Notre Dame — Saint Alban

Extract

On the outskirts of Lyons a vast monolith of a hospital commemorates the secular patron of that city of martyrs—Edouard Herriot. You take the bouncing tram from Place Bellecour (the Germans stole the trolleybuses), and at Blanche Grange you enquire for the church of Notre Dame—Saint Alban. It is hidden away behind the clinical cliffs of the hospital, and there is little enough about this plain box of a church to make it remarkable. But it is precisely here, amidst a sprawling suburb of flats and hostels, of workmen's dwellings and doctors’ villas, that for the last twenty-five years the abbé Laurent Remillieux has built up a Christian community which by this is known throughout France and beyond.

How did it happen? Père Chéry, who in his Paroisse Communauté Missionaire so vividly recorded the achievement of the Abbé Michonneau in the industrial parish of Colombes, has now published an account of the Lyonese parish which goes far to answer that question. Even the casual visitor to Saint Alban is aware that this is no ordinary church; or rather that here is a most ordinary church in which is realised the true function of a house of God, the meeting-place of God’s people, a living community of the faithful made one per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso.