I were in church for the first time.
No words I write now can describe my feelings on that morning. When the Mass ended and Jeannot beckoned me to join him in giving communion to the scores who pressed forward to kneel at the altar rails, I looked at their faces and felt that, truly, God had come down among us. I was filled with a happiness I had never known in all my years as a priest. Jeannot had raised me from the grave of my sloth.
Communion had been given. The Mass ended. But the congregation did not rise and leave. They sat in their seats, waiting, as Jeannot climbed the stairs of a rickety pulpit. Looking down on them, he began to speak in a voice that was incantatory, compelling, a voice like no other I have heard. At once, the congregation was silent, rapt.
Brothers and Sisters,
Today I want to raise you up.
The Church is not far away in Rome.
The Church is not archbishops and popes.
The Church is us – you and I –
And we who are the Church have a duty to speak out.
You ask me, speak about what?
I answer. Who are the unholy ones?
They are those who sell your work to foreign countries
And pay you seven per cent of what they get.
Did you know that?
And for the first time in one of our churches I heard the congregation answer in a shout.
‘No!’
Brothers and Sisters,
We must begin to speak out.
But I warn you.
If you speak out you will receive blows.
St Paul received blows because he told the truth.
But he endured them.
As you will endure them,
As I will endure them.
Because we must choose the Lord’s way.
We must speak out against those who exploit our poor.
We must take the path of love.
The path of love is the path of Jesus.
Help us climb out of this endless poverty.
We do not ask for riches.
We ask to live the lives of the poor
But not lives of starvation and despair,
Not the lives of slaves.
But decent humble lives
Under God.
Jesus asks you
Help each other.
The path of love is the path that leads to justice.
Walk with me on that way.
Jeannot made the sign of the cross and stepped down from the pulpit. And then I saw what I had never seen before. The congregation, behaving as though they were not in a church but in a town meeting, turned to each other, discussing the sermon, some of them clapping others on the back as though urging them on. People rose and agitatedly walked the aisles, while, at the rear, the church doors opened wide as the congregation streamed out into the sunlight, excited, talking, inspired.
When Jeannot came back to the altar, I followed him into the sacristy. I was still filled with that sense of God’s presence that had entered the church during Mass. I was certain that this boy who had been my protégé was now a person of exceptional holiness. Yet at the same time I could not reconcile that feeling with the sermon he had preached. It was a sermon of politics. Did he see it as that? Or did he see it, simply, as doing God’s will?
‘How long have you been preaching like this?’ I asked.
‘Since my first week. The crowds are getting bigger.’
‘But they must know you’re doing it?’
‘Of course they do.’
‘ Petit , you spoke of receiving blows. What if they arrest you?’
‘They won’t arrest me.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘Because God is watching over me. Don’t be afraid for me. Believe me.’
And I did. In the months that followed I spent all of my evenings in a new community centre which Jeannot had set up in an empty warehouse. I enlisted my students to raise money from their parents so that we could buy furniture, beds and blankets for an orphanage in which the Sisters of Ste Marie were planning to house some of the abandoned children of La Rotonde. I wrote letters to Canada and France soliciting funds for a boys’ club and, indeed, such a club soon came into being.
I look back now on those days as a time when I achieved a state of happiness which can only be entered into by a total forgetting of
No words I write now can describe my feelings on that morning. When the Mass ended and Jeannot beckoned me to join him in giving communion to the scores who pressed forward to kneel at the altar rails, I looked at their faces and felt that, truly, God had come down among us. I was filled with a happiness I had never known in all my years as a priest. Jeannot had raised me from the grave of my sloth.
Communion had been given. The Mass ended. But the congregation did not rise and leave. They sat in their seats, waiting, as Jeannot climbed the stairs of a rickety pulpit. Looking down on them, he began to speak in a voice that was incantatory, compelling, a voice like no other I have heard. At once, the congregation was silent, rapt.
Brothers and Sisters,
Today I want to raise you up.
The Church is not far away in Rome.
The Church is not archbishops and popes.
The Church is us – you and I –
And we who are the Church have a duty to speak out.
You ask me, speak about what?
I answer. Who are the unholy ones?
They are those who sell your work to foreign countries
And pay you seven per cent of what they get.
Did you know that?
And for the first time in one of our churches I heard the congregation answer in a shout.
‘No!’
Brothers and Sisters,
We must begin to speak out.
But I warn you.
If you speak out you will receive blows.
St Paul received blows because he told the truth.
But he endured them.
As you will endure them,
As I will endure them.
Because we must choose the Lord’s way.
We must speak out against those who exploit our poor.
We must take the path of love.
The path of love is the path of Jesus.
Help us climb out of this endless poverty.
We do not ask for riches.
We ask to live the lives of the poor
But not lives of starvation and despair,
Not the lives of slaves.
But decent humble lives
Under God.
Jesus asks you
Help each other.
The path of love is the path that leads to justice.
Walk with me on that way.
Jeannot made the sign of the cross and stepped down from the pulpit. And then I saw what I had never seen before. The congregation, behaving as though they were not in a church but in a town meeting, turned to each other, discussing the sermon, some of them clapping others on the back as though urging them on. People rose and agitatedly walked the aisles, while, at the rear, the church doors opened wide as the congregation streamed out into the sunlight, excited, talking, inspired.
When Jeannot came back to the altar, I followed him into the sacristy. I was still filled with that sense of God’s presence that had entered the church during Mass. I was certain that this boy who had been my protégé was now a person of exceptional holiness. Yet at the same time I could not reconcile that feeling with the sermon he had preached. It was a sermon of politics. Did he see it as that? Or did he see it, simply, as doing God’s will?
‘How long have you been preaching like this?’ I asked.
‘Since my first week. The crowds are getting bigger.’
‘But they must know you’re doing it?’
‘Of course they do.’
‘ Petit , you spoke of receiving blows. What if they arrest you?’
‘They won’t arrest me.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘Because God is watching over me. Don’t be afraid for me. Believe me.’
And I did. In the months that followed I spent all of my evenings in a new community centre which Jeannot had set up in an empty warehouse. I enlisted my students to raise money from their parents so that we could buy furniture, beds and blankets for an orphanage in which the Sisters of Ste Marie were planning to house some of the abandoned children of La Rotonde. I wrote letters to Canada and France soliciting funds for a boys’ club and, indeed, such a club soon came into being.
I look back now on those days as a time when I achieved a state of happiness which can only be entered into by a total forgetting of
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