Priests, Women, and Families

by Jules Michelet

By means of the words unity and universal Church, they have made them quit the ways of the Church of France. They now enjoy the fruits of this change! They well know what Rome is, and what a Jesuitical bishop is. If the universality of mind (which is the only true one) was ever possessed by Rome, she lost it a long time ago; it is to be met with again, in modern times, and it is in France. For two centuries past, we may say, morally speaking, that France is the pope. The authority is here, under one form or another; it is here by Louis XIV., by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, by the Constituante, the Code and Napoleon. Europe has always its centre, every other nation is on the outside.

The world goes on, and flies away, far, very far from the middle ages. Most people think of them no more; but I shall not forget them. The shameful parade made of them by any one before my eyes, will not induce me to turn my heart from those dark and mournful ages, with which I have been so long acquainted, suffering when they have suffered. The sympathy I retain for that by-gone age, whose ashes I have warmed again, prevents me from being indifferent to its most faithless representatives. I do not hate, but I make comparisons, and am sad. I cannot pass the front of the church-porch without saying to Nôtre Dame, in the words of the ancient, "O miseram domum, quàm dispari dominaris domino!" Alas! poor house, thou hast made a sad change of masters!

I have never been insensible either to the humiliation of the Church, or to the sufferings of the priest. I have them all present, both before my imagination and in my heart. I have followed this unfortunate man in the career of privations, and in the miserable life into which he is dragged by the hand of a hypocritical authority. And in his loneliness, on his cold and melancholy hearth, where he sometimes weeps at night, let him remember that a man has often wept with him, and that I am that man.

Who would not pity this victim of social contradictions? The laws tell him things diametrically opposite to one another, as if to sport with him. They will and they will not have him obey nature. The canon law says No, and the civil law says Yes. If he take the latter to be serious, the man of the civil law, the judge, whose protection he expects, acts like a priest, seizes him by the robe, and hands him over degraded to the yoke of the canon law. Agree together, then, O laws! and let us be able to find authority somewhere. If this be law, and the other one directly contrary be also law, what will he do, who believes them both to be sacred?

Oh how my heart swells for all these unfortunate men! How many prayers have I made that they may be permitted to abandon a condition, which gives so rude a contradiction to nature and to the progress of the world! Oh! that I might with my hands build up and cheer the domestic hearth of the poor priest, give him the first rights of man, re-establish him in truth and life, and say to him, "Come and sit with us, leave that deadly shadow, and take thy place, O brother, in the sunshine of God!"

Two men have always deeply touched my heart, two solitary beings, two monks—the soldier and the priest. I have seen, often in my thoughts, and always with sadness, these two great sterile armies, to whom intellectual food is refused, or measured out with so niggardly a hand. They whose hearts have been weaned would require to be nourished with the vivifying food of the mind.

What will be the ameliorations and the remedies for these serious evils? We shall not attempt to tell them now. Either means and contrivances are found out by time, or it manages to do without them.

What we may safely say is, that one day or other, these terms priest and soldier will indicate two ages, rather than two conditions. The word priest, in its origin, meant old man; a young priest is a nonsensical contradiction.

The soldier is the youth who, after the school of childhood, and that of work, comes to be proved in the great national school of the army, and to gain strength, before he settles down to the quiet state of matrimony and the family table. Military life, when the state has made it what it ought to be, will be the last education, varied with studies, voyages, and perils, the experience of which will be of advantage to the new family which the man will form on his return.

The priest, on the contrary, in the highest acceptation of the term, ought to be an old man, as he was at first, or at least a man of a mature age, who, having passed through the cares of this world, and being well acquainted with family life, has been taught by his experience to understand the sense of the Great Family of the Universe. Seated among the old men, like the elders of Israel, he would communicate to the young the treasures of his experience; he would be the man for all parties; the man who belongs to the poor, the conciliating umpire to prevent lawsuits, and the physician of health to prevent diseases. To be all that, something more is required than an excitable, hot-headed young man. It ought to be a man who has seen, learned, and suffered much, and who has at last found in his own heart the kind words which may comfort us on our way to the world to come.