Homage to St. Pancras
Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #43, January 2011
Why St. Pancras, you say? Go and look at the panels set before the altar at Fr. Wood's Memorial, and you will find paintings of four youthful saints proposed as models to the boys of St. John's School; they are Saints Lawrence, Edward, George, and Pancras. Pancras is shown holding the Blessed Sacrament. He died a martyr at age 14.
The Roman Catholics used to push Saint Tharsicius an otherwise unknown martyr instead. Both somehow became martyrs of the Sacrament and they are often confused one with the other: the Roman Martyrology tells of Tharsicius a young acolyte being killed by thugs as he went to deliver Communion to Christians prisoners during the times of Pope St. Stephen I (+257). When they tried to rob him of the Sacrament, it had mysteriously disappeared and thus escaped profanation. There was even a hymn honouring him in my college days, but it was nonsense and pure doggerel:
De ton sépulchre glorieux
Où le front pur et gracieux,
Les lèvres demi-closes,
Calme, tu dors parmi les roses,
Lève-toi, revis sous nos yeux.Doux martyr de l'Eucharistie,
Réponds à nos désirs ardents,
À tes jeunes frères apprends
Ton amour pour Jésus Hostie...
Pancras was especially venerated in England because Augustine of Canterbury dedicated his first church to Pancras and his relics were presented as a gift to the king of Northumberland. A district in London is named St. Pancras after him. There used to be a church of St. Pancras, Soper Lane, in London, near St. Mary-le-Bow, but it was not rebuilt after the Great Fire. There is a St. Pancras New Church on Woburn Place, the first Greek revival church built in London in 1819-1822, which successfully incorporates structures and details borrowed from famous Athenian monuments (Acropolis, Erechtheum, Tower of the Winds). There is also a St. Pancras Old church in the same area, which may be of Anglo-Saxon origin, but was heavy restored in the late 19th c.
The name also later applied to St. Pancras' train station. This is an extravagant Victorian pile (a "tomato brick megaschloss") , comprising the station proper and the Midland Grand Hotel over it; it is both a masterpiece of engineering by William Henry Barlow (it is built over a graveyard, an ancient church, a canal, gasworks and the Fleet River) and one of the best achievements of Gothic Revival architecture by Sir George Gilbert Scott. It escaped a planned destruction in the 1960s and has now been magnificently restored at a great price. It is said that the original hotel had only 4 bathrooms for 600 rooms, but at the time of construction (1868), these were still novelties - flushing toilets were indeed the most popular attraction at the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition in 1851 and 827 000 people (up to 11 000 a day) used the fancy "retiring rooms".
The restored station is now England's glorious gateway to Europe through the Chunnel. Inversely, the French people who come to England no longer have to undergo the symbolic humiliation of entering the country through Waterloo Station. My old mentor at Toulouse's Université Paul Sabatier, Professor Angelier, used to delight in remarking to me how strange it was that English name all their monuments for defeats instead of victories as the French do.
The Jesuits at the Gesù on Bleury Street offered their traditional young saints, Stanislas Koska and Aloysious Gonzaga, to the boys of the neighboring Collège Sainte-Marie. But they also tried to promote a local boy, Maurice Froment, 1922-1942, from Collège Saint-Ignace in Rosemont, who died from some debilitating disease while he dreamt of joining the order; he left a spiritual journal which was used to follow his inner journey (Labelle, J.P. Maurice Froment, Devenir prêtre. Montréal, Bellarmin, 1954) . Others religious orders and groups also had their own candidates; the Redemptorists had Alfred Pampalon, 1867-1896, a saintly priest who died young of tuberculosis. He was declared venerable in 1991 by Pope John Paul and is now curiously promoted as a patron of alcoholics and drug addicts at Ste Anne-de-Beaupré. The Brothers of the Sacred Heart had Paul-Émile Martel, 1915-1933, a fine little boy, a novice under the name of Frère Denis, who is now quite forgotten. The Sisters of Jésus-Marie were more successful with the Blessed Dina Bélanger 1897-1929, a musician and mystic. All the orders were trying to imitate the great success that the Carmélites of Lisieux had achieved with the promotion of Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus, 1873-1897, but she was of a different class. I remember that even at my boarding school of Saint Alexandre de la Gatineau, the fathers made a feeble attempt to promote a young seminarian from our midst - Jean-Louis Deschamps, 1937-1956 - who died young of kidney failure after having been vested into the order and making his vows on his deathbed; he was a shy, pious and sickly boy who left no spiritual writings and there was soon not much to say about him. I still have a picture of him gazing into heaven from his sickbed.
Perhaps the most famous of the Quebec aspirant boy-saints was Gérard Raymond, 1912-1932. His cause was promoted by the Petit Séminaire de Québec. A few years ago, I found pamphlets from the "Amis de Gérard Raymond" championing his beatification in a south-shore church downstream from Québec City (L'Isle-Vette, if I remember well) and a mass in Québec City still marks each year the anniversary of his death. He was a young man who like so many others of his generation died from tuberculosis at the age of 20. His life centered round his home and the Séminaire de Québec and it seemingly offered nothing unusual: “He endeavored to be and was nothing but a regular student”. Yet he strove to surpass the mediocrity of his fellow-students and to attain perfection. He described in 7 copy-books and 3 note-books the daily details of his spiritual journey. His confessor, Fr. Oscar Genest, used large extracts of these and added comments to produce anonymously and print privately a first biography of the boy in 1933, the year after his death under the title “Une âme d’élite”. His spiritual journal was similarly published in 1937.
The book is about the boy's life which is totally without incident where even the most trivial event is interpreted in terms of his future spiritual life; for instance, his childish love of climbing up on furniture and his fear of black holes are seen as foretelling his soul's coming battles. The two dominant themes of the biography are his search for perfection and his constant quest for bettering himself. All his adolescent life is a preparation for his future life as a missionary "in a pagan country, culminating in a true martyrdom, that of blood".
Since Christ redeemed the world by his suffering, a future priest must also be a "man of sorrows". And so, from chapter to chapter, follow in succession the issues of self-denial, sacrifice, rule of life, resolutions, self-mastery, penance, spiritual exercises, and abnegation that pervade his "terrible daily life". He is described as having an "intense thirst for sacrifice, a strong taste for suffering". He continually endeavours to master his body, to check his self-esteem, to control his speech, and to be ignored by others. He wears a hair-shirt and sleeps on a board garnished with "sweet little nails". To love, to suffer, such is God's will: "I wish to be a victim for sinners, I wish to be a martyr". He never became a priest, but his illness allowed him still to be a martyr. The biographer noted that the dying boy, his pale head on the pillow, a trickle of blood running down from his lips, was the very image of the martyr he always dreamt of being.
He aspired to become a saint and this he endeavoured to achieve through his simple daily life, by a "generous acceptation of his fate and a total and constant accomplishment of his duties". By doing this he strove to identify himself as closely as possible with Christ and thus participate in his saving work - "the salvation of the world requires sacrifice and suffering, it calls for blood". In his own way, he tried to follow the example of St. Theresa of the Child Jesus whose "History of a Soul" he had read. In order to succeed, he could never falter - "in his journal blows a wind of penance that can be surprising and fearsome. Many will think that he exaggerates, but it is the characteristic of all great souls to exaggerate" notes his biographer, while adding "admirable child whose existence verges on heroism".
Yet, Gérard Raymond could love only through suffering and pain, and his quest for sanctity has been seen as morbid. In a psychoanalytic study of the journals, Claude-Marie Gagnon (La littérature populaire religieuse au Québec, sa diffusion, ses modèles et ses héros. Université Laval, 1986) finds a "network of obsessive associations" building up into "a personal myth". "The association of suffering to an amorous passion for a male object of desire (Christ), together with a submission (castration) to a strict father figure (God the Father) suggest an homosexual fantasy". The "sexual desire is linked to a death wish".
To the present day reader, the journal calls to mind an ascetic culture that verges on masochism. It is not sure that this is authentic Christian sanctity. True saints seem to be more balanced psychologically. And Gérard Raymond remains too intimately linked with a spirituality that is now obsolete and deemed unhealthy to become a saint of universal appeal. In this, he is quite different from his model, the Little Saint Theresa.
Yet his story fits well into the long Christian tradition of hagiography, the history of the saints. The earliest examples are the Acts of Martyrs written for the edification of the faithful but also to prepare them to the possibility of a similar fate in those times of persecution. Martyrdom does indeed constitute the first mode of sanctity in the Church because it brings immediate salvation. After the end of persecutions, a further image of sanctity developed first around Saint Anthony the desert father, whose life Saint Athanasius wrote and made into an early Christian best-seller. The new Christian hero is the Christian athlete whose exactions are nothing but excessive; his martyrdom is now his long ascetic life in difficult circumstances. Gérard fits into this second tradition, but what he lacks is the maturity and serenity so apparent in Saint Anthony. That is why Anthony still influences his fellow Christians 17 centuries after his death, while our Québec boy is destined to oblivion, despite the continuing efforts of a few friend to keep his memory alive. His journal puts too much emphasis on suffering and not enough on love. He may indeed be a true saint, but his example hardly inspires us today.