Click here to read the homily of St. How to help Contact us Private area. Other news. Vincentian Reflection on the Wold Day of de Poor. Frederic continued his academic work and ministering to the poor. As a confrere of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, he made home visits to the poorest of the poor.
Although an intellectual genius, he was devoted to the poor and illiterate, with whom he spent countless hours. As his health deteriorated, he resigned from the university.
He was 40 years old. Today in it numbers ,, serving the poor in countries, a living monument to Frederic Ozanam and his companions. The first formal step for his beatification was taken in Paris on June 10, He now in enjoys the official title, "Servant of God. From the time of the fourth century when Christianity was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire, French Catholics, like most Western Christians, assumed that their culture was Christian.
It took the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to bring to a boil the secular trends that were simmering beneath the surface of the culture. The French Revolution had left in its wake the uprooting of old beliefs and traditions as well as the destruction of old institutions.
With the coming of Napoleon, the country was almost without religion. To this day, ancient churches like the Cathedral at Chartres bear the scars of vicious destruction and profanation.
Reason was literally enthroned as goddess in the Pantheon, once a sacred shrine to St. Genevieve, one of France's great patronesses of the poor whose relics were desecrated at the time of the Revolution.
Atheism and freethinking had become vogue. Religious instruction was absent outside the home. Religious orders had been banished, the faithful clergy scattered. The philosophers declared the "death of Christianity.
Yet a Concordat was signed in which pleased no one, but provided at least some room for a reconstruction of a new order on the ruins of the old. Understandably, the Church had grown very defensive about the encroachments made upon its claims. In Ozanam's time, Catholics were divided as to what stand to take. Conservative Catholics grimly favored retrenchment. Liberal Catholics sought reconciliation and, though rejecting the anti-Catholic dimensions of secular liberalism, saw the acceptance of those ideals of the Revolution and the meeting of legitimate demands of the oppressed as vital to the reconciliation of the Church and modern society.
The basic issue between conservative and liberal Catholics was not a political one, but rather one of defending what the attitude to be taken by the Church toward modernity. On the one hand, should there be a withdrawal from or reconciliation with it? An unyielding defense against it or a search for new applications of Christian principles?
To regard change with pessimism and resist it or to look with optimism and hope at the possibilities of development? We will see that Ozanam made a clear and consistent choice in the liberal direction of bringing the Church to a more positive view of the modern world.
This put him out of step with the prevailing conservative mood of French Catholics. But it would anticipate the more universally Catholic view that would surface in the social encyclicals and more recent pronouncements like those of Vatican II. There was also a strong anti-clerical or perhaps anti-Church is a more accurate term spirit in many quarters. Certain features of it are worth noting. First, not all enemies of the Church were enemies of religion. Anti-clericalism was due primarily to the political involvement of Church and State.
Second, anti-clericalism was strongest in areas where the monastic orders had large land holdings under the ancien regime where the presence of the Church had been felt most strongly and especially where the Jansenists had been most deeply entrenched. Finally, anti-clericalism to a certain extent was France's alternative to Protestantism elsewhere, but which had been largely stamped out in France by the combined efforts of Church and monarchy.
A word must be said about the socio-economic scene. The France of Ozanam's time was marked by increasing numbers of poor people and inadequate measures of assistance for them. The Napoleonic system left public charities to the discretion of each of the nation's communes most of which had very limited re- sources. Cities like Paris had a disproportionate number of very poor people.
In , one in twelve were classified as "indigent. In addition to the more obvious problems of the poor - wages, living conditions, lack of necessities of life -a new, industrial, mass society was being born. And its violent birth was met with fear and resistance by the upper-classes. It was not merely a matter of low wages and long work hours.
Living conditions, especially in the rapidly growing cities were dreadful. Violence, disease and immorality were rampant. Furthermore, the plight of the poor was worsened by the greed and indifference of the upper-classes. The power of the State only strengthened the position of the wealthy. The whole spirit of society was hostile to the poor. In the midst of this exploitation of the wealthy, indifference of the State and alliance between Church and State, it is little wonder that the workers responded with hatred and violence.
And it became imperative for Christians like Ozanam to speak and to act so that the Church could be a Church incarnating Jesus in a modern world. An Appreciation by Amin A. Baunard, L. New York: Benzinger Brothers, Dublin: Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, Vincent de Paul, Australia: National Council, Camus, L. Cassidy, J R. Celier, L. Lethielleux, Chauveau, P. Deflandre, M. Garden City, N. Drury, T. Drzazgowska, M. Louis: Thesis St. Louis University, Dunn, A. New York: Benziger Brothers, Vincent de Paul, London: R.
Washbourne, Ltd. Duroselle, J. On 15 September , at the age of forty, he died in Marseilles of a serious illness, lived with Christian resignation.
He had written: « Great men are those who never have the plan of their Christian destiny in advance, but they have let themselves be led by God's hand ».
What gave a special hallmark to his life, what will make him remembered by the new generations, began precisely on his twentieth birthday, 23 April « Among all those we will see representing a conspicuous part of social Catholicism, there might not be one who has not passed through the St Vincent de Paul Conferences » to meet the countless needs of the poor.
0コメント