A number of years ago, an editorial appeared in La Croix, the renowned French newspaper, commenting on the then forthcoming canonization of Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort. The editor, Pierre Lermite, wrote that there are two kinds of saints. The first type, everyone loves, everyone appreciates: holy men and women like Francis de Sales, Bernadette, Therese of Lisieux. There is, however, another type of saint. They appear to us like a torrent cascading down the side of a mountain, over-turning everything, leaving us in awe, if not shocked. The saint to be canonized tomorrow, said the editorial, is of this second kind. Montfort: a roaring torrent cascading down a mountainside!
Especially in the past 70+ years, attempts have been made to summarize Saint Louis de Montfort in a phrase or even a word. Pierre Lermite believed that the metaphor of a roaring mountain torrent captured the essence of our founder. Others prefer “artist,” or “mystic,” or “man of the absolute.” The readings of this morning’s Mass point to different ideas: the first, from Proverbs, depicts Montfort as the contemplative of Wisdom; the second, reflecting the beginning chapters of First Corinthians, focuses on Montfort as Wisdom’s fool, and the Gospel pictures Montfort as the pilgrim, the missionary, the vagabond.
What word or phrase would you use to summarize Saint Louis de Montfort? There is a metaphor used by John Baptist Blain, a close friend and early biographer of Montfort, to describe the powerful personality of Saint Louis, a metaphor also found in the famous epitaph on Montfort’s original tomb: FIRE. Montfort is a raging fire. It not only signifies his boundless zeal: It primarily points to the fire who is God, a “consuming fire,” writes Montfort, and more specifically to the Holy Spirit, the flame uniting the Father and the Son. Fire: it tells us that Louis Grignion was ablaze with God. He participated so intimately in the very nature of God that he was the Holy Spirit‘s flame: dancing, jumping, leaping from one place to another, igniting towns and villages into living fires of God’s love. Montfort’s ministry scorched off the rust of sin and was like a refiner’s fire, burning all impurities, transforming his hearers into the pure gold of Jesus Christ.
Blain initially speaks of Montfort as “a fire which was not allowed to burn.” Blain is referring to the years that Louis Grignion spent at St. Sulpice Seminary in Paris, and more specifically, from 1695 to 1700 when he was a student at Little Saint Sulpice. “A fire not allowed to burn.” The rules of St. Sulpice hemmed Montfort in, they put boundaries and limits on his yearning for mortification, for hours in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, for service to the poor of the area. They contained the fire. The fundamental rule of Saint Sulpice, “one size fits all,” was not made for a fiery young man who was being prepared by God for an extraordinary ministry in the Church. A fire not allowed to burn! It was at Poitiers, several months after ordination, that the raging fire who is Father Louis Marie began to blaze. He was appointed chaplain at the local poorhouse. The flames of his heart reached out to every aspect of the institution—he ate with the poor, he begged in the name of the outcasts, he identified with the homeless, he drew up a program of reform so that the poor would be recognized for who they really are: the very images of Jesus Christ. He tenderly embraced those whose fetid, running sores caused revulsion on part of the staff;
The text of this article was given as a homily in a Montfort parish by Fr. Gaffney, SMM.
Montfort firmly believed that he was embracing the very presence of the Lord. He ardently desired that the fire of God’s special love for the poor, the sick, the uneducated, would burn in the hearts of more and more followers of Jesus. He therefore founded, right in the poorhouse, the community of the Daughters of Wisdom. Marie Louise Trichet, a young girl from a middle class Poitiers family became the first member of the new religious order. The poor house would be her novitiate. And he yearned for a congregation of priests and brothers who like him, would ignite the world with God’s tenderness by their Spirit-filled preaching. When news of all this spread, many regarded the Father from Montfort as absolutely mad, “a fire gone out of control.”
The opposition of the Board of Directors made it impossible for him to continue his ministry at the poorhouse. He then began in earnest the vocation which would be his, right up to his death: preaching parish missions and retreats. Now the fire broke out into a huge blaze, engulfing cities, towns and villages into the burning Heart of God.
His preaching was so filled with the Spirit that parish after parish experienced a new Pentecost as he went throughout northwestern France. Once again, tongues of fire were poured out upon the fearful followers of Jesus. In 1708, when he was invited to Nantes to preach missions, the vicar general and a Jesuit preacher / theologian sat in on his first sermon, so that together they could criticize and make a list of those “strange quirks” of Montfort. They left the Church visibly shaken, for as they themselves said, they experienced wave after wave of the power of the Spirit enveloping the entire congregation.
His signature missions with his fiery preaching, the renewal of baptismal promises through Mary; the huge, colorful processions of the Blessed Sacrament bands playing, crowds singing, soldiers parading— were transforming highlights of his stay in the parish. And it ended with the planting of the life-size Crucifix, a sign that the town had once again pledged its allegiance to the flag of the faith, the Cross of Jesus Wisdom.
Montfort—the fire of the Spirit— burning away what he calls the rust of sin, preparing the soil for the new growth of life in Christ. And he left towns with a catechetical school for the youngsters, a soup kitchen for the poor and at times even a hospital for the incurables. The fire who is Montfort had swept through the area, turning it into a towering flame of the Holy Spirit.
But the raging fire——so some said—had gone mad, out of control! Who could keep up with his incredible zeal, who could even understand it? His stress on the tenderness of Jesus and Mary, his success which some early biographers compare to the power of the apostles after Pentecost, his identification with the outcasts: that fool, Grignion, cried a few, but a powerful few. The command that he had over his congregations, so strong that even garrisons of soldiers begged to go to confession, alarmed some of the religious and political leaders.
The Bishops of Poitiers, Nantes, St. Malo and others strongly invited the Father from Montfort to leave the diocese. The saint’s spiritual director for many years, Father Leschassier, began to doubt him and in fact stated that Montfort was clearly filled with the fire of the spirit but he was not sure that it was “a good spirit.”
The Father from Montfort was misunderstood, expelled, calumniated, called by the Louis XIV’s representative for Brittany, “that great fool, Grignion”. Several times, attempts were made on his life, for there were people who were determined to extinguish the fire so that they could live in peace, undisturbed by the radical demands of the Gospel. Many of his seminary teachers not only considered him a failure but a blot on the honorable name of St. Sulpice.
A fire gone out of control! Montfort—a living Pentecost—Whose preaching called down flames of fire upon all who opened their hearts to the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Saint Louis de Montfort is a gigantic figure in the history of the Church, a fire so ablaze that he is misunderstood by many, even today.
How did Saint Louis de Montfort become such an ardent fire of the Holy Spirit? We all know the answer: his secret of sanctity. As the fire of God comes to us through Mary, it is in and through Mary that we will become the fire of God. God awaited the Yes of Mary before igniting the Blazing Flame of His Word upon this earth. Her faith, willed by God, sparked the incarnation of the eternal Wisdom, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
Mary may be called the furnace of divine love for she is the Daughter of God the Father, the consuming fire; she is the Mother of God the Son whose Heart is aflame with love; she is the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, the divine flame of charity. In her heart, Jesus, incarnate Wisdom, burns more brightly than anywhere in creation, even more intensely than among the seraphim and cherubim. We must pour ourselves into that “mold,” that furnace of Mary, so that like Montfort, we become aflame with God. With Mary and in Mary, Jesus the Lord will become more and more the one and only center of our lives. With Mary and in Mary, we will become true apostles of the new evangelization, for everything we touch will experience the transforming fire of Jesus.
We can understand then why Saint Louis de Montfort looks forward to a “deluge of fire.” In his magnificent prayer for missionaries of the Company of Mary, he begs God to inundate this universe with this deluge of pure love, to flood this universe with the fire of the Holy Spirit. “When will it happen,” Montfort asks, “this fiery deluge of pure love with which you, O God, are to set the whole world ablaze, so that all nations will be caught up in its flames and be converted? “Let the fire be lit, ” cries Montfort! “Let its flames rise, let this divine fire which Jesus Christ came to bring on earth be enkindled.”
And if you were to ask Louis de Montfort, ‘What is this deluge of fire,’ he would respond, ‘lt’s not what but who is the fiery deluge.’ And if you were to answer, ‘It is the Holy Spirit,’ he would surely reply, ‘Yes, but remember that the Holy Spirit works through us.’ Therefore you—all of us—you are the deluge of pure love, for the fire of the Spirit only flames out through you.
Montfort not only speaks of the core of these “apostles of the end times”—his Missionaries of the Company of Mary—but also of the Daughters of Wisdom and of all those who will let themselves be turned into flame in the furnace of Mary. We, then, the entire Montfort family, we are this deluge of the fire of divine love, we are the flame of Love which God wants to use to reform the Church and renew the face of the earth. If we do not believe this, we join those who cried out to our founder, “Grignion, you’re a fool!”
Are we today that raging fire of the Spirit of Love which will ignite and engulf every particle of matter into the flame of the eternal and incarnate Wisdom? “Lord,” many of us say, “we are not a roaring flame, but only embers.” [However, if we follow de Montfort’s formula faithfully, our] embers may be fanned into towering flames, so that sparks may catch fire, so that even smoldering ashes will burn into “a fire out of control.”
Saint Louis de Montfort, blazing fire of God, pray for us!
