The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

memorandum was published in the same year and sold one hundred thousand copies, but it was a diagnosis, not a cure. Even today Catholics in France have not yet developed a social conscience. They have not yet understood the point of view of the workers. All they envisage is the limited charity of man to man; they do not yet realize that, first of all, justice must be given to a great section of human society.”
    “But surely,” said I, “the teaching of your bishops and priests has shown the workers that Christianity is not just a doctrine, but a way of living. Possibly the clergy have too closely identified themselves with the middle class and do not make themselves intelligible to the mass of the workers.”
    “That is what many of us believe,” said the seminarist excitedly. “How can we expect the workers to flock to church to hear sermons that are only delivered for the benefit of the church-going middle class. Must we not go further in adapting ourselves to the working class?” At this point the other priest stopped reading Ins breviary, took off his spectacles and said solemnly: “Social justice won’t remedy matters: Vous êtes trop exalté, Pierre, and your methods are too crude and hasty. Social justice must not be a condition for becoming evangelized. The Church did not wait for the abolition of slavery, but lived beside it as it did afterwards beside feudalism and capitalism: it softened them from within, but it did not attempt to destroy them from without. Social justice, I repeat, will not end our difficulties. Probably the worker will not thank us for social justice any more than he thanks us for our charity and pity if he notes in them the slightest touch of a sneer, instead of sincere brotherly love.”
    “I agree, Jean,” said Pierre, “we must show the workers a Christianity which has been purified of class distinctions: we must follow the example of St. Paul, who became a Gentile with the Gentiles and a Jew with the Jews, and the modern missionaries, who have to shed so much of their culture, their traditions, even their own language, in order to make themselves understood by the countries where they strive to spread Christ’s teaching.”
    The two young priests then spoke of the great movement that had taken place in France among the younger clergy to institute priest-workers.
    In 1933 the movement was founded by Père Voillaume, who tried to carry out the ideal of Charles de Foucauld, a retired officer of the French Army, a convert who became ordained and ended his days as an apostle among the Touaregs in the Sahara. The Confraternities have a masculine and two feminine branches, which are called ‘Les petites sœurs du Sacré Cœur’ and ‘Les petites Sœurs de Jésus’. Their watchword, which was given to them by le Père Voillaume, is travailler au cœur des masses . * Charles de Foucauld, who became in 1905 le Père Charles de Jésus, defined his ideal thus: ‘to adopt the life of Nazareth alone or in a brotherhood in all its depth and humility... without a habit like Jesus at Nazareth; uncloistered as Jesus at Nazareth; not less than 8 hours work a day (manual or otherwise, but preferably manual) like Jesus at Nazareth; no great estates, no big rooms, not even great alms, but extreme poverty in everything, as Jesus in Nazareth. In a word; in all as Jesus at Nazareth’. Charles de Foucauld died in 1916 without accomplishing his life’s wish of founding a community, but his life written by René Bazin inspired René Voillaume to create the community which was established south of Oran in the Sahara. I had met the Little Sisters of Jesus at the annual Gypsy Festival at Les Saintes Maries de la Mer and had witnessed what wonderful work these devoted women did among the nomadic Romanichals and ‘forains’. * They and le Père Fleury, a Jesuit from Poitiers, who is the national almoner of the Gypsies in France, have been pioneers in a work done on behalf of foreign nomad Gypsies and water-Gypsies or bargees, which has awakened interest in Holland and Belgium, where I have met priests who have persuaded their authorities to adopt the same methods with their nomadic Gypsy populations. *
    During the war, in 1944, the Mission among the workers was founded in Paris and twenty-five priests worked in factories in the city: they lived alone, but took their meals at the factory canteens, and at five o’clock in the afternoon they returned to their lodgings, where they said Mass for