Nothing can be done with the French people! What, then, have we come to? We admit that something can be done for felons in the hulks, for the pagan Chinese, for American savages, for the cannibals of Oceania. We believe it, for we send them help and missionaries; and yet nothing can be done for our France, for the nation beloved of God and His Church, which sheds its blood and spends its gold for the conversion of the infidels, and where so many heroic virtues still exist! It is a calumny against France. In order to justify your own neglect, you slander your brethren, you expose your ignorance of your country, you ignore the power of the Gospel and the virtue of the Cross. … Know, then, that we may yet regenerate the people. … Yes, we can, and if we cannot we ought, for it is a sacred duty; and he who does not discharge his own duty in that respect, has no right to give an opinion about the duty of others.
But what are the means which should be employed to bring the people nearer to the Gospel?
Religion must first be exhibited to them as it really is—beautiful, good, and lovely; and then you may hold it up to them as true, divine, and obligatory. You must first attract them by the senses and the imagination, by sentiment, and by the heart. The people like to be interested, touched, moved. They are fond of sentiment, of festivals, and shows. After a week spent in absorbing material drudgery their poor souls require the breath of the Divine word to animate and cheer them. To them especially religion should be "glad tidings"—should bring them mental repose, refreshment, and peace. We should set out by making them to feel, to love, and to bless; instead of which we begin with reasoning, and end with the same. We have a mania, a rage for reasoning; but make the people love first, then you may reason, and will be understood.
I say that in order to make religion lovely in the eyes of the people, you should exhibit it under its most attractive aspect. Point out the good which it does on all sides, to orphans, to children and their parents, to the forsaken, to the people themselves, their wives, their daughters, and their fathers. Appeal to their good sense and to their heart. Ask: "Is it not true? I refer the decision to your own judgment." Say to the people, but with overflowing affection:—"My dear friends, do what you will, you will never find a better resource than religion; religion will always be your best stay. … When you have spent your all, when the world will have nothing more to do with you, when your bodies shall be worn out by old age and sickness, when from dread of you men will flee from you as from a contagion, you will still find by your bedside a priest or a sister of charity to care for you and to bless you." [Footnote 11]
[Footnote 11: Le Manuel de Charité.]
But in order to make religion beloved, you must secure some love for the priest also; for the people confound our cause with that of God. In their estimation, religion is what the priest is; and if they do not love the one, they will hardly entertain any love for the other.
The priest, then, should appear to them surrounded with a halo of charity. He must make himself known; he will always gain by being known. He has been depicted in such dark colors that a true view of him will effectually remove many prejudices, and give occasion to the oft-recurring remark:— "Would that all priests were like this one."
But if the people no longer come to us, we must go to them. We don't mind going after the heathen of America and Asia; we cross the seas to get at them; whereas there are in our midst—in our workshops, our cottages, and throughout the country—tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of practical pagans. We know this well, we confess it, we deplore it, and yet we hesitate to cross the distance which separates us from them! Poor French souls! Can it, indeed, be that you are not of so much value as the souls of Chinese?