The Priest France Loved

Have you ever noticed how few things actually stop us in our tracks? And have you ever then noticed what stops us isn’t at all what we think it will be?

I fancy myself a reasonably worldly woman who has seen enough to be only nominally surprised by everything. While about 100 times a day since arriving in Paris I have been shocked and delighted (and that only speaks to my reaction in the cheese aisle at the local Franprix), I have actually found myself stopped in my tracks twice each day this week—because of a priest named Abbe Pierre—a man I had never even heard of until Monday.

The Priest
Josh told me before I headed off to my first class that my walk should be a bit more interesting because “Abbe Pierre”died that morning" at the hospital I pass enroute to class.

Josh then went onto explain that this Capuchin Priest who was essentially “the French Mother Teresa” was the most popular person in France (and he meant that literally: there is a poll taken each year and Abbe Pierre won for 17 of 20 years years. He probably would have continued winning, but took himself out of contention to “let the young people have a chance”).

And Abbe Pierre had been a decorated Resistance fighter during WWII (the ultimate symbol of “a good person” in France) and he had spent the last 50+ years serving the homeless, founding an international organization call Emmaus that serves the poor.

This was clearly a good man, but I didn’t expect to be moved the way that I was, and maybe still am.

The first afternoon I passed the hospital and there were many news vans and the beginning of a small makeshift memorial. By the time I returned home that evening, the news vans were joined by more reporters and the make-shift memorial had grown even larger.

I stopped on the way to class that first day mostly out of obligation. It seemed to me that people who do good things should get my attention. I stopped on the way home, and each subsequent time this week, because there is something truly powerful about this vigil.

There was a sleeping bag with a flower in the top, there were many small candles burning, there were roses and potted plants—but more than that, there were always people. Even I could make out that every newspaper wrote all week about the loss of this national hero.

I was learning about the French by watching how they grieve the loss of a beloved figure. I also didn’t have any similar experiences from the States, so this type of grieving seemed new to me.

I asked Josh if he felt anyone in America captured so many people’s hearts and would have a funeral like this—we were slightly embarrassed to say the only person we could come up with was Oprah. Any modern president would be too controversial, and undisputed greatness is rare.

The funeral was at Notre Dame today, which seemed in stark contrast to the little I knew about this man. 3,000 people were inside the cathedral, thousands more were outside of every imaginable walk of life. I suppose Notre Dame seems like the only appropriate place to honor a man so beloved by a nation.

It is interesting though that the national funeral would be so obviously Catholic with the president of France sitting in the front row in a country that prides itself on separation of Church and state

But the more I’ve learned about Abbe Pierre, the more fascinating he becomes and the more interesting the national grief seems. He was undoubtedly a very good man who served France during the war and the poor, but he was also flawed and anti-establishment. He advocated for married and women priests, he admitted to breaking his vow of celibacy, he used the media to advance his causes, he accidentally created controversy when he supported a friend who wrote a Holocaust revisionist book.

Yet here he was, being honored by France’s greatest living people, in one of France’s grandest cathedrals.

France adored this man. In his life he seemed to have embodied France’s proudest values and his shortcomings seemed to mirror those that the French have been accused of throughout history, making it impossible for anyone to hold his faults against him.

And for me, a newly arrived visitor to France, this man showed me a side of this country I feel lucky to have seen so early in my stay. I didn’t need to see this side of France to begin to understand what a complex country we have chosen to live in for a short while. But I come away learning more from the simple vigil outside the hospital than any world history class ever taught me about France and its people.

sPg

For more about Abbe Pierre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbe_Pierre