A NEW WAY OF BEING CATHOLIC

This year is the celebration of 150 years in Australia of the St Vincent de Paul Society. John Honner fills out the picture of its founder, Frederic Ozanam.

Frederic Ozanam was sick and close to death when he was young. He was cured either by a miracle or by beer when, awaking from a fever, he asked for beer (a drink he had never tasted or liked) ‘and the beer saved me’, he said.

Ozanam was one of many young Catholics in Europe in the 19th century who started a new way of being Catholic. He lived in the wake of the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and the French revolution, when the medieval monastic models of being church lost their way.

In about 30 years from the 1770s to the early 1800s the number of male religious in the church dropped from 300,000 to 30,000. Yet, precisely at that time, lay men and women like Frederic Ozanam, Catherine McAuley, Mary Aikenhead, Nano Nagle and Edmund Rice began to respond to the poverty they saw about them in the newly formed industrialised cities. Frederic was the only one to remain a layman.

On 21 July 1853 His Eminence Cardinal Donnet, Archbishop of Bordeaux, declared to the members of the Society:

‘In other days the clergy and the Church had as auxiliaries numerous convents with monastic congregations; these auxiliaries have been swept away by the floods of the revolution. Since 1790 society has deliberately taken on a lay character. Forgetful of the laws of gratitude, it has almost anathematized the old monasteries, and the clergy find themselves so to speak, unprotected, face to face with the men of the revolution. But in the heart of that very society, which was so deliberately lay, which threw off as a yoke all the influence of the clergy, God has raised up a society of laymen.’

Frederic was essentially a very conservative Catholic in a time when most others were revolutionaries. He thought the revolution premature, the revolutionaries a rabble, and remained a convinced supporter of the King and the Pope. Soon enough, however, he came to enjoy the company of, and debate with, his more radical peers in a regrouping of the Society of Moral Studies. And soon enough after that he was engaging with his friends in student protests.

More than anything else, however, he was concerned with the social question of the gap between the rich and the poor. Or, as he put it in 1848, ‘the struggle between those who have nothing and those who have too much’.

The clues we have in Frederic’s correspondence about the relations between the Society and ecclesiastical authority come first in a letter of 1837, some four years after the start of the Society, where Frederic notes ‘the good will of ecclesiastical authorities, after some wisps of clouds, is shown us in all abundance’. In later years he notes that the Society ‘sustained rude assaults, not from ecclesiastical authority which is on the contrary favorable, but from the imprudent zeal of the pious laity’ or, as he once called them, ‘the important people [big wigs] of orthodoxy’.

While being a lawyer and a philosopher, Frederic’s world view was fundamentally shaped by love. He writes in a letter of 1834: ‘I believe in authority as a means, in liberty as a means, and in love as the end’. Or, again, ‘in the face of power there must also be the sacred principle of liberty’.

In the end, he found politics too tough: in a letter of 1849 he lamented the way political differences cut across friendships, and how pleased he was to have left the scene of militant politics, in which he was ‘too much engaged’ for the more serene sphere of study.

Later he would write of his ‘vocation’ in the university: Good can be done there which would be impossible elsewhere. ‘I will make use of that power of the public word with which they have wished to honor me…’ It is clear from his correspondence that Ozanam in his early years gave all his energy to his writing and teaching: the Society seemed more a company of friends and a course of action than a chore. He was a very successful academic, teaching in law and literature and history. His lectures in commercial law are said to have anticipated both Karl Marx and the Catholic social doctrine of Rerum Novarum. His collected works amount to eleven volumes.

Ozanam’s love letters tell us something about him too. In 1841 he became engaged to Amelie Soulacroix, and all his energy for writing letters goes into his correspondence to her. If this was a partly an engagement contrived by Ozanam’s patrons, it was certainly a passionate one as well. The first letter he wrote to her, that we have, runs to well over three thousand words. Six days later he wrote a letter of a thousand words, and six days later again one of two thousand words. He is madly in love, writing to Amelie:

‘To have gazed upon you so for some days, to have been able to sit beside you, to look into your eyes, to read your smile, to hear that sweet tongue whose accents are like rose-dew to the dryness of my soul, to exchange all my thoughts with yours in silence …’

In six months they were married. A few days after their marriage he wrote to a friend, ‘I let myself be happy. I no longer count moments nor hours. There is no more passage of time for me … of what interest is the future? The good fortune of the present is eternity … I understand heaven’.

The following year, when Amelie was ill, he put aside his work and correspondence and stayed at home to care for her. We find later that his wife suffered two miscarriages, and that, ‘aside from the strict duties of my position’ he gave up all other obligations in order to support her in her convalescence.

Perhaps his marriage, if not the pressures of university work, also had something to do with his declining to be nominated as president of the Society in 1844. The family group and the happiness of the home, the love of his wife and the vitality of their only daughter, remained his priority until his premature death in 1853.

Ozanam seemed to get his priorities right at each stage of his life. A humble and caring and thoughtful person, his legacy is great.

John Honner is Director of Practice and Policy at MacKillop Family Services. This article has come from his research into Joseph Dirvin (ed), Frederic Ozanam: A Life in Letters, Society of St Vincent de Paul, St Louis, 1986, and was first published in Viewpoint (Spring 2003).