Christ loves the French

The France of yesteryear, the France who prayed, the France who sustained the Church, the France who wrote fewer books, but better, the France who bore more children, for God, for the Church, and for the homeland — it is that France who gave us birth in the love of Christ, the Church, and the Pope.  What is left of that France has just saved all of France from assassination.  Will it save her from suicide?  Let us hope for it, let us wish it, let us ask it every day from Christ, who loves the French.  It is what we can best do for the French nation.

–Henri Bourassa, 1918

La France d’autrefois, la France qui priait, la France qui soutenait l’Église, la France qui faisait moins de livres, mais de meilleurs, la France qui faisait plus d’enfants, pour Dieu, pour l’Église et pour la patrie.  C’est cette France là qui nous a enfantés dans l’amour du Christ, de l’Église et du Pape.  C’est ce qui reste de cette France-là qui vient de sauver la France tout entière de l’assassinat.  La souvera-t-elle du suicide?  Espérons-le, souhaitons-le, demandons-le chaque jour au Christ qui aime les Francs.  C’est ce que nous pouvons faire de mieux pour la nation française.

Bourassa — La Langue II. The Miracle of Pentecost

Henri Bourassa, La Langue, gardienne de la Foi (1918).

The Miracle of Pentecost

This constant practice, this inviolable respect for the natural right of peoples, goes back even to the birth of the Church. When the divine Redeemer, after having satisfied the justice of his Father, had reopened to men the gates of our final homeland where the unique people of the Election will speak the unique tongue of Love without end, he sent the Consoler, the Paraclete, the Spirit of light and of truth, to “teach you all things.” The Spirit did not speak “of himself.” As if to raise up more the lowly of men, fallen but already redeemed by the blood of Christ and “reestablished in his original dignity,” He descended into the spirit of twelve ignorant men, he set their hearts on fire, lit up their intelligence, fortified their will. Their chief, the very one who had disowned their master before the hearth of a guardroom for fear of the mockeries of a servant, Simon the fisherman, now become Peter and the indisputable foundation of the Church of God, boldly speaks before a crowd still full of the fury, the fear, the contradictory passions which had marked the ignominious death of the Saviour. And the first pope and the first bishops worked the first miracle of the Spirit of God through his Catholic and Apostolic Church. Listen to the sacred text:

1. And when the days of the Pentecost were accomplished, they were all together in one place:

2. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.

3. And there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them:

4. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they began to speak with divers tongues, according as the Holy Ghost gave them to speak.

5. Now there were dwelling at Jerusalem, Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.

6. And when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded in mind, because that every man heard them speak in his own tongue.

7. And they were all amazed, and wondered, saying: Behold, are not all these, that speak, Galileans?

8. And how have we heard, every man our own tongue wherein we were born?

9. Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,

10. Phrygia, and Pamphylia, Egypt, and the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome,

11. Jews also, and proselytes, Cretes, and Arabians: we have heard them speak in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.[1]

Let us stop for a moment to study this first intervention of the Holy Spirit in the Church of Jesus Christ. In actual fact, it is double. Its first effect, is to instantaneously give to the Apostles the knowledge and the use of “diverse tongues.” This is strictly speaking the gift of tongues, which shall come again, in the course of time, on the lips of many missionaries of the Gospel. The second effect takes place in the hearing of the listeners. These men of all nations who hear for the first time the Good News, understand it each in his mother tongue, in the tongue of the country “where he was born,” whatever be the idiom used by the Apostles. This phenomenon will repeat itself equally in the life of great converters of peoples, like Saint Vincent Ferrier and Saint Francis Xavier. In neither the one nor the other of these events did the Spirit of light and truth judge it opportune to do what certain assimilators shall attempt later on: to impose on people the knowledge of the tongue of the preachers, on minorities the idiom of the majority. And yet this miracle would not have been more difficult than the other two for the omnipotence of God. If He did not do it, it is then that He judged that in this, as in all things, the Apostles of Christ ought to to make themselves “all things to all men”; that the spreading of the Gospel, likewise its moral code, likewise its dogma, does not abrogate the natural right of humanity but affirms it and uses it in the service of truth.

On this day, the method of evangelical preaching was established. Faithful to the example laid out by God himself, the Apostles and their successors extend the kingdom of Jesus Christ, announce everywhere the good news, open the eyes of the blind, make the deaf hear, speaking to “each in the tongue wherein he was born.” Such is the task of the Church, of her pastors, of her missionaries, of her preachers, of her catechists, and not to make themselves agents of the assimilation of one race or another, the unifyers of one empire, the propagandists of one particular or universal democracy, the servants of despotic kings or the flatterers or tyrannical mobs.[2]

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[1] Acts of the Apostles, ch. II, translation by Father Glaire (1880) [English: Douay-Rheims 1899].

[2] Permit me to support this reflection and many of those that follow, with the authority of the eminent author of The Public Law of the Church, Msgr L.-A. Paquet:

“Catholicism is universal.

“It is not its mission to apply a ‘triage’ of languages nor a selection of peoples, but to use all languages and to evanglise all peoples.

“Its ministers, by their very nature, are neither constructors of empires nor champions of republics, but sanctifiers and apostles.

“Christ, their model, did not stretch out his bloody hands on the cross in order to distribute sceptres and crowns to his favourite races; but to enfold all men in a single embrace and to pour out to all races the bounties of his redemptive work.

“It is this higher law, in all epochs, that has inspired all enlightened spirits and all men of God; and it is this master idea, inscribed for the splendour of believing humanity, which stamps the religious political order with its true character everywhere.

“Now, to accomplish the work of redeeming mankind, two instruments among many others, are not only useful, but as it were necessary: liturgical language, and national idiom.

“By the beautiful Latin language, whose precise forms, like keys burnished all from old medallions, establish and preserve her dogmatic thought, the Church conserves intact, in the spheres of science, doctrine, and rites, her unchanging creed.

“By the mother tongue, she lovingly descends from these heights, and she enteres into relationship and into cnoversation with the masses. There is the secret of her prestige, of her influence, and of her success.”

(Discourse given at the Congress of the French Language in 1912, and reproduced in Discourses and Allocutions by Msgr L.-A. Paquet, Quebec, Imprimerie Franciscaine, 1915).

Bourassa – La Langue. Table of Contents

Table of Contents

National and religious traditions of French Canadians

I. Principles of social order and natural rights

II. The Church, protector of national languages
The Miracle of Pentecost
Pagan Rome, Christian Rome

III. The Gospel preached in every language
Saint Francis Xavier, model of missionaries
Saint Francis Xavier and the idioms of Asia
The Canadian missionaries and the aboriginal languages

IV. Catholicism and the national languages in America
Msgr Langevin and the Ukrainians

V. Protestant languages, Catholic languages
The example of the Irish

VI. The French language, vehicle of Catholicism
“Canadian French” and “Parisian French”

VII. French Canadians, their civilising task
Let us speak and live our faith

Bourassa — La langue II

Henri Bourassa, La Langue, gardienne de la Foi (1918).

II

The Church, protector of national tongues

The right to one’s mother tongue, to one’s national tongue, is one of the best established of natural rights, one of fundamental bases of the essential human societies: family, tribe, race, nation. The first and the most constant preoccupation of the worst violators of the natural right of peoples — conquerors, dominators, brutal majorities — who want to enslave a vanquished nation or a minority, and to wipe them out as a social group, is to tear their national tongue from them. The ultimate and supreme resistance of races who choose not to die, is the fight for the preservation of their ancestral idiom. Victors and vanquished, killers and victims, both understand that he who guards his language holds the key which looses him from his chains.[1]

This natural right — no authority has better understood its force, none has respected its free and legitimate exercise more than our holy and tender mother, the Church Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman. No power has so constantly confirmed the right of peoples to their national language in education, management, and government, as the Papacy — from Saint Peter to Benedict XV.[2] We can say more: the Church has always seen the conservation of the use of national tongues as the most precious human element of her apostolate, and she has drawn her inspiration from this thought every time she has been called upon to make a judgement, from the point of view of the faith and of natural law, on the conflicts bred in the Church by the rivalries of races or peoples. The decisions or contrary acts of this or that man of the Church, priest, bishop, or pope — if such should ever happen — ought to be examined in light of the particular circumstances of time or place. An attentive and impartial study demonstrates that none of these decisions, none of these acts, undermines in any way the doctrine and general practice of the Church, always in agreement with the natural law.

It is in the annals of false Churches — heretical or schismatic, in thrall to the secular power — that one must recount the history of systematic oppression by means of language. When, unfortunately, this violation of natural rights is carried out in certain particular Churches which remain in communion with Rome, it is always following purely human politics, under the direction of prelates more worried about pleasing Caesar-the-King or Caesar-the-People than about building the Kingdom of God; and this complacency (happily rare and passing) of some men of the Church towards the caprice of despots or the passions of brutal majorities, has always accompanied a dissident or hostile tendency towards the Holy See, that is to say an inclination towards schism or heresy: Gallicanism, Josephinism, Polonism, Americanism, Anglo-Saxonism.[3] In other words, particular Churches, members of the universal Church, have violated or misjudged the right of minorities to their mother tongue, and did the work of national assimilation and religious perversion; in that measure they have separated themselves from the catholic spirit and tradition to incline towards becoming national — as if the Church of God, one and indivisible, could ever become, even partially, one nation’s thing! — that is to say, schismatic. Those, on the other hand, and by far the most numerous, which have respected the right of the conquered, of minorities, are the Churches whose angels — to use the language of the Apocalypse — have not ceased to obey God rather than men, and to practise towards all the faithful the charity of the great apostle of all nations, who did not see Jews nor Gentiles in the Church anymore, but only children of Christ.

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[1] Words of Mistral, the most illustrious félibre of Provence, ardent defender of regional dialects.

[2] One shall read with advantage, on this particular point, the learned study of R. P. Leduc, dominican, reproduced following the conference.

[3] Let this not be confounded with its ancestor, Anglicanism: the one has crossed over the straits of schism to plunge into full heresy and end in the abyss of agnosticism; the other stands on the good side of the water, but so near the bank that it throws in many souls through mixed marriages, neutral or protestant schools, and drinking from the most anti-Christian literature that exists on earth. As for Americanism, we know towards what misadventures it is heading, when the vigilant authority of the Holy See has just upbraided it.

Trees or good people?

We’re runnin’ out of trees, and we’re runnin’ out of space, but we’ll never run out of good people.

– Great Big Sea

Actually they have it precisely backwards. We’ve lots of trees, and lots of space. But we are rapidly, catastrophically, running out of good people.

Isn’t it just typical of our age to worry publicly over the number of trees, but to take completely for granted the supply of good people? As though good people simply appear automatically — even if you contracept your children out of existence, and the ones that you permit to be born you inoculate against striving after virtue.

Good people are a far more precious resource. And good people are far less easily substituted by technological solutions. 

Bourassa – La Langue I

Henri Bourassa, La Langue, gardienne de la Foi (1918).

I

Principles of social order and natural rights

Let us first of all establish the fundamental principles of social order and of the natural rights of nations in these matters.

God created man, as “all things visible and invisible,” for himself, for his glory, for his happiness. God has given to man instincts, aspirations, lights, and laws suited to leading him towards his supreme end, which is God.

One of these laws is man’s sociability.

Man is made to live in society; and society, like each one of the members who compose it, exists for God. It ought to draw its inspiration from God, to obey God, to tend towards God.

The only universal and complete society, embracing all men from all times and all countries, the only one capable of leading men to God, is the Church. Not only the body of the Church, to which we and all Catholics have the happiness and the signal advantage to belong; but also the soul of the Church, to which all men potentially belong. Not only the Church Militant, which is composed of all the living; but also the Church Suffering and the Church Triumphant, whose members — having died in the flesh but living forever in the immortal soul — are closely united, in God through God and for God, to the members of the Church Militant. Faithful image of the One God in three persons who created Her, the Church Militant, the Church Suffering, and the Church Triumphant together form one and the same society.

All other human associations — nations, races, social communities of whatever kind — are subordinated to the uniquely complete society which is the Church. But, being equally willed by God, in the temporal order they have the right and the duty to exist, to maintain themselves, to build themselves up, to perpetuate themselves; and the men who compose them have the right and the duty to faithfully serve the particular societies of which they form a part. This right of human societies to exist and the social duty which ensues for individuals ought to be exercised in comformity with the natural laws which God has given to guide men and societies, and also with the moral laws of which the Church, instituted by God and inspired by God, is the infallible definer and the inviolable guardian.

The Church does not have and has never claimed the right to suppress or to oppress the temporal societies established in accordance with natural law, nor to disturb their members — who are her own children — in the legitimate exercise of their social duty. Conversely, human societies in the course of maintaining themselves, and their members in serving them and benefiting by them, do not have the right to violate the laws of the Church, which are the laws of God; to hinder the action of the Church, which is the action of God; or to shirk the authority of the Church, which is the authority of God.

To sum up, man belongs to God before he belongs to himself; he ought to serve the Church before he serves his country; he ought to defend the rights of God and the Church before those of his nation or his race; he ought to “obey God rather than men,” the Church rather than the temporal powers, including his own government, when it orders him to violate the laws of God and of the Church.

These principles having been set out, let us endeavour to apply them justly and faithfully to the problem which interests us at the moment: the preservation of the national or mother tongue according to the faith, religious action, and the rights of God and the Church over the particular society of which we form a part.

On a general hypothesis, it follows from the principles which we have just set out that the right to one’s mother or national tongue is subordinate, like all other natural rights of man, to the rights of God and the Church. In theory still, it is quite correct to say that if a man, or a people, were forced to choose between his mother or national tongue and his faith or his morals, he should not hesitate to sacrifice his natural right in favour of his supernatural duty. May we suppose, even hypothetically, that this case has ever come up, or ever does come up? In an individual’s life, yes. It may happen that a man, a father of a family, must give up his mother tongue because that tongue has become for him and his children, owing to the particular circumstances in which they find themselves, the vehicle of impiety, heresy, or immorality; and to adopt a foreign tongue which is necessary for the preservation of their faith and morals. But for peoples, races, ethnic groups united amongst themselves by community of speech, the hypothesis appears, if not impossible in theory, nonexistent in fact in the history of humanity. And for this quasi-impossibility there is an essential reason.

The natural laws, willed of God, established by God, may not come into conflict with the supernatural laws. Without a doubt, the moral or intellectual infirmity of the human being, consequence of his initial revolt against the laws of God, has often led men astray in the interpretation and application of natural laws. It can happen that between the requirements of supernatural laws (intangible like their author) and the specific application of a natural right — corrupted by the disturbance of human reason, by the disobedience of pride or of the flesh — there sometimes does arise a real antagonism in fact, which obliges the conscience to fight against nature. But the mercy of God, even his justice — I should almost dare to say his reason — seem to have spared the conscience of peoples these harrowing conflicts. 

II. The Church, protector of national languages

H. Bourassa — La Langue, gardienne de la Foi (1918)

I have lately been reading a most remarkable book: Henri Bourassa’s La Langue, gardienne de la Foi, published in 1918 and long since out of print. It was George Grant who switched me on to it — he quotes Bourassa at a key point in Lament for a Nation. Bourassa was a French-Canadian politician and founder of the newspaper Le Devoir. Rather than attempt to characterize his general stance I will let him speak for himself.

The physical book, and the difficulty of getting hands on it, gives me the impression that nobody has read it in a hundred years except perhaps biographers of Bourassa. I could not find any online text either, and since the book is quite flimsy (it is basically a pamphlet) I worry that it will simply break down and be lost forever in a matter of decades, and all that will remain for posterity is the paragraph quoted by George Grant. And this is a book that should not be lost. To me, it is a revelation. It speaks directly to my heart, I feel a thrill run through me every time I pick it up to read. In fact it comes to me as an answer I have been seeking for a long time: how to be a patriotic Canadian Catholic? Bourassa gives the gift of a vision, an inspiring, beautiful vision, of what a Catholic Canada could be and is called to be.

I realize there are probably very few people who are seeking in this specific way for a Canadian identity, for whom Bourassa could be a help. But to me it would seem a tragedy if this book were lost. And I find it so rich and clear and penetrating in its Catholic political thought, that I believe it should be accessible even outside the French Catholic world. For preservation I can and will scan and digitize it. But I also feel a strong pull to translate the whole into English. The book is not long, less than fifty pages. Since I have a job, and a great many other commitments, even fifty pages is probably a matter of years for me — but I shall make a start and get however far I get.

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Table of Contents

National and religious traditions of French Canadians

I. Principles of social order and natural rights

II. The Church, protector of national languages
The Miracle of Pentecost
Pagan Rome, Christian Rome

III. The Gospel preached in every language
Saint Francis Xavier, model of missionaries
Saint Francis Xavier and the idioms of Asia
The Canadian missionaries and the aboriginal languages

IV. Catholicism and the national languages in America
Msgr Langevin and the Ukrainians

V. Protestant languages, Catholic languages
The example of the Irish

VI. The French language, vehicle of Catholicism
“Canadian French” and “Parisian French”

VII. French Canadians, their civilising task
Let us speak and live our faith

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Language, Protector of the Faith

National and religious traditions of French Canadians

“More French than Catholic,” they used to say readily about French Canadians before the war — those English-speaking Catholics who conducted the campaign of ostracisation against the French language in church and in school. “Slaves of the Pope of Rome and of the hierarchy,” proclaimed the Orangists and their allies. “Too French and not British enough,” added the Anglicisers preoccupied above all with political assimilation and imperial unity. With the war and the refusal of French Canadians to forget the demands of their own national defense in order to run to the aid of the ‘little nationalities’ across the sea — a pretext whose fallacious hypocrisy was only too evident to French Canadians, coming from the lips of their persecutors — these refrains have somewhat changed. Anglicising Catholics, antipapists, imperialists have toned down their old clamours and brought their voices into harmony. “Traitors to the Empire, ingrates towards France,” such was the familiar theme during the whole of the war. All these types — a good number are sincere — appear to ignore the essential elements of the French-Canadian nationality, the duties which flow from this nationality for French Canadians, the traditional sentiments which it inspires in them. Let us recall these briefly.

In the order of national duties, most French Canadians, exclusively Canadian for almost two centuries, subordinate the vague and distant ‘obligations’ that one wants to impose on them towards their two ‘mother-countries’ — appelations equally false in law and in fact — to their certain duties towards their unique homeland, Canada. In the order of natural rights, they are attached to their language, which is the common idiom of all groups of the French race across the world, and to their French traditions, more than to the material power of France. In the moral order, they belong heart and soul to the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church; and it is from the Church herself that they have learned that patriotism is not contrary to religion, and that Catholicism, because it is catholic, ought not to be, nor ever can be, in America or elsewhere, an instrument of assimilation for the profit of one race or a factor of unification and of political hegemony in service to the British Empire or American Democracy. If one is quite willing to go to the trouble of contemplating the situation and the sentiments of French Canadians under this triple aspect, many prejudices and misunderstandings will not be slow to dissipate.

Of these false or unreliable estimations, I want, for the time being, to linger only on the first. Are we more French than Catholic? Are we more attached to our language than to our faith? Permit me to repeat here the summary response which I made to the same question, at the vigil of the struggle for French schooling in Ontario:

“One is surprised sometimes that of all privileges, the one which we demand with most insistance and which is for us the most contested, is that of language. It is so much so that people criticize us, at times, for showing ourselves to be more French than Catholic.

“If he were to judge by certain outward expressions, the superficial observer could indeed come to believe that it is so.

“The explanation is very simple. First, we believe that our language — its preservation and its development — are for us the most necessary human element for the preservation of our faith; and second, in the simplicity of our minds and of our hearts — having preserved the Catholic faith in our ‘medieval’ province just as that faith was taught in the past — we believe that the Church holds the promises of eternal life. What is more, we think that in all the claims of the Church, the first steps, as also the general direction, ought to come from those in whom we see concentrated the authority bequeathed by Jesus Christ to his apostles and handed on by them to the bishops and clergy of the following centuries; but our language, that is our own property peculiar to ourselves, and if we do not defend it, no one will rescue it for us.

“Our language has not received a divine promise of preservation, except that which God has made to all peoples and all men who have enough heart and spirit to defend their soul and their body, their national patrimony and that of their family; but that promise does not reserve anything to those whose soul is base enough to barter their birthright for a mess of pottage, and to beg as a favour what ought to be claimed as a right.”[1]

Persuaded that in spite of, or perhaps because of, the ‘triumph of Democracy’ — which is, all in all, the right of majorities to oppress minorities — the assaults against our language and our faith are going to resume more forcefully and more numerously than ever, it seems to me opportune to treat the question more thoroughly and to contemplate to its full extent this important problem of national language according to religious faith.

I. Principles of social order and natural rights

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[1] Speech delivered at the first Congress of the French Language, Québec, 28 June 1912.