ponder from Albertinus’ circulars. It is that individually each of us is conformed to Christ in the way our physical members as well as our mind, heart, and will are intrinsic to us such that they don’t act independently of us. We are intrinsically Christ, who doesn’t act independently of us. Christ doesn’t feel compassion except through us; his body on earth is ours. An Irish Dominican, Donagh O’Shea expresses this truth in a very simple sentence: “When Jesus says ‘I’ we are somehow in the picture too.”

Of which part of the Body are we members? Jesus was known throughout his life as a prophet.65 The essence of a prophet is to feel and speak for God. As prophets, our spirituality of the Sacred Heart connects us to the

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emotional life of God enfleshed in Jesus, now risen and abiding in our hearts.

Taking that perspective means that when we pray we shouldn’t cinematically imagine ourselves walking alongside or behind Jesus. Or adoring him as a separate or distant being. Or as alternately entering and leaving his presence. Instead, we want to feel ourselves caught up in the very mystery of being connected to the heart of the risen Christ.

The kind of prophetic prayer the general chapter of 2012 proposes is one “born of the nearness of a God full of compassion, who undergoes a passion with his children who suffer and who suffers because of their distance from him.”66 To pray as authentic disciples of the Sacred Heart, members of the Body of Christ connected to God at the heart, we need

The theology of the Mystical Body of Christ teaches us that we are for today the heart of God in the world. Students and teachers in

Corazonista school in Bogotá, Colombia.

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to pray for a prophetic consciousness that will enable us to feel as God feels. Action comes after that.

As baptized members of the Body of Christ, we embrace our forebears’ spirituality of the window. For strength and example, we implore the beloved disciples, our prophetic founder, as well as our provident Brothers Xavier, Albertinus, and Maurice, to show us how to swell our hearts to the measure of theirs as we continue the contemplations they set into perpetual motion.

WE PRAY FOR OPENNESS TO BEING THE HUMAN PRESENCE OF HIS DIVINE HEART, FILLED WITH EMPATHY AND PASSION FOR THE YOUNG, ESPECIALLY THE WOUNDED.

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Lord, you are turned towards humanity and have feelings toward humanity.

You are dependent on our human voice and heart to express your feelings.

Generation after generation, you put your voice into the prophets you choose, who feel what you feel, to express silent agony, to give voice to the plundered poor, to decry the profane riches of the world. When you call us to prophecy you want us to abide prayerfully at the crossing point of your heart and ours. You want to pour your emotions into our hearts.

Help us to understand that your heart is indeed filled with emotion, that you are in fact more emotionally sensitive than the most sensitive among us. When you are moved and affected by what happens in our world, and want to act, open our hearts and shape our words to react on your behalf. Give us a heart to speak not what we feel, but what you hold in your heart.

We praise you for your loving kindness. And is not your love full of emotion? Through us, speak not only your love for the lost, but also your wrath at wrong, your jubilation, and the anguish of your pain. Visit on us your divine emotions and your bright imaginings for the life you hold out to us.

Forever, O Lord, you have wanted to become emotionally involved in human history, with all the heartache that would entail. May our embarrassment about our own emotions never block you from moving

PRAYER OF PROPHETIC DESIRE67

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our heart or using our voice. May we, as your prophets during this generation, be free enough to let you do and say whatever you please through us.

How often you have told us, Lord, “My ways are not your ways, and my thoughts are not your thoughts.” Teach us your ways. Help us to identify like you do with the steady moan of wounded humankind as well as with its joys and its hopes.

Attune our emotions to yours. Make us prophets who can transform your concerns and anxieties into our own concerns and anxieties. Connect us to you at the heart and enable us to vibrate according to the rhythm of your anger toward the arrogant and your loving compassion for the little ones.

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notes

1 Brother Maurice was elected Vicar (first assistant) to Brother Jules Ledoux in 1964, superior general in 1970 and again in 1976. His term ended in 1982 when Brother Jean-Charles Daigneault succeeded him.

2 The grand novitiate was a 9-month international spiritual renewal program for perpetually professed brothers.

3 Archives of the general house, Rome, A11.059 June 1963 (while Vatican II was in progress)

4 We are Present to them in the Heart of Christ (September 30, 1978)

5 We are Present to Them in the Heart of Christ, par. 49

6 Perfectae caritatis

7 Ibid., par. 5

8 Annuaire 33, p. 56

9 Constitutions of the Institute of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart (Metuchen, NJ, USA, 1927), Part I, article 1

10 Lumen gentium, November 1964

11 Declaration on Religious Freedom, Vatican Council II, 1965: “May the God and Father of all grant that the human family, through careful observance of the principle of religious freedom in society, be brought by the grace of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to the sublime and unending and ‘glorious freedom of the sons of God’ (Rom 8:21).”

12 Rush Ormond, Ecclesial Conversion after Vatican II, Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 2013, p. 68

13 Constitution of the Church in the Modern World (1965), par. 1, edited for inclusive language

14 We are Present to Them in the Heart of Christ, par. 8

15 https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2017/01/26/cardinal-etchegarays-retirement-means-end-era/

16 General chapter of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart (Rome, January 2001), Lord, when did we see you?, p. 4

17 We are Present to them in the Heart of Christ, par. 2

18 Scholars of John’s Gospel and letters are not sure whether John the Evangelist, John the Apostle, and the beloved disciple are one or more persons. Here we follow Brother Maurice’s usage. Scholars are more certain that the beloved disciple who witnessed the crucifixion is the same as the author of the first letter of John. In his circular, Brother Maurice does not make mention of Mary of Magdala, most likely because he was presenting a male model for the brothers. Scholars have no doubt that Magdalene was at the side of the beloved disciple, that she was a leader among the disciples of Jesus, and that the risen Jesus appeared first to her.

19 Luke 8:1-2

20 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mary-magdalene-feminism-metoo-jesus-disciples-apostle-christianity-judaism-pope-francis-vatican-a8281731.html

21 Cf. We are Present to Them in the Heart of Christ, par. 2; John 19:34-35; Rule of Life, 114

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22 John 19:35 is the only place in the New Testament where the writer steps out of character to aver that an event being reported is a historical fact.

23 1 John 1:1-3

24 William A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, vol. 1 (Collegeville MN, 1970, p. 107)

25 Notes de Prédication, Manuscript 23, pp. 234-236

26 New York Times, 5 November 1982

27 We are Present to Them in the Heart of Christ, par. 7

28 John 20:1-18

29 John 20:23

30 Luke 1:77, Canticle of Zachary

31 Theological Commission, Jesus Christ, Word of the Father, 1997, p. 99

32 Born in 1672.

33 http://www.eudistes.fr/bibliotheque-texte-eudiste/item/236-saint-jean-eudes-un-itineraire-spirituel-vers-le-coeur-de-jesus, 8ème étape

34 Baptized Guillaume Arnaud, André Coindre recruited him as a layman to be foreman and professional mentor of boys learning silk-weaving trades. André later invited him to be first among the ten brothers who would form a religious community at the heart of the refuge.

35 Brother Xavier [Arnaud], Memoirs, Rome, 1995

36 Published in 2018, the 200th anniversary of the founding of Pieux-Secours.

37 Rome, 1987

38 Ribaut, Annuaire 96, p. 9-10

39 Ibid., p. 12

40 Prospectus of 1818

41 Notes de Prédication, p. 85

42 Annuaire 96, p. 7

43 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlJns3fPItE

44 Prospectus of 1818

45 Brothers Marius Drevet and Louis-André Bellemare.

46 Brother Roger Bosse.

47 Rule of Life, see Preamble and articles 11, 82, 85, 150

48 US News & World Report, 27 October 1986

49 Known as “The Butcher of Lyon”.

50 Archives of the general house, Rome

51 Mark 9:14-29

52 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Thomas, 1602

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53 John 20:25

54 Brother Albertinus (Juge) was elected in March, 1937 and served until 1952. His first term was extended by three years because a general chapter could not be convened during World War II.

55 Cf. Rule of Life, 117

56 Annuaire 54, p. 7-21

57 Annuaire 54, p. 18

58 cf. Patrick Cabanel, Le grand exil des congrégations enseignantes au début du XXe siècle, Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, pp. 207-217 (https://www.persee.fr/collection/rhef)

59 Metuchen, New Jersey, thirty miles from New York, was the newly-established house of formation for the United States Province after the “American colony” was divided into two provinces in 1900. The Canadian novitiate was in Arthabaska.

60 Annuaire 54, p. 9

61 General chapter of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart (Rome, April-May), A Call to Prophetic Mission, p. 16

62 Ibid., p. 21

63 Circular of Brother Albertinus, We are the Body of Christ, 1938

64 Rule of Life, 13

65 Matthew 21:11

66 A Call to Prophetic Mission, p.21

67 Based on a reflection of Abraham Heschel in The Prophets.

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Brother Bernard Couvillion was born in New Orleans (Louisiana, USA), on August 31, 1946. He joined the juniorate of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart in 1960, in Daphne (Alabama), at 14. His novitiate (1964-65) took place in Belvidere (New Jersey), after which he made his first vows. During the scholasticate period, from 1965 to 1968, he obtained a degree in English and followed closely the progress of Vatican Council II. He later earned Masters degrees in English and in Pastoral Studies.

After some years as English teacher in New Orleans, he was designated in 1975

the author: br. bernard couvillion

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as formation director for aspiring brothers in the USA. At the same time, from 1979 to 1982, he was a member of the international commission for the revision of the 1970 text of the Rule of Life.

After six years as provincial councilor in New Orleans, he was elected provincial in 1988, a position he held until 1994, when he was elected superior general. Afterwards he was re-elected for another six-year term from 2000 to 2006. During his twelve years of leading us, his circular letters made a great impact in the whole Institute. He also served on the board of the Union of Superiors General, in Rome, for seven years.

Presently, he devotes his time to serving as campus minister at St. Stanislaus College in Bay Saint Louis (Mississippi). Recently he published the history of the superiors general from 1952-1988.

He loves the Rule of Life and considers his participation in writing and spreading its message as the singular grace of his life as a brother. He continues animating different sessions on the Rule and its spirituality for brothers and lay partners.

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Step Publication Author Publication dateTopic

publications to preparethe bicentennial

I. To look to the past with

gratitude

II. To live the present with passion

III. To embrace the future with hope

Fr. André Coindre

Spirituality of the Sacred Heart

The brother of the Sacred Heart

in the future

Br. Polycarp

Pedagogy of trust

Shared charism

Br. René Sanctorum (France)

Br. Bernard Couvillion (USA)

Br. Jean-Paul Valle (Colombia)

Br. Jesús Ortigosa(Spain)

Br. Stéphane-Léon Sané (Senegal)

Mr. John Devlin (USA)

30th September2018

30th September2019

30th September2020

30th April2019

30th April2020

30th April2021

1

3

5

2

4

6

index

Introduction: the window ............................................ 31. The beloved disciples John and Magdalene .......... 14

2. André Coindre and Brother Xavier ....................... 25

3. Jean, Vincent, Lespinasse and Stéphanie ............. 36

4. Brother Albertinus ................................................. 50

Prayer of prophetic desire ......................................... 63

Notes ........................................................................... 65

The author: Br. Bernard Couvillion .......................... 69

Publications to prepare the Bicentennial .................. 71

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