THE HISTORY OF THE
C O N G R E G AT I O N OF
H O LY C R O S S
J A M E S T. C O N N E L LY, C . S . C .
Univerity of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright Š 2020 by the University of Notre Dame Published by the University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data To Come
C O N T E N T S
Author’s Preface Introduction Glossary
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Abbreviations xix List of Superiors General List of Maps
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PA R T I . F O U N D AT I O N S chapter 1. In the Beginning There Were Two: France, 1820– 37 3 chapter 2. The Congregation from Sainte-Croix, 1837– 57 000 PA RT I I . M I S S I O N S chapter 3. The Indispensable Man: United States, 1841– 61 000 chapter 4. Au Canada: Canada, 1847– 72 000 chapter 5. A Matter of Survival: Bengal, 1852–1910 000 chapter 6. What Man Has Put Asunder: The Holy Cross Sisters, 1856– 89 000 PA RT I I I . M O V I N G PA S T T H E F O U N D I N G chapter 7. A Time of Trial: France, 1857– 68 000 chapter 8. Death and Resurrection: France, 1868–1926
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P A R T. I V. M AT U R I N G M I S S I O N S chapter 9. Civil War and the Immigrant Church: United States, 1861–1906 000 chapter 10. Into the Twentieth Century: Canada, 1872–1917 000 P A R T V. A N E W F O U N D I N G chapter 11. The Legacy of Gilbert Français, 1893–1926 000 chapter 12. An Era of Expansion and Restructuring, 1926– 50 000 PA RT V I . A N E R A O F C R I S I S chapter 13. The Era of Vatican II, 1950– 68 000 chapter 14. Changes, Challenges, and New Directions, 1968– 98 000 Epilogue, 1998– 2018 000 Notes 000 Index 000
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
What became the Congregation of Holy Cross began two hundred years ago, in 1820, with the organization of a community of pious laymen to establish and teach primary schools in the diocese of Le Mans, France. The founder was Father Jacques Dujarié, the parish priest in the village of Ruillé-sur-Loir, who began to gather the Brothers of St. Joseph, as they were called, at the request of his bishop. Unlike the founders of many religious communities, Dujarié did not undertake to found a religious community because of a spiritual experience or a special revelation. He had already started a religious community of women, the Sisters of Providence of Ruillé, and his success with them encouraged his bishop to think that he could establish a community of men. The revolutionary government had abolished all religious orders and congregations in France by a law of February 1790, depriving them of legal standing and declaring that religious vows were no longer binding. Napoleon’s 1801 Concordat with the Vatican gave civil standing to the Catholic Church and a decree of 1808 recognized only one religious community, Jean-Baptiste de la Salle’s Christian Brothers. Men and women could choose to live in common but not corporately have legal standing or own property. Over sixty religious associations existed in France by the time of the Restoration in 1815 when the Bourbon monarchy resumed power. These associations attended to the care of the sick, the poor, and the elderly and to the education of children. Dujarié’s biographer notes that at least four religious communities of men whose ministry was education were founded in France in the five years before the inception of the Brothers of St. Joseph in 1820.1 In the early years, the brothers made one-year promises of obedience to Dujarié, which they renewed annually. They underwent a period of formation of several months to a year living with the founder in his rectory and once a year gathered for a community retreat. Dujarié did not compose a rule of life for his brothers but borrowed the rule of another French community. The Brothers of St. Joseph grew quickly to over one hundred members but then sharply declined in numbers in the — xiii —
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1830s when religious persecution by French revolutionary authorities threatened to resume. In 1835, in failing health, Dujarié, with the consent of his bishop, turned over the leadership of the brothers to a younger priest of the Le Mans diocese, Basile Moreau. Moreau joined the brothers to a band of priests that he had founded to preach parish missions and moved the center of the community from the village of Ruillé to the city of Le Mans where Moreau was on the faculty of the diocesan seminary. There a collège (secondary school), was begun in the neighborhood of Sainte-Croix (Holy Cross), and the community eventually became known as the Congregatio a Sancta Cruce (literally “Congregation of/from Holy Cross”). In 1841 the community became tripartite when a women’s division, the Marianites of Holy Cross, was added. Moreau sought and received papal approval for the men as the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1857, but the Vatican insisted on the women being a separate congregation. Like Dujarié before him, Moreau did not testify to a spiritual experience that led him to link the brothers and priests together. Rather, it was a pragmatic solution to the situation at hand. Originally intended to help revive the Church in France after the devastation caused by the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Congregation responded to appeals of bishops from outside of France for help, not because of a vision on Moreau’s part for the future of the community. Foundations were made in Algeria, North Africa, in 1840; in the United States in 1841; in Canada in 1847; in Rome in 1850; and in Bengal, India, in 1853. When legal persecution decimated the membership of the community in France in 1903, the North American foundations ended up with more than 90 percent of the Congregation’s members by 1962. Using their abundant personnel, the United States provinces established ministries in Chile and Peru in South America and in Ghana and Uganda in Africa in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, while the Canadian provinces undertook work in Haiti and Brazil in these same decades. After India became independent in 1947, Canadian missionaries from what is now Bangladesh opened houses in that country in 1959. American priests from Texas took up residence and work in Mexico in the 1980s. By the end of the twentieth century, local vocations were being recruited, trained, and professed from all these areas. From a small religious community in France, the Congregation of Holy Cross grew steadily throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to over three thousand members by the mid-1960s. In the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, education was the principal ministry of the Congregation. However, it began to staV parishes when it started working in Bengal, to meet the needs of particular ethnic groups in the latter decades of the nineteenth century in the United States, and in the twentieth century in Canada and Africa. Other ministries were undertaken in the twentieth century, and the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal, Canada, grew out of the healing ministry of Brother André Bessette. The University of Notre Dame in the United States became one of the major Catholic universities in the world by the latter decades of the twentieth century. —
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In the decades after Vatican II, the Congregation saw a steady decline in membership as many men in North America withdrew from the order and as, in the years just after Vatican II, the number of new recruits fell dramatically, especially in the face of cultural changes in Canada and the United States. By 2000, membership was only about half of what it had been in 1962. However, by then, local vocations were being recruited in Africa, India, Bangladesh, and Haiti that were replacing the diminished ranks in North America in the twenty-first century. The Constitutions of Holy Cross were revised in 1986 to give the Congregation a more collegial structure of government. In 1992 a process of restructuring began that continued in the twenty-first century. It reduced the number of jurisdictions in North America while increasing those in Asia and Africa as the community grew in numbers in those areas. In 2018 the Congregation of Holy Cross was active in thirteen countries on five continents. It was organized in ten provinces and four vicariates and its membership had stabilized and was beginning to grow again. It was a far diVerent entity than it had been in 1820 or 1837 and in both its size and its ministries.
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IN THE BEGINNING T H E R E W E R E T WO France, 1820– 37
The more radical phases of the French Revolution devastated the Catholic Church at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century in France. Many bishops and priests were imprisoned, religious orders were declared dissolved, and monasteries and convents were confiscated, their inhabitants turned out on the street. Religious institutions that had been supported by the Church collapsed and were not replaced by the revolutionary governments. Notably, the parochial school, sustained by the local parish, was hit hard by the Revolution, especially in the villages of France. In 1789, in the western part of the diocese of Le Mans, for instance, the 274 communes that later constituted the department of La Mayenne, had been served by 321 parochial schools, 180 for boys and 141 for girls. This extensive network of elementary schools was destroyed. The law of April 17, 1791, which required both parish priests and schoolmasters to take an oath of loyalty to the new regime, had thrown the Church and the institutions that it supported into disarray. Those who could not in conscience swear the oath either fled the country or went into hiding. The laws of August 4 and 8, 1792, dissolved the religious congregations that had provided many of the schools’ teachers. An 1801 report on public instruction noted that “public education is practically a nonentity everywhere; the generation which is now reaching its twentieth year is irrevocably doomed —
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to ignorance. . . . No primary schools are found anywhere. Thus it is that the great bulk of the population is left without instruction.” Nowhere was this assessment more true than in the rural areas.1 At a clergy retreat in the diocese of Le Mans held in the summer of 1818, the first such retreat since the French Revolution, the diocesan priests voiced much concern over the widespread ignorance among the children in their parishes. One solution that commended itself to Bishop de Pidoll and the Le Mans clergy was the organization of a group of pious young men to serve as schoolmasters in the parishes of the diocese. The model that they had in mind was that of the Christian Brothers founded by Jean-Baptiste de la Salle and given official recognition by the French government in 1808. The Christian Brothers were being imitated in several parts of France. Only the previous year, in Brittany, just to the west of Le Mans, two priests, Jean-Marie de la Mennais and Gabriel Deshayes, had organized congregations of teaching brothers, which united in 1819 as the Brothers of Christian Instruction. The Rule of the Christian Brothers specified that each foundation should have at least three brothers. Since most of the village schools in France would do well to support one brother schoolmaster, the new congregations of teaching brothers envisioned their members working singly or in pairs.2 The man to whom Bishop de Pidoll entrusted the task of organizing a community of teaching brothers for the diocese of Le Mans was Rev. Jacques-François Dujarié, then fifty years old, a pastor in the village of Ruillé-sur-Loir and not in the best of health. Born in 1767 at Rennes-en-Grenouilles, in the borderland between Normandy and Brittany, to a family of small rural landowners, Dujarié had been a student in the seminary in Angers when the Revolution began. When the new regime enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791 in an attempt to create a national church under government control, the directors of the Angers seminary refused to swear the prescribed oath of obedience to the new laws. On the day that the new constitutional bishop entered Angers to take possession of his see, the superior of the seminary read to the students a meditation on how “the sins of the people call down upon them evil pastors.” Shortly thereafter, the Angers seminary was disbanded, and its 240 students, including Dujarié, sent away.3 Dujarié returned to his home where his father was the mayor of the commune and where a constitutional priest had taken over as pastor. The latter abjured his oath a short time after and was imprisoned by the government. In the countryside, local opinion favored the nonjuring clergy, and the laws against them could not be strictly enforced. For the next four and one-half years, Dujarié worked as a weaver and, disguised as a shepherd or an itinerant lemonade peddler, moved about the district aiding the nonconstitutional priests, who served in hiding. During the Reign of Terror, in January 1794, Dujarié witnessed the execution of one of his former seminary professors. In December 1795, he traveled incognito to Paris and on the day after Christmas was ordained a priest by an underground bishop who conducted se—
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cret ordinations in the homes of trustworthy Catholics. A few days later, Dujarié celebrated his first Mass in the cellar of his friends’ house.4 After returning to Le Mans, Dujarié was assigned to work in the area around the village of Ruillé-sur-Loir, and for the next six years, he served an apprenticeship under a remarkable priest, Jacquet de la Haye. The latter was described in a police report as too zealous for his position, has means and can do good if he so wishes. . . . A fiery man, crafty, going regularly to exercise his ministry where he is called and even where he is not called, seeking out all means of making proselytes and carrying on heavy correspondence with his followers. . . . clever in persuading priests to retract the Oath.5 On one occasion in 1800, de la Haye was arrested by the National Guard as he finished celebrating Mass. There was a scuffle, and as he was being dragged away, the mayor of the commune and a band of Catholics arrived on the scene, freed the priest, and took him to the mayor’s house where he took sanctuary until it was safe to move on.6 Dujarié would later be remembered as being almost always in the company of his mentor during these years. Together they led a rough and austere life, making long trips at night in frightful weather and along terrible roads to console the sick, bringing to them the help of religion and administering the sacraments, and also baptizing children. They rarely slept in beds, but almost always on hay or straw. They were obliged to carry with them the vestments and other things necessary for the celebration of holy mass.7 When Napoleon signed the Concordat with the Church in April 1801, giving possession of dioceses and parishes back to nonjuring clergy, de la Haye was passed over for pastor at Ruillé-sur-Loir because of his staunch opposition to many local government officials. Instead, Dujarié was placed in charge of the “branch church” at Ruillé, while de la Haye was posted elsewhere. On the first of January 1803, Dujarié, then thirty-five years old, was appointed to the pastoral charge that he would exercise for the next thirty-three years. As he settled into his pastorate in the early months of the new year, Dujarié found himself responsible for the spiritual care of slightly more than one thousand people in an area of about twelve square miles. While he was no stranger to his parishioners, to whom he had been ministering for seven years, he now had to restore the public worship of the Church, which the regime had disrupted during the more than ten years of suppression. While the local council allotted him a salary, it seems that Dujarié did not hesitate to use his inheritance to meet expenses.8 —
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SISTERS OF PROVIDENCE Jacques Dujarié was also keenly aware of the material needs of his people. In his first year as a pastor he organized a Charity Office, the counterpart of today’s social service agencies, and secured the services of two women religious from Évron to care for the sick in their homes. While making rounds of his parish, Dujarié was particularly distressed by the poverty and ignorance of the children in the farming village of Les-Hauts-de-Ruillé. He began to visit regularly and gathered the thirty to forty children there for catechism classes. Eventually, Dujarié entrusted the teaching to some women of the area, and out of this endeavor, a village school developed. By 1806 ten young women were living together in a fieldstone house in Les-Hauts-de-Ruillé, which had been named “la Petite Providence.” Besides instructing the children, the women also visited and nursed the sick.9 Thus far, the ministry served by la Petite Providence appears to have existed without any long-range plan, and the women met needs as they arose. But in 1808, Dujarié sent his “Sisters,” as they were now being called, to Baugé, where they were trained for several months in the care of the sick by the saintly Anne de la Girouardiere, foundress of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Mary. In that same year, Dujarié sent some of his sisters outside of the parish of Ruillé to assist Jacquet de la Haye, thus beginning an expansion of their field of labor. In 1812 Dujarié appointed one of the sisters as superior of the little community that had developed. By 1819 Dujarié was applying for government authorization for his “Sisters of Ruillé.”10 Up to this point, the group of pious women whom Dujarié had gathered to teach the children in a farm village and look after the sick poor was tending by force of circumstances and by a momentum that may not have been more than dimly perceived to develop into a religious congregation. What was needed, however, was someone who could devote full attention to the development of the community, give it a more consistent direction, and develop an internal government capable of providing for the expansion of the foundation and the establishment of its proper personality. That person arrived on the scene in July 1818, when a young noblewoman presented herself at Dujarié’s rectory in Ruillé. Julie-Joséphine-Zoé-Rolland du Roscoät was the second child of a noble Breton family. During the Revolution, her father, a colonel in one of the king’s regiments, had fled the country to take part in an abortive invasion that sought to overthrow the new regime. When this mission failed, he returned secretly to France and lived in Rennes with his family, a fugitive who could be arrested and executed at any time. Because the government had confiscated and sold the family’s estates in Brittany, Madame du Roscoät had taken the children with her to Rennes where she supported the family by keeping a school. With the advent of Napoleon, the family recovered its lands in 1805. Furthermore, with the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, Zoé du Roscoät’s father had regained his rank as a colonel in the royal army. —
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Attuned, perhaps, by the years of penury in Rennes to the needs of the poor, Zoé du Roscoät began, once the family was again settled in their manor house, to look after the rural poor on her father’s lands and in the surrounding countryside. Her concern for the religious instruction of poor children led her to befriend a young Breton girl, Pérrine Lecor, who was to assist her in her work in Pléhédel, a town in the north of Brittany. Lecor had made a vow of chastity and had come to Pléhédel after a mystical experience compelled her to consider living her life in a religious congregation. When she confided this to Zoé du Roscoät, the latter began to wonder whether this might be her calling as well. During a retreat, Zoé du Roscoät consulted the Jesuit who was directing it, and he suggested that she look into the congregation of sisters that his friend, Dujarié, had started in Ruillé. They were, he assured her, the lowliest and poorest in France.11 Zoé du Roscoät, Sister Marie Madeleine, as she was known in the community, at thirty-seven was the oldest and by far the best-educated among the group of women whom she joined at Les-Hauts-de-Ruillé in the summer of 1818. Not only did she share the rough life that was their calling, but she also won their esteem. When Dujarié decided in 1820 to introduce the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the women and form them into a religious community, he also invited them to elect one of their sisters to a three-year term as superior general. They unanimously elected Sister Marie-Madeleine.12 When Zoé du Roscoät had first come to Ruillé, there were eighteen sisters at LesHauts-de-Ruillé and the seven other houses that Dujarié had established. With the group’s stabilization effectuated by her leadership and by the introduction of religious vows, the sisters from the “Petite Providence” began to proliferate in numbers. In 1821 and 1822, there were twelve new foundations, some of them as far away as Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, Angers, and Tours in the Loire Valley. Dujarié had purchased the Ruillé property itself and had begun the construction of a large building that would serve as the motherhouse for his sisters. The prospects for the future seemed bright, when Sister Marie-Madeleine died suddenly of typhoid in June 1822. However, the foundation that she and Dujarié had laid survived, and her successor was at hand. Pérrine Lecor, the Breton girl who had first turned Zoé du Roscoät toward the idea of living a religious life under vows, had followed her into the community in 1820. In 1823 the sisters, now established in their new motherhouse, the Grande Providence, chose her as their new superior-general. As Mother Marie-Cécile, she would lead the Sisters of Providence, as they came to be called, for forty-three of the next fifty years and see it expand not only in France but beyond, to the forests of Indiana in the United States.13 B R O T H E R S O F S T. J O S E P H It was Dujarié’s success with his Sisters of Providence that recommended him to his bishop as the man who could organize the much-needed community of brother —
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schoolmasters in the diocese of Le Mans. After accepting the charge from Bishop de Pidoll at the clergy retreat of 1818, Dujarié asked his fellow pastors to send him suitable candidates for the new brotherhood. By September of 1820, he had two young men living with him in his rectory whose education and formation he was supervising. One of these two candidates left after a year, only to be readmitted later, and the other was eventually dismissed. Neither of these two candidates persevered. But on October 22, 1820, a young man arrived at Ruillé from one of the villages in the western part of the diocese who would become the anchor for Dujarié’s brothers that Zoé du Roscoät had been for the sisters.14 Pierre Mottais was nineteen years old when he first came to Ruillé in the autumn of 1820. He and the other candidates used the attic of the rectory as their dormitory, which they shared with rats. The number of candidates multiplied in the next few months, however, and the growing community housed newcomers in the laundry, the bakehouse, the barn, and the stable—wherever a bit of room could be found. The kitchen doubled as the dining room, and the fare was scant. Dujarié had singled out Brother André, as his third recruit became known, very early on as his close collaborator in the task of shaping and leading the new brotherhood. In 1821 Brother André was sent to Le Mans for five months of schooling and teacher-training at the hands of the Christian Brothers. The following year he spent several months at the Christian Brothers’ novitiate in Paris.15 When Brother André returned to Ruillé from Paris in June of 1822, he found twenty young men living in Dujarié’s rectory, in various stages of preparation for their work in the parish schools. Dujarié had chosen St. Joseph as their patron, and the Brothers of St. Joseph had begun to wear a religious habit consisting of a black soutane with a collar and a two-winged white rabat that hung down on the chest, after the fashion of the French clergy. They had also begun to have common prayer among themselves. The brothers rose at 5:00 a.m. and gathered for a meditation, which they made on their knees. Then they assisted at daily Mass celebrated by Dujarié. Beginning in 1821, they made particular examen in common before the noon meal. In the late afternoon, they assembled in the parish church for the visit to the Blessed Sacrament or to recite the rosary. Sometimes they made the Way of the Cross. They listened in common to someone reading from a spiritual book before supper at 7:00 p.m. After a period of common recreation, the subject of the next morning’s meditation was announced. The brothers retired to the dormitory at 9:00 p.m.16 Dujarié was trying to mold young men from the villages who had very little education and who were accustomed to heavy farm work, into a community of schoolteachers. Daily life in the community was austere, and the brothers worked in the fields and vineyards that belonged to the Sisters of Providence, who were then in the process of moving their center to Ruillé. The isolation of Ruillé in the countryside made it challenging to find good teachers for the brothers, and Brother André gradually assumed the responsibility for their classes.17 —
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In the autumn of 1821, the community first sent its brothers out to parish schools. The following year, the brothers established seven new schools, and in 1824 eight more schools were entrusted to them.18 These first Brothers of St. Joseph would spend two, four, six, but never more than ten months in formation in Ruillé before being sent out to teach. Their preparation may have been brief, but the need for teachers was considerable, and the requests were many. Dujarié counted on the pastors in the parishes where they served to complete the brothers’ formation.19 Like Dujarié’s other foundation, the Sisters of Providence of Ruillé, the Brothers of St. Joseph grew rapidly during the 1820s. Between 1825 and 1828, records show that one 155 young men sought admission to the community and that 60 of these persevered through the period of formation and eventually took assignments in parishes. During these years, the new brotherhood also developed the structures that would give it shape. In the summer of 1822, Dujarié gathered the brothers for the first of the annual community retreats that would become a regular feature of the brothers’ life and formation. In 1824 the brothers moved out of Dujarié’s rectory into the Grand Saint-Joseph, a building that he had erected in Ruillé and that became the community’s center. In that same year, at the close of the community retreat, André and another brother made an annual vow of obedience to the superior, Dujarié, and thus inaugurated a practice that would bring a measure of cohesiveness to the new community in the years to come. Throughout this period, Dujarié’s poor health prevented him from making a visitation of the schools entrusted to the brothers, and this responsibility fell more and more upon his trusted assistant, Brother André.20
LEGAL RECOGNITION Despite their rapid growth in numbers and the good prospects enjoyed by the brothers in these years, there was a serious problem that seemed to defy solution. Dujarié could not acquire legal status for the Brothers of St. Joseph as a religious congregation. During the Revolution, in 1790, solemn religious vows had been suppressed by law with the result that religious orders and congregations were no longer recognized in civil law as legal persons. A decree of August 4, 1792, had ordered the evacuation and sale of all buildings occupied by members of religious communities. Two weeks later, another decree abolished all religious corporations and secular congregations that might hold property for religious communities. The Concordat that Napoleon had signed with the Holy See in 1801 made no mention of religious orders and congregations, which had begun to revive under Napoleon when the government did not enforce the laws against them. An article in the Napoleonic penal code of 1810 forbade the erection of any association of more than twenty persons without government authorization. All this legislation survived the Revolution as —
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well as the era of Napoleon, and it continued to restrict the organization of religious congregations in the years when Dujarié was founding his two communities.21 Dujarié had, in fact, used his inheritance and depended on benefactors to pay the expenses of the Brothers of St. Joseph and the Sisters of Providence. These benefactions were not insignificant. In 1824, for example, King Charles X himself gave Dujarié 4,000 francs for the brothers, and by 1829, public authorities in the communes served by the brothers were granting gifts and subsidies in return for their services. But since the Brothers had no legal standing as a community and could not receive gifts of money or property, all this support had to be routed through Dujarié. Dujarié himself could find no way of giving the brothers title to the Grand Saint-Joseph, their motherhouse.22 In 1825 this problem of legal personality was resolved for the Sisters of Providence. In that year a law was passed that permitted the king to authorize religious congregations of women that had been founded before January 21, 1825. Such authorization granted a congregation the ability to hold and acquire property as a corporate entity. The following year, Dujarié applied for and obtained a royal ordinance conferring legal personality on the Sisters of Providence, and he began immediately to transfer the property to the sisters that he had acquired for them.23 Unfortunately, this law of 1825 made no provision for congregations of men. Throughout these years, however, Dujarié was continually trying to find a way around such obstacles. In 1823 he had obtained a royal ordinance that recognized the Brothers of St. Joseph as a religious and charitable association dedicated to teaching. This ordinance gave the brothers some standing before the authorities of the Academy that regulated the teaching profession in France, and it also exempted the young brother schoolmasters from military service. This ordinance did not give them legal personality, however, and donations of real estate and money to the brothers had to go through the University, the government agency that supervised the schools of France and that held such gifts for an association like the Brothers of St. Joseph. Because this diversion of the community’s funds was unacceptable to Dujarié and the community’s benefactors, Dujarié continued to hold the property in his name. He received gifts and subsidies intended for the brothers and was responsible for all their expenses.24 This situation might have been tolerable for some time had there not been a crisis. In July 1830, a palace coup had imposed a new constitution on the country, sent King Charles X into exile, and installed his cousin, Louis-Philippe, as a constitutional monarch. The anticlerical factions had come into power, and for a few months, it seemed as though the persecution of the Church might be resumed, and the horrors of the Reign of Terror repeated.25 Many of the Brothers of St. Joseph, scattered as they were by ones and twos and left to their own devices in country villages, lost heart and abandoned their calling and the community. Whereas in 1829, nineteen men had applied at the Grand —
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Sainte-Joseph for admission to the community, and eighty brothers and twenty-five novices had gathered in Ruillé for the annual retreat, in 1830 the retreat could not be held because of concern over attacks by anticlerical factions. In 1829 there had been approximately 106 brothers of St. Joseph, and they were keeping forty-seven schools in ten dioceses. By the end of 1830, as few as fifty-six brothers were teaching in thirty-seven schools, and another twelve were in formation at the Grand Sainte-Joseph and the boarding school in Ruillé.26 In addition to his other problems, Dujarié’s health steadily deteriorated after 1827. In his sixties by then, Dujarié was confined to his bed for much of the time. When he did manage to get on his feet, he could walk only with crutches or by leaning on someone. Moreover, the anticlerical officials had taken over the municipal council of Ruillé and had refused to reimburse Dujarié for expenses incurred in operating the Charity Office and a school for the children of the town, which an earlier council had agreed to do. There were also disagreements with the parish trustees.27 As if all this were not enough, there was growing tension between Dujarié and Mother Marie Cécil Lecor, the superior general of the Sisters of Providence. Although Dujarié, once he had secured legal recognition for the sisters in 1826, had transferred the property acquired by him in their name, he had continued to administer the finances of both the Sisters of Providence and the Brothers of St. Joseph. Regarding himself as the common father of both communities, who had one patrimony administered by him, Dujarié believed that the resources of the one should be put at the service of the other. Thus, in 1822, when he was establishing the sisters in the Grande Providence, their motherhouse in Ruillé, he used the brothers as workmen and set them to caring for the sisters’ vineyards and tilling their fields. When he needed money to buy the land and erect the building that became the Grand SainteJoseph, the brothers’ center in Ruillé, he borrowed it from the sisters. By 1829 Mother Marie Lecor was complaining to Bishop Carron, de Pidoll’s successor as bishop of Le Mans, that Dujarié was interfering with the activities of herself and her council and that he was intermingling the financial administration of the sisters and the brothers. During the critical year of 1830, when it seemed as if the anticlerical legislation might cause the disbandment of the brothers’ community, Marie Lecor appears to have feared that Dujarié would use up all of the sisters’ assets in his efforts to sustain the brothers. Her complaints to Bishop Carron persuaded him to visit Ruillé in September 1830, where he heard both her and Dujarié on the subject of the financial separation of the sisters and the brothers. As a result of this visit, Carron declared that the temporal administration of the two communities must henceforth be separate, and he authorized Mother Marie Lecor and her council to administer the funds of the sisters’ congregation. In November, the bishop appointed another priest as chaplain and confessor to the sisters. Since this priest was to live in Dujarié’s rectory in Ruillé, the wedge between the Brothers of St. Joseph and the Sisters of Providence was driven yet deeper.28 —
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F O U N D A T I O N S
Mother Marie Lecor now began to deal directly with Bishop Carron instead of going through Dujarié as before, and relations between her and the founder grew increasingly strained. At the end of April 1831, Carron and his vicar general, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Bouvier, came to Ruillé to supervise the distribution of property between the two communities. The division included not only land and buildings but also the crops still in the fields, the wood already cut, the farm implements, domestic animals, and the use of the wine presses. Every item was accounted for down to a horse given to the sisters that would “be gladly loaned for the personal use of M. le Curé Dujarié, but not for the wagons or journeys by the brothers.” At the sisters’ annual retreat in September 1831, Sister St. Charles (Helene) Jolle was elected mother general to succeed Sister Marie Lecor who had held the office for eight years. A definitive agreement was drawn up that regulated practical details of the separation between the sisters and the brothers, but Bishop Carron still found himself called upon to settle disputes over the interpretation of this agreement. Thus, while Dujarié retained the title and certain prerogatives of honor as the founder of the sisters’ community, after 1831 he no longer exercised effective control over their congregation.29 As the separation of the brothers’ and sisters’ temporal assets ensued, Dujarié turned to stabilizing the brothers’ community after the crisis of 1830, when it lost almost a third of its number, relinquished ten schools, and saw the stream of new candidates all but dry up. In September 1831, the brothers met at Ruillé for their annual retreat, the first since 1829. Dujarié did not convoke all of the brothers for this retreat but only certain ones and them by name. His circular announcing the retreat explained that the expenses of bringing them all would be too great, but it seems more likely that he feared that some members had succumbed to the spirit of the Revolution and would disrupt the gathering.30
B A S I L E M O R E AU The brothers’ retreat of 1831 was preached by Basile Moreau, a young priest of the diocese of Le Mans who taught scripture and dogmatic theology in the diocesan seminary. At the end of the retreat, Dujarié and thirteen of the brothers in attendance signed a pact of fidelity wherein they pledged lifelong attachment to their congregation and committed themselves to remain united as a congregation even though their institute might experience suppression for a time. It appears that the Abbé Moreau suggested this pact. All but one of the fourteen signers persevered in their commitment until their deaths.31 Moreau returned to preach the brothers’ annual retreat in 1832, this time in collaboration with a Jesuit missionary. All the brothers had been convoked that year, and at the retreat’s conclusion, forty-three of them made the annual vow of obedience to the superior, whereas only eighteen had done so in 1831. The confidence of —
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