RU 04/2007 - FRANCE, let's forget Abbe Pierre

- FRANCE: Abbe Pierre? Let's forget him! Doesn't the Holy Scripture counsel that 'the right must forget what does the left'? Let's forget him, not because he would have been a Jewish convert: this is a false rumor, even though it would have explained a certain number of the Father Pierre's interior contradictions. Not because he would have sent, as a deputy with the National Assembly after the 2nd World War, the cooperators of Vichy to the gallows: all what can be found with his biographers, is that he intervened once in the parliament against an amendment that would have granted some clemency to the younger ones among the resistants against the Germans. One cannot deduct too many suppositions from this isolated fact. Not because he pronounced himself against the celibacy of priests: he doesn't excel in this, since a big number of Catholic priests preach it today, from the pulpit and in their flesh. Not because he was favorable to women priests: he knew perfectly that this was a low human idea which would never be realized in the Catholic Church, since Jesus chose his Apostles. Not because he confessed himself publicly to have sinned with women, inspite of being a religious (Capucin): those psychodramas don't interest anybody anymore, since one can see and hear this kind of penitents, forgetting that there is a confessional for that, so often on TV. Not for his utopias with Bernard Kouchner about 'necessary interference' (intervention) in other countries in order to defend human rights, providing thus potentially the justification for a unique, oppressive and totalitarian world government: all this non-Catholic talking ended up nowhere. Not because he was good friend with the Communists: the opposite would rather have astonished in a clergy that got used to be 'swearer' (on the atheist Constitution) since two centuries in France. Not for his famous self-bestowed nimbus 'abbe Pierre', when his name was simply Henri Antoine Groues: he is not the only one to glorify himself by a name, a borrowed nobility. Not for his permanent research to appear with the top personalities of this world, on all media stages: it can, up to some degree, be explained by his desire to make known the outcry of the poor ones. - No, not for all this we should forget him. But merely for the fact that he is nothing in this message of love. It doesn't come from him, he didn't invent it. The main thing is that, in him, the Good Lord made resound His burning Word: love your neighbor! It's all His Glory, and the only merit of Fr. Pierre was to have been, during a short moment - his life - , the receptor and microphone of the Good Lord in the middle of a selfish and atheistic universe. A young man heard in 1954 on the radio that Fr. Pierre made construct in Holland a village for people without home: he left his home and, by hitchhiking, went there to help, with his hands, to construct those houses. This young man never saw Fr. Pierre, never read any of his books, never was a companion of Fr. Pierre's movement Emmaus: but he received the message, this Good News which spilled out through the priest's mouth: love your neighbor! This divine message seized him, enflamed him and transformed him. In 2004, a Parisian taxi driver, not known as a column of any parish, hided a pregnant prostitute of the East, from the boulevards of Paris, for one week free of charge at his stepmother's home on the countryside in Burgundy, in order to protect her from her Georgian pimps who wanted her to abort her baby. And that little lady in Normandy, in 2006, who earns her poor life by doing some household works in the home of others: she shelters almost permanently one or two schoolgirls to permit them not to take refuge to abortion... How many times these small conversions occurred in the world, following the humble - sometimes scandalous or even guilty - apparitions of Fr. Pierre, and of other priests? How many poor have been comforted in the shade, fed and lodged without noise, loved without glamour? The true good is done without noise, in God's silence. All the honor, around this media affair of Fr. Pierre, belongs to God, beyond the glory and praises of men to men. And after all, the fact to have been, during some seconds of eternity, God's microphone to bring a beam of love into this hopeless world, is it not worth of a Requiem in Notre Dame cathedral? R.I.P. - (ru)