Dear Marist friends,

Having been invited to speak to you about Jean-Claude Colin on this celebration of the bi-centenary of his birth, I could have prepared a carefully worked-out conference on one or other aspect of his life or attempted a synthesis of his personality, his contribution to the Church and to our religious families. In fact, I soon felt that on an occasion like this I could not limit myself to “treating a subject” with all the detachment of an historian. This man influenced my life far too much for me to think of him this evening as a mere theme for a conference.

Having entered novitiate without even, I believe, knowing his name, it was through contact with his writings and while standing before his tomb that, shortly afterwards, during the vigil ceremony of the 15th November, my conversion to the Lord and to religious life began; it was there that both my Marist and Colinian vocations were born, simultaneously so to speak. Since then, I think, I have never ceased being confronted by him, since I cannot separate the congregation I live in from the man who founded it and to the study of whom I ended up devoting a large part of my life. That Colin’s personality, certainly not an easy one, should have exercised such a seductive influence is not, it must be admitted, a common experience among Marists. Often Colin as a man seems to be more an obstacle than a help, and the spontaneous reaction is to try to “save” him, as it were, by extracting from his life, from his words, a “spirit” that would outlast him and have meaning for us.

I could have devoted myself this evening to celebrating once again the abiding values and the relevance of his thought for today. But in fact I believe we can do something more and better. Rather than trying to bring him closer to us, let us simply look at him, at the man himself, with his Colin head, as Yardin used to say. Make no mistake about it, in spite of his deep wisdom, this man is no Confucius or Pascal; in spite of his countless “spiritual conversations”, he could never compete with the great masters of spirituality, and much less can he be seen as an innovator of genius in the area of new apostolates. Basically he was one thing only, but he was that to the fullest extent possible: a founder. Not, as we all know, in the sense that he was the first to launch the idea of a project to which we all now belong, but in bringing alive the congregation of Marist Fathers who owe everything to him. This is the reality I would like to look at this evening, and right now I ask forgiveness of the Brothers and Sisters present if they do not find in my presentation an analysis of what Colin specifically means for their congregations. I believe that in general we all know what that is. Let us go to the essential. This man spent his life bringing into existence, enabling to grow, strengthening, and defending a well defined religious body. Let us first of all ask what he intended, and afterwards it will be time enough to come to ourselves and to the role he might play in our future.

One of Colin’s greatest battles was the one he fought against the Vicars Apostolic of Oceania to ensure for the missionaries the help that comes from community life and their belonging to a religious family.

From this point of view, to be a Marist, and not a Picpus religious, is not a simple matter of fact, something accidental and secondary, as for example the fact of belonging to the province of Paris rather than Lyon. In belonging to the Society, the religious finds all that henceforth his life is going to be, materially, psychologically, spiritually. He has no need to search elsewhere: it would be useless and imprudent. Hence the importance of all that expresses, reaffirms, preserves those realities which are at the root of this common belonging.

Heading the list among these things are the general retreats, to remind us of the aims pursued and the means accepted, to strengthen the bonds between scattered confreres and especially, through the consecration to Mary at the end, to celebrate the initiative of grace to which the Society owes its existence. The annual rhythm of these retreats, however, is not enough: it is day by day that the same realities are re-expressed and lived, thanks to the three Salve Regina’s which in the morning, after lunch, and in the evening punctuate the Marist day and bring the community once again into the presence of the one who is its foundress and superior. Meals are also privileged moments which, over and above sustenance - quite substantial, let it be said - provide, thanks to reading, silence, and the improvised conversations of the Founder, a further occasion to deepen certain convictions. Thus they are genuine community exercises practiced by Marists. “No outsiders at our table,” Colin would never cease to repeat, certainly not because of any mistrust of laity, but in order to ensure for the community a privileged moment in which to come together and be strengthened, in every sense of the word.

Besides, to continue our exploration, at the risk of being bewildered or lost, we need to remember both the depth and the extent, in Colin’s thinking, of the subject’s being taken over by the Society to which he gave himself completely. The Society takes care of him first of all materially with sustenance and help guaranteed until death, in return for the subject’s handing over completely the fruits of his work. But also, and especially, the Society’s spiritual care is extremely specific and effective. The Society offers to the subject a whole network of exercises to keep him in touch with God; it ensures that they are assiduously practiced, thanks particularly to checking the rooms during morning meditation; it expects each one to help his brother’s weakness by informing the superior of the failures he notices; it expects each one to open up his heart to the one doing visitation, which, without encroaching on the area reserved to confession, ensures that each one is known by the one in authority with regard to essential points: state of conscience, interior fidelity to vocation, the reality of his prayer life. The Society also controls all relations with the outside world: letters, going out, visits, because it cannot allow a Marist to deny in his contact with others the values it intends to affirm and defend. By profession the subject makes his own the objectives of the social body through which he gives himself to God and he knows that he can be checked at any moment on the fidelity of his behaviour to these objectives. There is a certain logic here pushed as far as it can go: what is ultimately at stake, in fact, is too serious, both for the Society and for the individual, to risk compromising it by closing one’s eyes to what is going on.

We know that today’s changed mentality and indeed theology itself leads us to distance ourselves somewhat from such an outlook, and we shall have occasion to say this more clearly shortly. What we cannot accept, however, is that this image of the Society be purely and simply rejected as a carry-over from the age of obscurantism. To be sure, the community took over the individual completely, but no more than what happened in the early Church, when the ultimate punishment was meted out to Ananias and his wife for simply hiding from the apostles the exact price of a field which was undeniably their own property. To say this is not to say that we should introduce such things into our own changed world, but we can sincerely ask ourselves if there was ever a religious group capable of making a real impact on the surrounding world without the members accepting that the group control their fidelity, for the sake of the values recognised by all as essential.

It would go still further beyond all justice and historical truth to commiserate with the inhuman situation of the poor Marists of the last century, victims of this oppressive totalitarianism. There is the telling incident of Jean-Baptiste Sandre, who withdrew after spending a year in the scholasticate of La Capucinière in 1842. In his memoirs, which describe how he became a free thinker, he has left a moving testimony of the time he spent with the Marists. What he experienced with them had a meaning for him: certainly everything was directed towards the maintenance of the virtues and of piety, but, he said, “we were like a family, living like brothers at peace”; during all the time he spent in the house, he remained faithful to his religious exercises and that, he explains, “in a natural manner, without constraint and without distaste” (FA, p. 149, note 1). If later he abandoned the faith, it was not because he had known people who took it seriously and accepted all its consequences for their own lives.

Yes indeed, the Society of Mary was then a truly fraternal community and the rule itself, of which one might be tempted to say that it ignored the most sacred of personal rights, in fact guaranteed them much more than might be thought: for Colin all Marists were eligible to chapters and it was his successor Favre, so concerned about modernity, who arranged things in such a way as to ensure control of those elections by the central power; for Colin there were no differences between priests and brothers except those arising from ordination and it was after him that, to his indignation, the practice arose of giving coffee to the priests and not to the brothers. Everybody, Colin says, no matter what his dignity, should work periodically in the kitchen. Typical also was that rule of poverty according to which “nobody is allowed to have in his room what others cannot have,” a demanding principle aimed against introducing into community life those inequalities which soon make it intolerable and which the canonical casuistry of permissions soon legalises.

What has to be underlined is the internal balance which characterised Colin’s idea of the Society: on the one hand the individual gives himself unreservedly to the Society, which takes him over completely, but the Society is not left behind: it offers the individual what he deeply seeks: a life for God and the creation of a fraternal community. We all know how much the attainment of these two objectives, inseparably united since Jesus Christ, is slowed down by our personal demands. It would be well worth while to tone these down somewhat if by that means we could go further in the direction we seek. Of course there is something utopian in this, but in the strong sense of utopian, that sense of which the New Testament is full, and if Colin believed in it, he deserves at least our respect.

A word about authority will enable us to rediscover, both in all its power and in its remarkable balance, the idea Colin had of the Society. Here again there is no concession to the ideas most in fashion: “The Society, Messieurs, will not be a republic; there will not be two chambers. There will be a system of authority and obedience” (FS, doc. 174, § 27). Government in the Society will be even stricter than among the Jesuits (FS, doc. 68). And that was not empty boasting! Whatever the sociological, psychological, or theological conditioning that might have given him this attitude of mind, Colin had a descending conception of authority: authority comes from God, the superior holds the place of Christ and of Mary and he is the channel through which we can learn God’s will from on high. Nothing very new in that, but beyond these ideas, current in his time, Colin had an almost sacral notion of the superior, especially of the superior general, placed by his very position in a special relationship with heaven, high priest between God and his people, expected to lead them in the Lord’s pastures.

An inevitable consequence of such a point of view, we imagine, will be the creation around the sacred personage of an aura of prestige and of almost unlimited rights. In fact in no way is that the case. There are few questions about which Colin spoke more explicitly or more forcefully: a Marist superior can call on no special dignity, no privilege, no facility which does not derive directly from his specific and temporary role. For example, he may have two rooms, since he has a mass of documents to keep, and sufficient chairs to receive strangers who come to do business with him, but for the rest he should not stand out except for his greater poverty; the major superior, unless he is also the local superior, should not preside at table, a measure Favre would later change, he was so concerned to preserve for authority “the honour which is its due.” Besides, nobody more than Colin insisted on the fact that the superior at the end of his term of office should return to the ranks; the practical establishment of a class of superiors succeeding each other in all the important positions was, on the contrary, one of the sad features of the administration which came after him. Even the famous practice of genuflecting before the superior, we know, was not a recognition of any special dignity of the superior, but, in Colin’s mind, was intended simply to bring the two men into that spirit of faith which should prevail in their interview.

One is badly mistaken then in tracing back to Colin tendencies that appeared in the Society at certain times, of confusing the unquestionable force of authority with the personal prestige of those who exercised it. Colin may have sacralised the function, but he left the office-holder no possibility of presenting himself as a sacred cow. Indeed, on this question of authority perhaps more than on any other, mentalities have changed between Colin’s time and ours. This needs to be noted, but it would be profoundly unjust to point onesidedly to traces of an outmoded authoritarianism in the Founder, while omitting to mention those elements which provided a counterbalance. Admittedly, his conception of authority was different from ours, but it was a consistent whole: it was a passionate and more than respectable attempt to give the Society a strong orientation in the direction of its supernatural mission, by hounding as rigorously as possible the corruption which power brings into the heart of those who exercise it.

That the Society of Mary, in the Founder’s vision, should have this missionary dimension is no longer a new discovery for anyone and I don’t plan to spend time on themes that have been well developed in recent years. From the more specific point of view we have taken this evening, I would prefer to show that the Founder not only thought about and expressed in his conversations and letters this basic dimension, but that he enshrined it in the structure of the social body he founded.

Let us begin with what is a good indicator of the orientations of a religious community: the place it gives to a particular reality in its prayer. From the beginning of the Society, prayer for sinners holds a central place in Marist intentions: every Wednesday the whole day is offered for them; parishioners during missions, students in the colleges, the Christian Virgins of Lyon, the Marist Sisters were all associated with this intention. Every day, during the visit to the chapel after lunch, immediately after the Salve Regina, and before any other invocation, five appeals were addressed to Our Blessed Lady, St. Michael, to the angels, the apostles, to St. Francis Xavier, all with the same insistent request: “Pray for the conversion of sinners and unbelievers.” Favre, the perfect theologian, was to change all that. If a visit is made to the chapel, the Tantum ergo must be recited before the Salve Regina, then, not to be too long, the invocations were reduced to three with the banal formula: “pray for us.” To pray for oneself is fine, to be sure, but it is not the same as praying for the conversion of the world. It was in vain that Colin asked for a return to the first formula, and a postulatum from Jeantin barely succeeded in adding at least the timid “pray for our missionaries” which still concludes the exercise.

That the change was not a mere accident is confirmed by one of the clearest characteristics of the post-Colin period: not the loss of apostolic zeal, still less the loss of a devotion to Mary, but the dissolving of the bond between the two, of that intimate bond to which the Society, since the 1816 project, owed its fruitful tension. Henceforth, on the one hand Mary was celebrated, and on the other ministries were exercised, but there was hardly any reference to the idea that it is the very fact of bearing Mary’s name that determines the Society’s apostolic choices: to go everywhere seeking out sinners, to give them all one’s time, leaving others to care for souls who are doing well, to undertake what others will not do, to refuse parishes, where one is bound to people who are already Christian, and chaplaincies, which limit the soul’s horizon. “Something else is needed for a Society of apostles,” Colin used to say. Between the little directories for all tasks which flourished after 1854 and what the Founder called “the love of souls,” there was a great chasm, a chasm in which there quietly disappeared what had enthused the Marist aspirants in the major seminary when they simultaneously called themselves “Mary’s first children” and looked out on “the great needs of people.” All that Colin said about the Marist apostolic style, “hidden and unknown”, “taking souls by submitting to them”, echoed the passion of a mother who cannot bear to see her children perish. In one of his last declarations, after the 1872 chapter, the Founder recalled “our very own mission, to work for the salvation of souls,” and he added, not without sadness, “Not one Father stood up in the chapter to support my idea.”

Thus, whether we look at it in its vocation or in its mission, in its internal life or in its reaching out to others, to the world to be converted, the Society intended by Colin is a social body totally structured by the ends that are proper to it and which it received from on high. It all holds together with a surprising force and coherence which only a historical effort enables us to rediscover. This image which we have just called up, can we still call it our own, can we still make it our own? There is the question we must now address.

You may ask what these theological considerations have to do with our reflection on Colin. Personally I believe they are essential. I do not think, in fact, that we can truly relate to this man apart from the context of faith. Let us be clear. There is no question of calling on faith to have us accept Colin’s notion of the Society’s vocation or mission, to tie us to his way of seeing Mary’s role or the role of the superior, to bring us back, in fact, to an image which already belongs to the past. Faith intervenes in a totally different way: it continually reminds us that history is where God manifests himself; the secular reading we can and should do of the events of this history does not dispense us from seeking out the role they play in our dialogue with God. An alert psychologist may analyse the mechanisms at work in the behaviour of his parents and therefore relativise them, but he may not allow to develop within himself feelings of contempt or resentment without turning his back on God who expects him to love and honour them. Faith, yes, true faith, that which is not simply adherence to dogmas, accompanies the believer all through life, corrects his reactions without condescension, preserves the presence of God in a life through a thousand attitudes of detail which express its religious meaning.

Strictly speaking, there is only one body which must always continue in existence: the Church, which has Jesus Christ as its head. The others acknowledge men as their founders, and do not have to endure, but fall when the need for which God created them has been met. If they do endure afterwards, they no longer thrive with the dash and prosperity which blessed their early days. They fall back into the common run when their mission is ended. (FS, doe. 5)

It could hardly be better said, and Colin gives us there a key to unlock the enigma of the future of the Society of Mary.

The first consoling fact to notice: two centuries after the birth of the Founder, we are still in existence, without any schism or traumatic reform to cast doubt on our continuity with the Society whose unity Colin and Favre consecrated when they overcame their differences.

As for the need for which the Society came into being, we know what this was, even if there were differences in the way it was described. Our Society came into being shortly after the world, for the first time in its history, set about giving itself a basis independently of any theology or faith, beginning the process we now call secularisation. In face of this process, beyond the inevitable condemnations, Colin felt one could do more than simply claim rights and impose one’s will. He felt that the best response would be a hidden presence, like that of Mary. The direction nowadays taken by the Church’s statements about itself and about the hidden God would seem to indicate that the insight guiding the actions of the first Marists has not had its day yet.

Having come to where it is today without any rupture with its origins, and having being designed to respond to the most burning problem of our day, the Society has all it needs to continue in existence, and this not by “falling into the common run,” but by keeping the fullness of the blessing that accompanied its beginnings. The question now is: Do we really want this body to continue?

The response to this question is not as obvious as it might seem. To be sure, no Marist would like to see his congregation disappear. However, faced with the changes that have taken place over the last century that we have briefly recalled, faced with the difficulty of holding on to Colin’s image of the Society and with our decrease in personnel, there is the temptation to aim for the perennial endurance of a vision or a “spirit” rather than the more problematic continuity of the social body. The Founder’s broad vision of a people of God of the last days open to believers “of every age, sex, and condition” would seem to invite us to see our future in terms of a multiplicity of initiatives united less by fixed structures than by the same spiritual reference.

In fact, however, the more attractive the mirage, the more the desert traveller should mistrust it. Forgive me if I intervene here in a very personal way. I believe I had a role, generally recognised, in the rediscovery of certain of the Founder’s themes, but now I begin to ask myself if in all this I have not been playing the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice. Yes, it was time to realise that Colin was not merely the somewhat moralising preacher of the hidden virtues, that he knew how to encompass the present and the future in a powerful vision, in which the mystery of Mary threw light on the mystery of the Church and its future. It is fundamental for the understanding of a man to go back to the broad horizons of his thought, but that provides only a framework of interpretation, not a content. If we are happy to discern, in some of Colin’s insights, an anticipation of certain themes of Vatican II’s ecclesiology or of the theology of hope, it is clear that our real reflection in these directions will be nourished more by modern research than by what may have been felt at the beginning of the 19th century. Colin cannot compete with theologians who have considerably refined their instruments of thought. On the other hand, what neither Rahner nor Moltmann have done is to bring together a group of men to embody these insights, to train them patiently to give witness in a manner inspired after Marian humility, to oppose rather harshly the desire these men might have had to serve themselves in order to turn them little by little into instruments of the mercies of God.

Yes, let us not hesitate to repeat it, what Colin did was to found a society, to give it a rule, to give life to a body that would incarnate his insights. The most insidious temptation for us today would be to become indifferent to the body in order to concentrate on the spirit. The separation of body and spirit has a name; it is called death. Is that what we really want for Colin’s heritage? Even the most characteristic and encouraging phenomenon of our time, namely the interest the laity show in this Marist heritage could likewise be misleading. I believe that, more than any vision or spirit seen in isolation, what really attracts them to Marists is the contact they have with Marist communities. If there were no body there to make the spirit visible, if Colin’s ideas were merely those of an isolated thinker of genius, the laity would find in them no point of reference.

That was only an example and I would beg you not to give it more weight that it deserves, but I remain convinced that a direct continuity between the Founder and ourselves, even if only on a few points, has a considerable importance for the preservation of our identity and for our survival. To discover what these points might be is the work of all. Pity the poor congregation whose refoundation would be entrusted to historians, even if these may have their role to play in the formation of a collective consciousness.

Yes, to learn once more, after thirty years of liberation, to love afresh our Marist corporate body, to give it features and form, there is the task that awaits us, if we do not wish to disappear. The meaning of our past has its role to play, but even more so our own real creativity, the only authentic sign of life. Our way of praying together, gestures of sharing and fraternal help, all of this has to be re-invented. But we cannot stop there. The essential is still deeper. Our faith in God, in Christ, in the Church is empty if we accept from them no more than an approval of our own choices. It becomes real when, on the contrary, the word of God penetrates to our depths, “to where joints and marrow come together” (Heb 4, 12). Let us have the courage to say it: our Marist being will hardly be an expression of faith if it does not bite into our daily choices, if it is no more than a framework in which we have to exercise our freedom. Among the things to be re-invented there is all that will make real the responsibility the Society to which we have given ourselves has in our regard. Some forms of checking on meditation in the last century were rather police-like and childish, but if our prayer life becomes a strictly private domain which my Society has not to be concerned about, it is the very meaning of life in common for God which is called into question. Of course I expect that my superiors will respect my freedom and my conscience, but it remains to be proved that they are not respecting me when they ask me about what once upon a time, before them, I solemnly promised to observe. Since the dawn of religious life in the desert, centuries before St. Ignatius, opening one’s heart to the one in authority was the soul of the following of Christ. Any group which claims to represent certain values is concerned about the way its members live those values, and a religious life which demands nothing soon represents nothing. I believe therefore that we have to find once again symbols and rules which speak not only of sharing, but of dependence, and which will express with equal force both what I can expect from my Society and what it can expect from me.