Kelly and Hitchcock on Bernanos

Just a couple lengthy quotes from Msgr. George A. Kelly and James Hitchcock.

Monsignor George A. Kelly, Battle for the American Church (Revisited):

Older parish priests have the opportunity late in life to chat with their once young parishioners, now nearing Social Security status. When those who blessed themselves as they passed a church, the ones who attended weekday Mass during Lent or confessed at least monthly, speak aloud these days, they speak lovingly of the Church of their youth. They also remark how wide and deep are the differences between the post-World War II Church and post-Vatican II Church. American clerics of that period recall how entranced they were at the time with the mystique of the French Church: a Georges Bernanos and his country abbé, an Etienne Gilson and his revelation-based philosophy, a Cardinal Suhard and his world-famous pastorals. For many parish priests, Abbé Michonneau’s Revolution in a City Parish was a bible.

We did not realize how vibrant American parochial life was until we read Michonneau. His entire apostolate . . . called for the revitalization of Christianity in “Catholic” France, which he considered absolutely pagan. Low Mass attendance, alienated working classes, parishes sustained by old ladies, ritual Catholicity without internalized faith. And, from First Communion until Extreme Unction, most French Catholics, in his judgment, had mind-sets like those who had no religious faith at all. During the 1950s, American curates readily found out they had nothing much to learn from Michonneau, or even from Suhard. Our bishops of that day may not have been as brilliant as the Archbishop in Paris. Indeed, they were hardly ever mentioned on the streets where we lived. Nor where American pastors known for writing books. Yet, our parish predecessors had bequeathed to us so many believing and practicing Catholics that, by Michonneau’s standards, they could never be identified as pagan.

In 1994, on the other hand, American grandparents might well often agree that Michonneau’s view of paganized Catholics is verified in the lives of their grandchildren. (24-25)

James Hitchcock, Years of Crisis:

Although my sense of the meaning of religion is that it is ultimately a response to great beauty, the “negative” side of faith has always seemed important to me also. The final glory is precious only because we have first fallen to the valley of tears . . . I have always been attracted to the rather astringent, sin-conscious Gallic piety represented in recent time by Mauriac, Bernanos, and Claudel and correspondingly put off by the cheerfulness of a certain English attitude expressed by people like Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. To say that one senses in himself the capacity for every kind of sin is both self-dramatizing and probably untrue, but some approximation of this seems to me necessary for full spiritual development. (16)

Advertisement