The Transparency of Grace: Bernanos and the Priesthood

Extract

I must withdraw so that God can touch the people whom chance places on my way, people that he loves. My presence is as indiscrete as if I were to be discovered between two lovers or between two friends.

Simone Weil

The Catholic faith of Georges Bemanos was simple if not uncritical. He claimed to be thoroughly of the Church yet he was dissatisfied with many aspects of its temporal existence. He sometimes rejected classification as a Catholic writer, regarding himself as a writer who was also Catholic. His books were not designed for a restricted audience, but were a kind of wayside preaching of the mysterious way of providence, and the dangers to humanity when God was written out of the story of its life.

His works were not designed to promote the self-protective certainties of contemporary bourgeois Catholicism. His clerical heroes, in particular, were all John the Baptist figures, raised up in the rural desert to uncover the superficialities of a compromised urban clerical Catholicism: la confiture de Saint Sulpice, as he allegedly referred to it. A truly Catholic existence lived under the unrelenting sun of divine grace was a demanding profession. Bemanos’ religion was for heroes and saints. Their heroism was their commitment to truth, their fidelity to the gospel in the smallest and most ordinary things of life, and their unstinting, sacrificial, gift of themselves in the self-abandonment of love for God and those whom he had made. Bemanos’ Church was the communion of saints, a place of exchange where ashes become fire and deserts bloom.