At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. [Matthew 18:1-5, NRSV]
In Search of the Spirit of a Saint [2] (Part II)
[Part I of this article appeared on 1 April 2010]
Statue of Saint Jeanne Jugan at the Sisters of the Poor in Valladolid, photo by Rodelar
The announcement of the canonisation of Sr. Jeanne Jugan drew a torrent of reactions as people throughout the world learned, most of them for the first time, of how this deeply spiritual founder of the Little Sisters of the Poor suffered in the hands of an ambitious but evil priest. These reactions are almost entirely positive about her spirituality.
There is one negative strand, however, and this exception complains only about her and her fellow Sisters keeping silent while her reputation and life mission were so brutally abused by an ambitious priest. The voices in this negative line insist that while the Sisters’ work was very holy, their “silence” and “inaction” in the face of atrocious abuse and injustice of such proportion were clearly something unholy. Where is righteous indignation – the emotion one feels when one becomes angry over perceived mistreatment, insult, or malice – they question. And to rationalise their difficulty over the new saint and her Sisters’ reticence, these voices point to the episode of Jesus stopping the stone-throwers in John 8. Jesus, they say, would not hesitate to stop such abuses committed by religious leaders in a manner which was decisive, public and thorough.
Today, as we wrote in the last post, we even have the director of the Vatican’s press office, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, insisting that Pope Benedict has always worked against the culture of silence in regard to the abuse committed by priests. To be sure, many vile remarks have been cast against that ambitious and abusive priest. All this is, in some ways, necessary to expose the evils that happened and continue to happen in the Church, provided we do not let such concentrated discussion on clerical abuses distract attention from what is by far the more important issue in our present reflection – the depth spirituality of St Jugan.
To be sure, an open coffee-corner discussion of St Jugan’s story would no doubt elicit heated remarks on “clerical sexism” and “typical clerical oppression against women religious” and all that. We do not wish to go there in this post, however, but before anybody challenges the claim that St Jugan’s story shows up “typical” clerical abuse and misbehaviour against women religious, we mention here in passing three cases, amongst many others.
- [a] Mother Mary McKillop, the foundress of the Australian-based Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, was, in 1871, officially excommunicated by her local bishop, on the grounds that “she had incited the sisters to disobedience and defiance.” In April of this year, in an extraordinary gesture, Bishop Sheil’s successor, the current archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, made a public apology to the Sisters for their foundress’s excommunication. Standing before her statue, he said that he was “profoundly ashamed of the Bishop’s actions in driving the Sisters out onto the streets.” McKillop was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995 and her canonisation has just been announced for 17 October 2010.
- [b] Mother Theodore Guerin, brutally abused by a bishop, was canonized in 2006. Guerin led a group of six French nuns who arrived in Indiana on Oct. 22, 1840, to establish a community in the woods outside Terre Haute. She and Vincennes Bishop Celestin de la Hailandiere struggled over control of the fledgling order, and he dismissed Guerin from her vows, threatened her with excommunication and banished her for a time from St. Mary-of-the-Woods. She did not return until after his resignation in 1847. Rev. Richard McBrien, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame and the author of the 2001 book “Lives of the Saints”, writes: “So many leading figures who had tussles with their bishop or other high-ranking ecclesiastical officials were later rehabilitated. History remembers them, but not the officials who gave them a difficult time. I dare say that Mother Guerin, as a soon-to-be-canonized saint, will achieve an elevated status that will forever elude the bishop who dismissed her.” While her bishop was impossible to work with, she always kept her faith. By holding on to her faith, she witnesses to the Sisters how to live in an imperfect, flawed, and sinful church today. She provides a model of virtuous life to America’s Roman Catholics — even if they find themselves at odds with church leaders.
- [c] The Sisters of Charity of Dubuque, Iowa suffered under the parish priest, Terence J. Donaghoe, who lorded over them. When he became too sick to say Mass, he refused to allow the nuns to call in another priest for fear of “meddling”. Because they “did not like to bother him,” the sisters had to go without Mass. Then he expelled two of the sisters for complaining about not receiving the sacraments even on Sunday. Donaghoe held all the community’s goods in his own name, including the nuns’ patrimonies, but refused to make a will. Finally, the nuns called in the bishop who forced the dying priest to sign a will. Donaghoe then turned to one of the nuns and said, “This is your work. It is just like you.”
In fact, St. Jugan’s experience is in a certain way remarkably similar to that of the Cure D’Ars – St. John-Marie Vianney, the patron saint of priests. In the Hidden Life of the Cure d’Ars by Henri Gheon, a priest who came to assist Fr. Vianney not only insisted on turning him out of his own bedroom but also effectively took over his role and acted as if he were Parish Priest and gave Fr. Vianney orders and generally made his life a misery. The reaction of Fr. Vianney was similar to the reaction of Sr. Jeanne. He humbly put up with the humiliation and accepted it as a trial and chastisement for his sins. It is never easy to even imagine the depths of humility necessary to accept such ill-treatment and injustice.
All this is awakening the laity to an important distinction. Described by canon-law as “sacred pastors”, individual priests may not behave anywhere near “sacred” in reality. Here we have such contrasting examples of the Priesthood.
- From our perspective, in this Year of Priests, perhaps we need to see clearly the distinction between the sacred office of the ordained priests and the office-holder. Likewise, while we who are baptised into the body of Christ are called “saints” in St Paul’s language, are we anything but saintly in real life? And again, while the objective principle of ex opere operato teaches that grace is objectively offered at a Eucharistic liturgy properly celebrated, whether subjectively grace is actually received by an individual may be quite another matter (see 1 Cor 11:29; Rev 3:20).
Like many others before and after her, St Jugan was sidelined for so long, and subjected to official rejection that consigned her to solitude, inactivity and oblivion. In itself, being sidelined wasn’t and isn’t and won’t be exceptional. To do good and yet get sidelined is commonplace in the history of the Church and will continue to be so, as long as those vested with official power of governance are mentally and spiritually fixated on “power” as opposed to “compassion” and behaving “high and mighty” – the very anti-thesis of Christ whom they mindlessly claim to represent. As Leclerc puts it: “That is all too frequent, practically banal in the corridors of power – and in the life of any society.”
As we see it, wherever the cold and impersonal “society” model of Church is practised in reality more than the warm and personal “community” model in any faith community, power overshadows compassion. Then, the Christ-factor is all but absent in a human gathering named after Christ, a gathering that exists to preach Christ and to serve others.
And so, would we not appreciate their legitimate anger and lend a sympathetic ear to women, religious or otherwise, who are so upset with the male-controlled Church, that they would say of the Church that it is “a man’s world,” that the hierarchy should but wouldn’t take an example from holy women because they are “only women,” that dedicated and self-sacrificing women religious are being forced into oblivion by self-aggrandising clerics who are “determined, even at the cost of falsifying the truth, to concentrate power and fame in their own person,” that history repeats itself, that histories of women-congregations make clear what religious had to fear from priests and bishops, that they even think “it is just such priests and bishops to which Dante refers in his Inferno – the roads of hell are paved with priests and bishops”….? The list of vehement reactions runs on and on.
Truth be told, Pope John Paul II knew well the problems that plagued the Church over which he presided. At the beatification of Sr. Jeanne in 1982, he said:
- “In our day, pride, the pursuit of efficacy, the temptation to use power, all run rampant, and sometimes, unfortunately, even in the Church. They become an obstacle to the coming of the Kingdom of God. This is why the spirituality of Jeanne Jugan can attract the followers of Christ and fill their hearts with simplicity and humility, with hope and evangelical joy.”
Again, as we said, while discussions on Pailleur’s criminal and sinful actions against the saintly Sister Jeanne are legitimate, they must never divert our attention from the more important meditation on her depth spirituality. And so, if being side-lined for so long was not exceptional about St Jugan, what was?
Already, in our Ephphatha Coffee-Corner dialogue, our colleague Dr. Emmanuel Katongole sees a most positive explanation for Sr. Jeanne’s “obedience and submission” in the face of injustice by the priest. Instead of seeing her posture as one of inaction, he reads in her submission a clear sense of the goal, the telos of her mission. “If her mission was to care for the poor, especially the weak, voiceless and invisible elderly, then she might have willingly accepted (and suffered) her own silence and invisibility for their visibility. Could she have judged that fighting the priest and the established church for her visibility and recognition would simply have put the cause of the poor in jeopardy? To be honest, there is something laudable about her meekness (that I personally would find extremely difficult to live up to) that is a reminder that the causes for which we struggle and fight for are not ‘about us’ – and always, as Romero would say ‘always beyond us’.”
What Lies within Her Silence?
The engaging question then is, what kept Sr. Jeanne going during all those years when she was silenced? How do we understand her protracted silence? What lies within that silence?
In The Desert and the Rose: The Spirituality of Jeanne Jugan, Eloi Leclerc wrote a splendid biography. He makes several deep connections useful for our meditation and instruction, of which three are in our view particularly worthy of attention.
a. Silence as Suffering
First, he says that “Jeanne’s silence was suffering, first and foremost”.
In the silence of Sister Mary of the Cross, was indeed the silence of Mary at the foot of the Cross, from whom she took her religious name. Furthermore, her silence reflects the silence of the Suffering Servant of Whom Isaiah wrote: “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights. I have endowed him with my spirit that he may bring true justice to the nations.” And yet, the prophet continued: “He does not cry out or shout aloud, or make his voice heard in the streets. He does not break the crushed reed, nor quench the wavering flame” (Isaiah 42:1-7).
St Jugan allowed herself to be grafted into the Cross of Jesus, living to the full her chosen religious name. She had often told the new comers: “We are grafted into the cross and we must carry it joyfully unto death.” How she matched her words with her life! What a radiant example of holiness she gave to generations of Little Sisters!
Through her unwavering focus on Christ the Crucified Lord during her protracted suffering, St Jugan teaches us today when the Roman Catholic Church is in for a long struggle over its clerical sex abuse scandals that in times of crisis, we should never lose sight of the Lord. Our faith must be placed on Christ the Saviour, never on human agencies who merely claim to act for Him. He, we can be sure, will never fail us. Like St Jugan, there is no reason why any member of the lay faithful need to leave the Church on account of the crimes and sins of others, be they ordained ministers.
Indeed, St Jugan’s suffering had great depth, precisely because she thrived on the most sensitive point in her religious being – her intimate relationship with God. Her time of banishment was, by any account, a lengthy period of spiritual long dark night. Truly, this spiritual giant knew inner abandonment! She would often say to postulants and novices:
- You see these rose bushes. They are a little wild. You too are a little wild, but if you let yourself be shaped, you will become a beautiful rose, shaped by God’s love. But you must let yourself be humiliated. Instead of turning in on yourself, reach up to God.
By her life, she is calling us to self-sacrifice – “Refuse God nothing. Accustom yourselves to do everything for him. Let us love him very much, that is all that is necessary.”
The road to sainthood, as her life has shown, is paved with humble piety and untold patience. But the colossal betrayals against her complicate her story for lesser mortals like ourselves. Though eclipsed in nearly every way, her submission to what happened was nearly complete. But was that the call to us as well? Are we lesser mortals called to accept every slight, large or small, every time someone rejects or neglects the value of what we have done or does not respect us as persons? Are we to put up with, let alone welcome, every unreasonable demand? And yet, Sr. Jeanne lived what she exhorted others to do:
- “In our joys, in our troubles, in the contempt that others show us, we must always say, ‘Thank you, my God,’ or ‘Glory to God.'”
There is a level of spirituality here which is difficult to touch, let alone attain. It is certainly beyond mere rational description. It is better felt and appreciated, in silent meditation, and not in more noisy words and juvenile spirituality. St Jugan, for all her active ministry in profound corporal works of mercy, was a true contemplative at the same time.
No wonder the famous Victorian novelist Charles Dickens could write, after meeting Sr. Jeanne, that “there is in this woman something so calm, and so holy, that in seeing her I know myself to be in the presence of a superior being. Her words went straight to my heart, so that my eyes, I know not how, filled with tears.”
b. The Quality of Suffering
Second, Leclerc suggests that what is exceptional is above all “the quality of her suffering”.
“She suffers not from being dispossessed, rejected, and forgotten. She suffers because she can no longer approach the poor and freely express her love for them. She suffers because she can no longer pour all her energies into the project, as she used to do.” We touch on what is truly extraordinary and unique in her experience when we realise that as God was expressing His love to humanity through St Jugan, she was put to suffer precisely because “that divine flame was suddenly diverted from its goal, and a night wind persistently tried to extinguish it.”
Then, we will see that the “quality of her suffering is echoed by the quality of her silence. She could have shouted her suffering from the roof-tops… Instead of that, silence. Awesome and disconcerting silence. Not a word of protest, not one piece of writing, not one letter in twenty-seven years.”
Why did she keep silent in the face of such atrocious evil? “She who holds her tongue keeps her soul,” she once confided to a young Sister. Her silence tells us it was a silence of growth.
Silence has its own meaning and inner content. The full meaning does not have to be expressed in words, although a few words uttered at some point against a vast background of silence may even give the silence a greater intensity.
Silence is not void but an abundance of spaces – for recollection and wonder.
Human greatness grounded on social success can disappear overnight. Ultimately, what is left when one’s outer brilliance has faded away is one’s inner resources. Sr Jeanne understood well that “humanity’s greatness, its true wealth, does not reside in what is visible. It lies in what is carried in the heart.” Though she was condemned to oblivion, she carried the whole world in her heart – “a reconciled world, already penetrated by infinite tenderness.”
Ian Elmer offers some light when he writes: “I have always found the expression ‘death to the ego’ an excellent way to picture that aspect of the spiritual journey that demands that radical metanoia, or ‘change of mind’, which will allow us entry into the kingdom within.”
For the Little Sisters, instead of carrying the pain that could fittingly be associated with the isolation their founder suffered for the last quarter century of her life, they see it as an example of humility and hiddenness, which they now embrace as the charisms of their order. “She was so humble and didn’t toot her horn. But we feel this grounded our congregation in the spirit of humility and hiddenness of Christ. She lived that. God worked through those years of hiddenness.”
c. God, the Forgotten, Remains Silent
And third, Leclerc makes this connection which is as spiritually profound and shocking as it is theologically penetrating: “Today, God the Forgotten, keeps silent.”
In different corners of the world today, how many of the poor and little are suffering, in silence, forgotten? Has the world of WMDs, free market, free cyberspace, and no-sweat MBAs, rendered God redundant, forgotten, and silent – “relegated to the shadows as useless and nonexistent”? Or is God silently suffering with the suffering silent? In a world that worships the visibly powerful – and that world clearly includes the Church – God the founder of the universe is sidelined. Is there any place where loyalty and commitment are more intense and the “gods” are worshipped more popularly, loudly and emotionally than the sports stadium and the arena of the entertainment superstars?
And yet, isn’t God equally sidelined in a church where its officers could point menacingly from their privileged and church-law-protected pulpit and bark at the 99.99% vast majority (by definition non-officers), saying: “You lay people better listen good, we the priests are the ones vested with power. We are the ones to decide”? Power and authority may be very loud, but that’s no indication of greatness or fidelity to the vision of Christ. Leclerc points us to God’s true greatness:
- God the Forgotten keeps silent. His silence is not a turning in on himself. The Founder of the world readily lets himself be stripped of all signs of power. There is in him no will to dominate or to possess. His silence is an expression of his truth, of his true greatness: “I know what plans I have in mind for you … plans for peace, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope … When you search for me, you will find me (Jer. 29:11, 13).
All this brings us to the realization that there are different types of spirituality for which we are each uniquely gifted. Many in the world today, and in America especially, are fiery champions and advocates for the poor and downtrodden. They play a crucial role in speaking on behalf of the poor to bankers at the Wall Street and congressmen and congresswomen at Capitol Hill. In Malaysia, the Jesuits are as brave as they come, speaking truth to power and calling the civil authorities to account, often at great risks to their personal safety. They know, that unless we in the Church practise social justice, we have no legs to stand on when we preach to civil society on justice and peace. But others, like Jean Vanier, are called to actually live and work among the mentally-challenged poor, inviting them to the table, sharing their life and communion. Others serve the poor by pouring out their lives for the most needy – the Mother Teresas of the world’s slums. Yet others, like St Jeanne Jugan, serve the vulnerable elderly poor and in doing so, enter into vicarious suffering for them, quietly. The struggle for justice takes many forms and involves many spiritualities. Informed by St Paul, we know that there may be many different parts but only one body, many different gifts but only one Spirit, and many different services but only one Lord who calls and commissions us to service and equips us with the necessary spiritualities (1 Cor 12). It would be to seriously miss the point for anyone to judge St Jugan’s silence negatively according to a spirituality suited only for others.
Many other reflections on St Jugan may provide opportunities for ongoing coffee-corner dialogue. But it seems to us that a word needs to be said about her so-called “obedience” – something that could easily be misunderstood. Clearly, she was submissive and obedient, not to an abusive priest, but to the power of God’s presence in her. A revealing anecdote involving the renowned Dominican theologian M.D. Chenu clarifies it well. On his seventieth birthday, there were celebrations in the presence of Cardinal Feltin. The cardinal praised Chenu for having accepted humbly and without disobedience the sanctions imposed by Rome upon his writings. Chenu jumped up and said: “Eminence, it was not obedience, because obedience is a somewhat mediocre moral virtue. It was the faith that I had in the Word of God, compared with which clashes and passing incidents are nothing; it is because I had faith in Jesus Christ and his church.”
And finally, we just want to conclude on the thought that in His time, God raised the suffering but faithful Sr. Jeanne up to sainthood. Exiled in life, Sr. Jeanne Jugan gained full recognition in God’s time. At her beatification Pope John Paul II said that “God could glorify no more humble a servant than she.” Deep down, pride is a terrible sin that inflicts most of us, but St Jugan had conquered that. At her deathbed, what we see is a beggar for God, humble and trusting, tranquil and serene, a giant spiritual guide for old age and every age. Indeed, God lifts up the lowly.
In the end, St. Jugan’s story offers us hope of the final vindication of God’s justice. This of course does not mean that we accept a trite “we trust in God” attitude accompanied by inaction, but it is a confirmation of a trust and dependency on a God who is trustworthy, faithful, and dependable, even when the human authorities supposed to have been placed over us for our welfare by divine will repeatedly prove themselves to be anything but trustworthy, faithful and dependable. At certain times in church history, and perhaps in our own time, it might seem as if the light of the Spirit had been all but extinguished and that Jesus is no longer with us in the boat. In such times, words from Christians of blessed memory, such as Edward Schillebeeckx, another renowned Dominican theologian who died in December 2009, are most helpful: “God is new each moment,” and that “wherever injustice occurs, whether in the world at large or in the church itself, the Spirit is actively at work, prompting resistance, hope, courage and change.”
St Jugan, truly a gift to the life and holiness of the Church, offers the prophetic lifestyle to help us keep authentic Christian life in perspective. Living through twenty-seven years of long dark nights, her light shows us another wonderful path to God! From God’s point of view, those years of silent faith had proven to be the most fruitful of St Jugan’s life. And we humbly accept for ourselves the advice she gave the young Sisters:
- Go and find him when your patience and strength run out and you feel alone and helpless. Jesus is waiting for you in the chapel. Say to him, ‘Jesus, you know exactly what is going on. You are all I have, and you know all things. Come to my help.’ And then go, and don’t worry about how you are going to manage. That you have told God about it is enough. He has a good memory.
St Jeanne Jugan, pray for us!
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, April 2010. All rights reserved.
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