Basil Moreau and Religious Life - A talk given by Sr Ann Catherine at the book launch of Basil Morea

There is a venerable tradition amongst Religious of poking gentle fun at each other’s institutes, and one of the many delights of the last three years, in which I’ve been privileged to work alongside the only priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross currently resident in the United Kingdom, has been the opening up of an entirely new avenue of pleasure in just this area. Among the standard strategies in such inter-congregational jousting is, of course, the Our Founder is Better than Your Founder Manoeuvre, which involves showing just how much more like Jesus our founder is than is yours. Over the centuries, when faced with superficially more impressive candidates like St Francis of Assisi, Dominicans have learnt to be wily and resourceful, and a favourite tactic has been to point out that, like Jesus, St Dominic wrote next to nothing: some mysterious letters in the dust in one case; a few notes to nuns in the other. Now, by this criterion, I fear it’s not looking good for Blessed Basil. Basil Moreau wrote lots. That is, after all, why we are here this evening. And thank God that he did, and that we are.

Because, of course, the serious point is that what he wrote reveals precisely a man for whom the quest for Christlikeness is everything. And, at least to this Dominican, the specific form of this quest undertaken by Basil Moreau, the specific nature of his search for holiness, has a strangely familiar texture.

Although the Order of Preachers is a little older than the Congregation of Holy Cross, the congregation of Dominican Sisters to which I belong is almost exactly contemporaneous with Moreau’s foundation. Basil Moreau was a toddler in rural France when our foundress, Margaret Hallahan, was born in the slums of London, where she received her somewhat meagre formal education at the hands of an émigré French priest turned schoolmaster, a refugee from the post-revolutionary turmoil that provided the backdrop for Moreau’s own Catholic formation. Mother Margaret, it is said, found lifelong consolation in the French spiritual songs she learned at school, some of which, perhaps, were known to Blessed Basil. It is tempting to think, then, that the two grew up almost literally singing from the same hymn-sheet: metaphorically, I think we can certainly say that they did.

Like Moreau’s, Margaret Hallahan’s vocation was forged in response to the spiritual hunger of a culture scarred by the rejection of its Catholic heritage. Moreau would surely have recognised a co-operator in the “work of resurrection” in Mother Margaret’s indefatigable founding of schools, organising of evening catechesis for factory girls and harnessing of popular devotion in the service of evangelization. His definition of the virtue of zeal as “the great desire to make God known, loved and served, and thus to bring knowledge of salvation to others” could stand as her epitaph as well as his. Mother Margaret, meanwhile, had she known him, would doubtless have manifested the traditional Dominican disdain for Moreau’s taste for Ignatian spirituality, but I like to think she might nonetheless have recognised him as a dear brother, who, like her, refused to educate the head at the expense of the heart. Moreau’s conformity to Christ, like that of Mother Margaret, is, in the first place, it seems to me, conformity to Christ the teacher of truth, dare I say it, to Christ the preacher.

But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m claiming Blessed Basil as a Dominican manqué. The Order of Preachers has enough saints and beati after all. Instead, as we prepare, at the invitation of Pope Francis, to celebrate a Year of Consecrated Life, I’d like to stress just two characteristics of Moreau’s life as a religious and a religious founder which we might think of as gifts to the whole Church.

First, there is Moreau’s insight into the complementarity of vocation within the Church, symbolised by his decision to place the Fathers, Brothers and Sisters of his religious family under the patronage of the Sacred Heart, St Joseph and Our Lady of Sorrows respectively; a wonderfully fertile counterpart to the other scriptural images of Christian interdependence – the Pauline body, the Johannine vine – that Moreau also deploys in his descriptions of what the life of Holy Cross is to be. The paradoxes of authority and submission within the Holy Family, to which Moreau alludes in his sermon on St Joseph, and the grandeur of God’s artistry in Mary which he praises in his account of her immaculate heart; all this prevents the imagery from legitimating mere bourgeois respectability or an unhealthy clericalism. Rather, it provides a really fresh starting point for thinking about how men and women, how priests, religious and laity, relate to each other, their equality in difference being grounded in nothing less, Moreau hints, than the mutual outpouring of love within the Blessed Trinity. And I suspect there are few things the contemporary Church needs more to receive from her past than such a vision.

Secondly, it might do us good to eavesdrop on Moreau as he speaks to his brethren about the Cross, the Cross he hailed in far more than pious cliché as his only hope. In 1855, at a critical point in the early history of the congregation, Blessed Basil underwent an extended period of spiritual desolation, an agony of divine absence so extreme that, as he had the courage to tell his confreres, it gave him sympathetic insight into the suicide of Judas. “There are moments”, Moreau comments, “when those who undertake the works of God must be broken and humiliated – times when everything must be crushed”. What saves this from being either pathological self-hatred or an equally unhealthy glamorization of suffering is Moreau’s grasp of the ecclesial significance of his pain. Intriguingly, Blessed Basil describes his dark night not as personal purification, or purgation of past sins, but in terms of its apostolic usefulness. It came upon him, he thought, “either in the interests of the congregation, or to give me greater sympathy with the spiritual sufferings of others”. And, as he writes elsewhere, what is true of his own terrifying disintegration can be true of any Christian suffering. Not only can our afflictions bring empathy for our fellow-sufferers to birth, but, united with those of Christ, they can become so many “fragments of the true cross”, sharing its salvific value, and thereby bestowing an immense and consoling dignity on those who suffer. Thus the Cross becomes the tree of life, suffused with the light of resurrection.

It turns out then, that Basil Moreau isn’t simply like Jesus – but then, nor is St Dominic. Much more excitingly, like St Dominic, like all of us, he was called to become Christ, Christ crucified and glorified, in his Body the Church. The collection of his writings we’re celebrating tonight, given to us by two of his spiritual sons, both shows us how it happened, and encourages us to believe that it can happen in us, too.

Basil Moreau, Essential Writings is edited by Kevin Grove, CSC, and Andrew Gawrych, CSC, and published by Holy Cross Books, South Bend, Indiana, USA.

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