Bérulle and Olier: Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary

Extract

After the disruption of French Catholicism during the Wars of Religion of the second half of the sixteenth century, the Catholic revival of the seventeenth century famously involved a restoration of Marian piety. When the second monarch of the new Bourbon dynasty, Louis XIII, had dedicated the kingdom to the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1637, the long- and anxiously-looked-for male heir to the throne, the future Louis XIV, was finally born in 1638, easing a sense of crisis which was as much political and religious as purely familial. The widowed Queen Anne of Austria, regent for her son from 1643, subsequently ordered the building of the great Parisian shrine of Val-de-Grace. Yet the conspicuous Marian devotion of the French Catholic revival did not emerge in isolation, but rather in relation to a new and intense Christocentric piety. Central to the latter was the leading figure of the revival, Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629), founder of the French Oratory, and subsequently cardinal. The nature of his piety also led to concentration on the priesthood, seen as an essentially male imitation of Christ. In that further context a second major figure must also be considered, Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-57), who was certainly influenced by Berulle. But in one historic interpretation that influence was altered, in the direction of a Christian pessimism, by the process of transmission via a third figure, Charles de Condren (1588-1641). Yet the relations between these persons and their priestly and pastoral piety may be open to another interpretation, and one in which the place of a complementary Marian devotion has considerable implications for the much-debated history of seventeenth-century and subsequent French Catholicism.