Moreau Beatification 2007
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Journal Entry: September 16, 2007
Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross
We arrived in France on Thursday, September 13, to celebrate the beatification of Father Moreau with a group that included Holy Cross religious and lay leaders from the University. With us were Richard Notebaert, the Chair of our Board of Trustees, and his wife, Peggy; Tom Burish, our Provost, and his wife, Pam; John Affleck-Graves, our Executive Vice President, and his wife, Rita; Hilary Crnkovich, our Vice President for Public Affairs and Communication, and her husband, Chris; John Cavadini, Chair of the Department of Theology, and his wife, Nancy; and Fr. Jim McDonald, C.S.C., our Associate Vice President.
At an evening prayer on Friday we joined Holy Cross sisters, brothers, and priests from around the world in the Church of Sainte-Croix, which Father Moreau built and where his body now rests. We saw there Carol Mooney, President of St. Mary's College; Fr. Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., President of the University of Portland; my good friend Sr. Pauline Gomes, President of Holy Cross College, a superb school for women in Dhaka, Bangladesh; Fr. James Burasa, C.S.C., who leads the young Holy Cross district of East Africa that serves at several educational institutions in Africa; and many others from Holy Cross ministries and institutions internationally. After the prayer service, I had the opportunity to meet at Le Mans Cathedral with approximately sixty Notre Dame students currently studying at various sites in Europe. Our Notre Dame delegation then ended the day at a dinner with other Holy Cross priests from the United States.
The image of family was pivotal in Father Moreau's vision for the group of women and men he brought together. As we gathered for his beatification, I was struck by how we all–Holy Cross priests, sisters, brothers; Notre Dame administrators, faculty, staff, and students; and those working in Holy Cross ministries around the world–had been forged into a global family by Moreau's vision and spirit. That vision continues to animate Notre Dame.
In the Church of Sainte-Croix are large stained glass windows representing the major institutions and places where Father Moreau sent his religious to serve: one depicts Notre Dame, a second, the St. Joseph Oratory in Montreal, Canada; a third, East Bengal, which is now Bangladesh; and a fourth, representing numerous other Holy Cross missions. It was manifestly a work of God's Spirit that Moreau, who had spent most of his life in and around Le Mans and had not then ventured outside France, could envision such a bold international mission to serve the Kingdom of God. Moreau cast seeds in faith, God gave the growth, and we are part of the tree that has sprung forth. As we gathered in Le Mans, we gave thanks for Father Moreau's life and holiness, and for what has grown from his vision.
Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C.
President, University of Notre Dame
As I read the story of Father Moreau, I was struck by how his ideals for the formation of students have become the hallmark of a Holy Cross education and how similar his challenges were to the ones we face in managing organizations.
Today, we see the legacy of Father Moreau's work in the thousands of C.S.C. priests, brothers, sisters, and lay ministers serving in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. It all started as one man's unshakeable desire to serve God in the roles in which he excelled–those of a scholar, teacher, and priest. If sometimes we are wistful about the challenges of operating in a secular culture amidst social turmoil, Father Moreau came into his spiritual calling in a context even more turbulent. He was born after the French Revolution at a time when the Church had lost popular support, clerical scandals abounded, and sectors of society (including education) had disintegrated. These challenges did not burden Moreau, but animated his vision to educate young people to the highest academic standards, with a strong love for God.
Moreau's vision for education is woven into the signature of the Notre Dame experience. Our most common description of ourselves, “an education of the heart and the mind,” came forth when Fr. Moreau declared that the education of the mind cannot come at the expense of the heart. The “Notre Dame Family” has its roots in Fr. Moreau's modeling his congregation after the Holy Family in its intended composition of the fathers, brothers, and sisters.
The extraordinary liturgies at Notre Dame would bring great joy to Father Moreau, whose love for good liturgies led him off, on his weekends, to haul hymnals on donkeys to rural parishes for Sunday Mass. Notre Dame's far-reaching alumni clubs and its dedication to service mirror Fr. Moreau's innovative recruitment of his former students in active service to the community. Our international orientation carries on Fr. Moreau's global outreach, whereby he sent his Holy Cross family to different continents across the world.
Deeply moving to me, as a student of organizational leadership, is the mix of entrepreneurial flair and grace that Father Moreau embodied. With little more than a band of brothers entrusted to his care by Father Dujaré, Fr. Moreau began to build a religious order that would eventually touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals. As in the start-up of any enterprise, he conceived the organizational structure, the governance principles, the plan of action, and the nature and scope of its ministries. He personally undertook the recruitment of priests and brothers, formulated and engaged in their preparation, and matched their talents to the work that needed to be done.
Yes, Father. Moreau was the consummate fund-raiser and engaged the ordinary folks of his day to give of the little they had. He attended not only to the tangibles but also to the spirit and soul that would animate and inspire the work of the collective community. He lived the daily grind of any administrator and did so with thoughtfulness, diligence, and discipline.
What distinguishes Father Moreau, though, is the inimitable grace he manifested under very trying situations. Throughout the four decades of his work, he encountered misunderstandings, disagreements, personal attacks, fairly public censures, rejection, and abandonment. Yet he responded with restraint and an uncommon grace. When falsely accused or misinterpreted, he did not counter-attack but presented the facts through the appropriate venues from the meticulous records he kept. On an occasion when he felt that his presence would be resented, he took a humble place to diminish his visibility. When major disagreements developed between him and the senior members of the Congregation, he could have removed them from their positions but chose not to. By so doing, he enabled their vision, passion, and talents to bear fruits despite the accusations he endured.
Father Moreau's actions provide witness of the possibilities of grace amidst inevitable organizational tussles born of legitimate differences in perspectives, personality clashes, and self-interests. Despite anguish and the hurt that he must have felt, Father Moreau sought the “bigger good”–the good to be accomplished in God's name and for God's people through the talents, passion, and flaws of the individuals whom God had sent specifically to be his partners in this service.
Central to Father Moreau's spirituality and the constitution of the Congregation of Holy Cross is the belief that our hope lies in the cross. While foundational to the teachings of Christianity, this is very difficult to put into action. There are crosses to bear in the daily life of organizations. Perhaps we can approach these as opportunities for grace, which comes only from the Divine. There are ways to honor differences, resolve conflicting interests, gain influence, exercise power, take positions without polarizing, and correct without demonizing.
The way of grace is not the way of popular culture and is seldom the wisdom of the most successful leaders of our time. It makes no promise that one will be left standing as a hero, with its full privileges. Its consequences are not always clear, as the most enduring contributions take lifetimes to bear a full harvest. But Father Moreau's example and his beatification affirm that such grace is possible–for each of us, by choice, through grace, in the faith that our hope is in the cross.
Carolyn Y. Woo
Martin J. Gillen Dean
Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor for Entrepreneurial Studies
Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame
We arrived at the parish church of Notre-Dame de Sainte-Croix, Our Lady of Holy Cross, at about 3:30 pm, a half hour before a service of evening prayer in thanksgiving for the life and legacy of Father Moreau. The church was already packed with people, praying and singing. Everything was jubilant, with daylight streaming in through the windows, sprays of dahlias and zinnias from local gardens, and the candles and votive lights in the sanctuary and at the tomb of Fr. Moreau. The service was conducted in French and English, alternating, for the benefit of the participants who had come from the United States and Canada, Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as from the parish itself and from around France.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown, it is the greatest of shrubs; and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.”
The service opened with this reading from the Gospel of Matthew. The commentary in the service book mentioned “the tiny seed, planted in Le Mans,” that had “grown and become a tree which is an image of a family.” And yet my mind had been going back and forth between the vibrant, crowded ceremony and the seeming indifference, as far as I could tell, of the rest of the city of Le Mans, which seemed to go about its business with scant notice or even curiosity regarding Fr. Basil Anthony Moreau. Perhaps tomorrow, at the beatification ceremony in the stadium outside of town, it will seem different. But in the city there were no celebratory signs or flags, and the crowd in the church, though it filled its relatively small nave, did not flow out onto the plaza.
I found myself looking for the large “tree,” but the more I looked, the more the parable from Matthew seemed to present the “tiny seed,” “the smallest of all seeds,” instead. That, I took as an image of holiness, of the sanctity we celebrate in a beatification ceremony. For someone like myself, always seeking the verification, the external and glorious, self-evident fruit that will obviate the awkward need for faith, the parable served as a reminder that the essence of holiness is always hidden, always invisible, and always presented to faith and never, fully, to exterior inspection.
To read the story of Basil Anthony Moreau is to read the story of a “tiny seed,” a movement of the will, of love, sown deeply in a field of suffering that never seemed to abate, the kind of suffering that comes when vision collides with institution, when love seems ambiguously incarnated in a nexus of ambition, of competition for notice and privilege, of a desire for an instant and obvious big tree that can be claimed as one's own.
The “tiny seed” of holiness must have seemed completely invisible in the field of abandonment and disillusion in which it ultimately found itself hidden, at the end of Moreau's life. That it did not become gnarled into a twisted shrub of bitterness is the miracle of holiness, which is hidden, and yet which sends forth a “tree,” capacious and welcoming, which those looking for a home, for a “nest,” can find. This large tree is the tree of the Cross, of love and compassion undefeated by rejection, misunderstanding, or anything else–Love itself, in which alone are there branches suitable for a true home worthy of living creatures.
This tree of compassion, the Cross, is, as the motto of Holy Cross reminded us in the service, our “true hope.” If we are placing our hope in the verification of the large edifice of acclaim and prestige, the seed of holiness will always seem invisible to our vision. If we are true to the vision of the founder of Holy Cross, our hope is in the coherence of vision and grows into a gracious and welcoming tree of compassion and love to which all the birds of the air, in a world full of suffering, will gladly flock.
“Moved by his life given over to Christ, let us give thanks to the Lord for such marvelous deeds” (from the hymn, “Hommage a notre Fondateur,” sung during the service.)
Prof. John Cavadini
University of Notre Dame