Difficulties, however, arose in proportion to the progress made. Few adherents were obtained from among the manufacturing chiefs, on whom depends the whole economy of the working-classes; while the committees, formed of men little accustomed to study the laws of labor, did not well observe its divisions, and thus dwindled away. That of Paris, to which had been allotted the most complete autonomy, and which was more especially devoted to the general propagation of the work, gave way beneath its accumulated burden.
“We then” (to quote the words of one of the members in his address to the Congress at Rheims)—“We then turned our eyes with confidence to her who is the help of Christians, our ever Blessed Lady, resolving to go all together and invoke her aid in one of the sanctuaries of France where she has most anciently manifested her power, and where formerly the kingdom was dedicated to her by a solemn vow—Notre Dame de Liesse. The funds of the Paris committee were already exhausted and the year only half over. We collected ten thousand francs, and unhesitatingly devoted them to defray the expenses of this distant pilgrimage.
“The committees of the north were invited to join it at the head of the circles they had formed, and on the 17th of August, 1873, twenty-five hundred pilgrims arrived from their respective towns to form one procession to Notre Dame de Liesse. Half of the number, in spite of the fatigues of the way, there received Holy Communion, and we returned with renewed strength and confidence to our posts.”
We will not here give a detailed account of the toils and progress of the year which succeeded the pilgrimage. A brief of the Holy Father confirmed the constitution of the work by the grant of duly specified indulgences attached to it; it also received the canonical protection of a cardinal of the church.
These favors brought a timely encouragement to the promoters of the work; for with its progress its trials also increased. Among the most painful were those of seeing it misunderstood by many persons who might have been expected to prove its warmest advocates. Some of these lost sight of its social character, and preferred to seek the good of a few individual souls instead of helping forward a Christian restoration of society; while others, again, mistook the part to be taken in the committees by the upper classes. “Of what use,” they asked, “is a committee, unless to provide resources for an ecclesiastical director?”
This is a question which has been frequently asked. But it must be borne in mind that if the circle establishes among its members social fraternity, the director could not himself alone represent its paternity. To do this would be to deter other Christians of the upper classes from the unmistakable command they have received to exercise this social paternity which they have from God in the very advantages of their social condition.
For why are riches and honors bestowed upon the few—why the benefits of education, of leisure, of cultivation of the mind—unless it be that they are to be consecrated to the moral guidance and material assistance of the classes who are deprived of such advantages? In regard to this social paternity, as in regard to that which creates the family, the priest must be the consecrator: but, in his turn, the father who would abandon to the priest the charges and responsibilities of the dignity which, by divine right, is his own, would only disappear from among his fellow-men to be confounded before the Eternal Father—he and the two complaisant accomplices of his culpable abdication.
After establishing social fraternity by the circles, and social paternity by the committees, it remained to restore the social family—that is, to associate Christian families in the benefits of the work, after having associated in it the heads of families of various conditions.
The family is, in fact, the first association by natural right, and therefore every constitution which embraces it and does not take it for its foundation is vitiated and sterile. The founders of the work knew this, and were, moreover, not allowed to forget it by the daily reproaches they received—“You are destroying the family; you are destroying the parish!”—and what not. But how to reach the family so as to be of service to it instead of injurious was not for some time made clear. The Circle of Montparnasse, the prototype of the rest, had avoided rather than faced the difficulty by disposing of its active functions in favor only of its unmarried members. But this was plainly not the solution.
The solution had, however, been discovered, at no great distance from Rheims, in the great manufacturing region which has for the motive power of its machines the waters of the Suippe, for its boundary the extensive woods which form an oasis of verdure in the burning plains of Champagne, and for its population factory-men, who wander, at the bidding of the industrial fluctuations of the time, to and from the looms of the north, of Rheims, or of St. Quentin—a population exceptionally indigent, since the struggle between capital and wages, inaugurated by liberalism, has become the normal condition of the producer and the consumer.