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"BLESSED ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖS" by Juan Manuel de Prada (https://nonpossumus--vcr-blogspot-com.translate.goog/2024/01/benditos-ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖes-por-juan-manuel.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en)
And the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness did not receive it (John 1:5)
The controversial pontifical declaration 'Fiducia supplicans' has caught me immersed in reading a biography of the French avant-garde writer Max Jacob (1876-1944), a ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ and Jew of αѕнкenαzι descent who converted to Catholicism around 1914, after a mystical experience in the one who saw the image of Christ appear on a movie screen. After being baptized (his godfather would be Picasso), Max Jacob will always live with heartbreak his sɛҳuąƖ impulses, which push him towards men often much younger than him, sometimes even children. Many of his contemporaries, who knew his propensities, doubted the sincerity of his conversion, considering him a harlequin who could never completely remove the theatrical makeup from his face; or, put less poetically, a hypocrite whose principles were not reconciled with his life. To his detractors, Jacob reminded them that the sacrament of confession erases sins, but not the source of them, which is fallen human nature.
Max Jacob never stopped, however, begging for the action of grace, in his effort to transcend carnal love. Thus, advised by Canon Fleureau, he decided to retire in 1921 to Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, where the Fleury Abbey is located, to live according to the rule of Saint Francis de Sales as a secular Oblate. There he remained for seven years, dedicated to a life of penitence and meditation, with the hope of "not sinning again." But in 1928 he would return to Paris and the debauchery, until 1936, when the longing for rural austerities returned him to Saint-Benoît, which he would only leave when the Gestapo arrested him – a Jєωιѕн race, at last – and interned him in the Drancy camp. , where he died of pneumonia on March 5, 1944. During these last eight years of his life, it is known that Jacob attended daily mass in Saint-Benoît, where he usually participated as an acolyte and received communion. On the train that took him to Drancy he wrote to Canon Fleureau: «I trust in God. "I thank you for the martyrdom that now begins."
How robust and vibrant the life of this blessed ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ seems to us, compared to that recent pontifical provision! But Max Jacob was still lucky enough to know a Church whose visible head enunciated the principles of Catholic moral doctrine without subterfuge or compromise; and whose members (like that canon Fleureau), through a prodigious sense of Catholic capillarity, accompanied those who could not always adjust their lives to those principles, accompanied them in their repeated falls and helped them get up again and again, without taking them hair or deceive them with merengistic sentimentalisms. And, while they accompanied them, they blessed them, because they knew – as Péguy teaches us – that it is through the door that sin leaves – “a terrible wound, an unforgettable anguish, a badly closed stitch, a mortal restlessness, a invisible background of the soul, a secret bitterness, a masked ruin, a badly closed scar” – through which grace slides into our souls.
This wonderful capillarity of the Church, "intolerant in principles because it believes but tolerant in practice because it loves" (according to the beautiful sentence of Garrigou-Lagrange), made possible the "exemplary life" of Max Jacob. The problems began when the Church wanted to assimilate itself to the world, "tolerant in principles because it does not believe and intolerant in practice because it does not love", adopting a stark (and disembodied) pragmatism that, while clouding the principles, does not guide or It accompanies those who are injured, but only serves to pat themselves on the back and look happy in front of the gallery. Well, suddenly, we have all stopped being wounded, we have all become those horrendous "flawless shells" to which Péguy also referred: "Since they are not wounded, they are not vulnerable. Since they lack nothing, nothing is given to them. Since they lack nothing, they are not given what is Everything. The very love of God does not heal that which does not have sores. The Samaritan picked up the man because he was prostrate on the ground. Veronica cleaned Jesus' face because he was dirty. He who is not fallen, he will not be picked up; "He who is not dirty, he will never be cleansed."
These fules blessings (or "trouts", as a porteño would say) to ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs do not collect or clean, they are pure fuss and pantomime of worldly tolerance. In reality, they are like the blessings given to dogs or geraniums (Fiducia supplicans itself recognizes that they must be imparted "without a sacramental formula, dressed in street clothes and without a subsequent celebration"), pure Jesuitism in the grimmest sense of the word. word; that is to say, cunning and duplicity, which only seeks to show off before the world, in exchange for losing the possibility of attracting blessed ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs like Max Jacob, with a contrite heart and sincere piety, a thousand times fallen and a thousand times upright, to whom such a aguachille It has to be forcefully repellent to them. On the other hand, these simulations of blessing will delight the activists, who will begin to go to the sacristies, demanding them, to tell the priests not to jump through the hoop and expose them to the pillory.
A blessed ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ like Max Jacob would have quickly realized that these blessings are a deception of cosmic size; Well, as he once wrote, "only what it costs has value." But, of course, Max Jacob had at his side Canon Fleureau, who did not practice theological gambling.
Juan Manuel de Prada