The Worldly Priest
Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #43, January 2011
Our Lord, the Gospel tells us, kept company with sinners, prostitutes, and assorted other dubious characters. But woe on the present-day priest who tries to follow his example, he will be immediately condemned by his flock and reported to his bishop (unless of course he keeps company with rich dubious characters who may, it is hoped, leave money to the Church – but then the rich are so because they hoard money,
not because they give it away – but that is another story). So ministering to the worldly is a dangerous calling for any priest particularly because of the presence of women.
As St. Symeon the New Theologian (+1022), that incomparable master of the spiritual life, puts it in his Ethical Discourses, the gift of dispassion is given only to the saint to the extent “that he may converse and dine with a woman without yielding to some injury or suffering in secret of some kind of impulse or stain”. Even Saint Alphonsus of Liguori (+1787) in old age still kept a table between himself and any female interlocutor lest he attack her out of lust. The tales of the desert fathers recount numerous stories of holy monks returning once a year to Alexandria to sell their basket ware and molesting the women they meet on their road - only to have these women hand back to them the
children they had thus conceived when they returned the following years - a theory perhaps for the existence of child oblates in monasteries.
Obviously with our anaemic sperm counts, low testosterone level and estrogenic pollution, we men cannot imagine the wild temptations of the flesh that our male forebears in the faith must have had to deal with. And indeed, carnal failings have been the downfall of many potential saints and scholars. Old prints often show the "Temptation of the Theologian" as a naked woman lurking about a scholar at his desk seemingly absorbed in his learned books.
Take the sad tale in our times of Jesuit Cardinal Jean Daniélou (1905-1974). He was one of the greatest Patristic scholars of the 20th century and his work is a delightful mixture of scholarship and insight. He died suddenly in the apartment of a prostitute (or was it at the door after climbing the stairs?) in the red light district of Paris. The Apostolic Nunciate, the Archdiocese and the Jesuits were called in. The Jesuits announced his death adding unwisely that "he had now gone to meet the Living God in the epactasis of the apostle". They explained his presence in the dubious surroundings by his well-known ministry to the destitute and rejected of society. Others added that he had been called to the apartment to hear the girl's confession. And someone mentioned that he was not the kind of person to be sexually attracted to women anyway. Yet, many remained unconvinced by these arguments, and berated the Church for her hypocrisy and cover-up. The word "epectasis" was one often used by the cardinal in his writings and refers to the striving (progress) a Christian must show in his spiritual life, but in this particular case, it meant the never-ending striving of the blessed in heaven to experience the wholeness of the Living God, and was used as such by St. Gregory of Nyssa, following St. Paul's "forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth (ἐπεκτεινόμενος) unto those things that are before" (Phil. 3:13). The word raised questions in the press and the irreverent magazine "Le canard enchaîné" explained to its readers that it meant "dying during orgasm". This uncharitable interpretation stuck on so much that the word "épectase" in the Petit Robert French dictionary is now given only this second meaning. We may never know the truth about the death of the good cardinal, though I suspect the Mondaine (Paris Morality Police) has the answer in its files.
Cardinal Daniélou was a member of the Académie française and Dominican Father Ambroise-Marie Carré (1908-2004) was elected to his seat. It is customary in that august body for the successor in his inaugural speech to praise his predecessor. And so all Paris was listening to find out how Fr. Carré would deal with the delicate situation - by using circumlocutions, he managed to evoke the ambiguous ending without delving unduly on it.
There is another well-known Daniélou, the brother of the cardinal - Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) who was a great student of Indian music and an apostle of Hinduism to the West. His interpretation of Hinduism has recently been strongly denounced as false and deformed. But that is another story.
Yet, it is possible to be a successful worldly priest, and my favourite example is the French Abbé Arthur Mugnier (1853-1944). He was born in modest circumstances and suffered from poor eyesight most of his life. He thought at some early point that he should marry and dreamt of an ideal woman, "an exquisite mixture of enthusiasm and melancholy, capable of both joy and suffering; lettered but not pedantic, artistic but without profession..." His mother persuaded him instead to join the priesthood and he then dreamt of becoming "un curé de campagne" to live among the fields and forests he so learned to love in his youth when his father was régisseur at the local château in Lubersac near Limoges. He soon developed a passion for literature and its great writers and all his life Chateaubriand was his favourite and he constantly delighted in the
"Mémoires d'outre-tombe".
Ordained in Paris in 1877 by Archbishop Guibert, his first assignment was as substitute teacher and discipline master in a junior seminary - his two years there made him deeply miserable.
From 1879 to 1895, he was curate in three Parisian parishes in succession, St. Nicolas des Champs near the Halles, made up mostly of tradespeople, St. Thomas d'Aquin a more bourgeois and snobish community, and finally Notre Dame des Champs. This was a period of great tension between the Church and the secularizing French government. Abbé Mugnier did not appreciate the attitude of entrenchment of
the hierarchy. He was a reformist and thought that the priests should go out into the world to spread the message, not retreat back in their churches. He was in favour of vernacular liturgies and a more welcoming confessional. This caused him endless troubles.
He was very active in parish life among his varied people, but he enjoyed mostly the company of the upper crust. One night he was called to the death bed of a man for the last rites. He was introduced into a rich patrician house that he figured was a fancy hotel. It is only as he carried the Sacrament down the hall, and saw all these women kneeling at the doors of their rooms and crossing themselves, while dressed only in their chemises that he realised that he was in a high class brothel. This would be his introduction to the demi-monde which would also become his mission field. The story is in fact a fine metaphor on his ministry of introducing Christ into the sinful secular world.
One day in 1891, a lady brought the naturalistic and decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans to meet him in the sacristy. A great friendship developed between the two men, and Abbé Mugnier was instrumental in the conversion of the author who went on to describe his spiritual journey in a great trilogy, En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898) and L'oblat (1903). Huysmans' conversion was based greatly on Christian aesthetics and he gathered a community of artists around him near the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Martin de Ligugé (founded ca. 360); this group broke apart when the French Army evicted the monks from the monastery in 1902. When I visited there for 3 days in 2006, I found Huysmans' house still standing (now the home of a local doctor) and the monks specialising in artistic enamels based on patterns provided by artists such as Rouault, Braque, Chagall... And thus the artistic connection of Ligugé has survived. Abbé Mugnier constantly defended his new friend and convert and that friendship gave him an introduction the world of letters. He gave popular conferences on literary topics, and on famous authors such as George Sand and visited their homes/graves and met their surviving relatives. This further connected him to the literary circles.
From 1896 to 1907, Abbé Mugnier was named first curate at Ste Clotilde, an aristocratic and generally royalist community. This gave him access to the old upper class society of France - which he thought illiterate ("So much beauty, so much luxury, but not a book in sight") and ultimately boring, but they were staunch supporters of the Church and her ministers. He would muse that though deprived of the joys of
marriage, he enjoyed all his life the company of women and he was not insensitive to their charms, particularly to a generous décolletage. His rather homely looks, his worn eggplant-coloured cassock, square-toed peasant shoes and old hat and umbrella made him a strange spectacle among the refined company which he kept. He was appreciated for his conversation and wit as well as his liberal and non-judgmental
views towards non-believers, anti-clericals and sinners in general.
In the late 1890s, he started spending his holidays (in those halcyon days, curates were given three months off a year) in Germany. He much enjoyed this time-out and got away from it all - his "clauso ostio" as he called it (from Mat 6:6 "shut thy door"). He developed there a passion for Wagner and especially for the opera Parsifal which he compared to Chateaubriand's Génie du christianisme. Each year thereafter he endeavoured to go to the newly established Wagner Festival in Bayreuth in August and maintained a regular correspondence with Cosima Wagner, the musician's widow and the daughter of Abbé Liszt . By September, it was time for him to return home to his confessional, "I am being called back home by the autumn adulteries".
The confessional was his workshop, though he had no illusions about it - "one rarely confesses one's true sins". Yet it gave him an insight - thus he distinguished "les péchés de gare" i.e. visits to a prostitute when one misses one's train from other more serious failings. And he remarked that penitents came more readily to tell him about their waning love affairs than of their budding ones. He thought true love possible in marriage, though more frequent outside it. He never refused absolution - on the basis that few women were faithful... even to their sins.
When asked how to resist temptations of the flesh, he advised his male penitents to consider the consequences: "I desire her; I possess her; she phones constantly; she wastes my time; she is jealous; my friend stay away because of her; she gesticulates; she always repeats the same things; she writes too much; she doesn't write well; she bores me..." He was also much present in the strange world of the well-known newly
converted, the so-called Neo-Christians. He said of them that they loved the great sinners and tried to rescue them from the pit, but that they showed little interest for ordinary mediocre sinners. He was referring among others to the famous Maritain couple - Abbé Mugnier kept away because he did not like Raïssa Maritain and the food they served was unremarkable.
He met Father Hyacinthe Loyson, a preacher very popular with the ladies who had extreme reformist ideas about the Church, that the hierarchy did not appreciate at all. Loyson was a rable-rouser who had been suspended a divinis by his bishop, had married an American widow (he described their relationship as that of Christ and his disciples) and founded his own Gallican Catholic Church that eventually drifted to the Old Catholics of Utrecht. Abbé Mugnier befriended him and naively thought that he could bring him back to the fold. This put him in hot water when a scandal arose in the press concerning this friendship and their exchange of correspondence. The bishop decided to send Mugnier away for some time - he thus spent a year or so in Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land visiting the sights. On his return in 1910 , he was named chaplain of a poor congregation of missionary nuns, les Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny, a post he kept till his death in 1944.
Abbé Mugnier then divided his time between his ministry to the nuns, the numerous baptisms, marriages and funerals for le Tout-Paris, his visits to the old and sick, and his evenings out among the literati. Indeed, every day after the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament he went out to supper with his artistic friends and got to know everyone worth knowing in Paris. "Jamais prêtre ne mangea en ville plus que moi. Je dissipe
mon âme à pleine assiette."
When the Great War broke out, he set up his confessional at the Gare du Nord or Gare de l'Est to shrive the soldiers leaving for the front. Other soldiers preferred to line up at the door of the neighbouring "maisons d'abattage" for a few fleeting moments of sensual delight before being sent to the great slaughter; perhaps they then visited Mugnier afterwards on the way to the troop trains. He was especially close to two women writers whom he called his nieces, Anna de Noailles née Bibesco-Bassarava (1876 - 1933) and Marta Lahovary Princesse Bibesco
(1886 - 1973); they were both femmes du monde and had their entry into all literary and political circles. Princesse Bibesco said of Abbé Mugnier that he was the only man that never made her suffer. Anna is buried in the Bibesco mausoleum at Père-Lachaise; the first time I saw it many years ago, it contained a photograph of her with a hand-written verse inscription, "Hélas, je n'étais pas faite pour être morte" which can be read as a act of faith in the resurrection - which it probably isn't; but the last time I passed by, it had gone, no doubt stolen.
In later years, he was cared for by the Comtesse de Castries, another "niece", while the Princesse Bibesco provided the entertainment. He died at a ripe old age of 91 completely blind and had people read to him over and over again his favourite authors, Chateaubriand, George Sand and Victor Hugo. All the gratin of Paris, both aristocratic and artistic, attended his funeral. The Archdiocese celebrated his unusual ministry to the Tout-Paris, but dubbed him, "mirandum, non imitandum - to be admired, but not imitated".