The Catholic Fellowship of the Sick

Extract

For the last twelve years there has been increasingly engaged in France a great new labour-a gigantic labour, indeed, to make both more human and more holy the great, grey, hidden world of the chronically ill or disabled. It began very simply in 1942 when a group of invalid girls met a certain invalid priest at another girl's bedside. There indeed was the archetypal idea, the gathering together in charity and friendliness of the isolated sick, with the hope of priestly instruction in their common and difficult vocation.

The movement of the Catholic Fellowship of the Sick is now fully organized in several dioceses and has the full and formal approval of the hierarchy. Its manifesto is apparently the little book of Fr Thierry-d'Argenlieu, O.P., who, chronically ill himself, is one of the leader of the movement.

There exists an enormous new world of the sick, declares Fr d'Argenlieu, partly as a result of war conditions and poor housing, but more due to the advance of medicine. ‘A heild has been brought into being', he says, ‘that used not to exist when both people's vitality was greater and when mortality was higher, too.'