We, the Ordinary People of the Streets. - book review

We, the Ordinary People of the Streets
Madeleine Delbrel
Eerdmans, $24, 270 pp.

A few years ago I reviewed in this column a short book on the life of Madeleine Delbrel (1904-64) written by Charles Mann. The "Ressourcement in Catholic Thought" series from Eerdmans has now brought out the collected writings of this French Catholic activist, first published in Paris more than thirty years ago. Happily, the translation contains the original introduction written by the estimable Father Jacques Loewe. He provides a full resume of Delbrel's life and work. (Curiously, the book's cover touts a second Hans Urs von Balthasar introduction, written for the German edition. This turns out to be brief and oracular, and tells us nothing about Delbrel.)

A convert to Catholicism, Delbrel spent her adult life as a Catholic activist in the overwhelmingly communist Parisian suburb of Ivry. It is in that context that her writings should be read. On the other hand, it would be easy to dismiss this body of work as of mere historical interest since the only Communists left in France are a handful of academic Gauchistes and their camp followers. But I think a fair case can be made for Delbrel's pertinence today if one transposes her vocabulary slightly to imagine her writing for an unbelieving world.

In more than one meditation she attempts to articulate in the simplest, most compelling terms what it means to be a believer (a difficult task under any circumstances). This task she undertook at a student conference in 1961 where she parsed belief as a kind of knowing and a kind of speaking. When speaking, she insists, we cannot afford the luxury of saying easy things to make it easier for ourselves. If an unbeliever asks about the Resurrection, then it is about the Resurrection that we must speak.

In a paper prepared for those who participated in Vatican II, she makes some striking observations about the life of Catholics which are as true today as they were forty years ago. She says that when radical faith is weak there arises a surfeit of obligations and commitments which do not spring from the deepest core of faith; things like "attachments to certain forms of moralism, a commitment to certain political alternatives, an adoption of certain lifestyles and customs, which are all indifferent in themselves but which start to be taken for Christian duties and mistakenly equated with the life of faith." Such a truncated Christian life offers nothing to the unbeliever.

As I read through these quite disparate papers (some never before published), what struck me was the deep sense of contemplative awareness that they reveal in an almost accidental fashion. Delbrel's writings have a dated feel, but when one looks beneath the surface there is perennial wisdom. In one sense, she reflects a crucial era in the life of the modern church, namely, the pastoral energy of France in the period of the nouvelle theologie. At the same time she gives witness to her deep commitment to Christ in a place and time where that commitment was not easy to keep. Here one finds the real value of her writings. After all, as she writes in one place, if someone asks a person if he or she really can "swallow" the story of the Resurrection of Christ, it is the authentic person of faith who says simply: "Yes, I do." The Resurrection may not be the first topic brought up when speaking with an unbeliever but if it is brought up, she writes, one must face it squarely and not flinch. That hard truth was uttered more than forty years ago but it still rings true.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

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