The miraculous failure of Maurice Bellière

We have them in the family, in the neighbourhood. We used to know them at school. People who chose the wrong professions, if they chose at all, and were not simply pushed around by force of circumstances. Chance puts us beside them, and when the going gets rough, they just throw in the towel and go home. They are the duffers and ditherers, those who never do things properly, who seem unable to stand upright in their lives. We remember a gift they once had, a shining enthusiasm, a little something special that in better days had marked them out with promise, and we wonder why they could not make more of it.

With such a person these lines are concerned. His name is Maurice Bellière.

Maurice was a French priest who belonged to the Society of the Missionaries of Africa, more commonly known as the White Fathers. In 1905, after a few years of reliable service, Maurice ran away and returned to France. He died in an asylum for the insane in Caen in 1907. He was 33.

Maurice was by no means only a duffer, but the cloud of failure tends to colour how one sees him. An unmistakeable military air wafts from it. Dereliction of duty. Insubordination. Cowardice. This was a time when French missionaries served France as well as the Church, when French colonial forces helped to determine mission strategy, and French intelligence services asked for and received regular reports from Catholic mission stations in far away places.

At first, Maurice studied for the priesthood at the diocesan seminary in Sommervieu, near Bayeux. Barely able for the stress, he wrote to the superior of a convent of Carmelite nuns asking that a member of the community be assigned to pray for the success of his vocation. The task fell to Sister Thérèse. A deeply afflicted young woman, though one would not have noticed it from her joyful demeanour, advancing tuberculosis never distracted her for a moment from what she took to be her duty. She was assailed not only in her body but also in her spirit. As she drew closer to bodily death, she also approached that death of the mind and heart that is despair. She breathed not a word of her torments, unless required to by religious obedience. In a triumph of loving faith, she routed her spiritual assailants. We know her today as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

Sister Thérèse adopted the dreamy and vacillating Maurice as her little brother. For a period of about a year, she prayed incessantly for him, offered her sufferings for him, and corresponded with him, addressing the sometimes trivial issues he raised in his letters, and putting before him elements of the new way to God she had discovered, the so-called ‘little way’ of confidence and love. The last letters she wrote to him were wrestled from an abyss of agony and exhaustion, but they give hardly a sign of it. Beautifully-worded, they focus completely on the young man’s needs, and they shine with insight, encouragement, affection and good advice. The day she died, 30th September, 1897, was the day the newly-ordained Father Maurice departed for Africa and the missionary life.

To the present writer, who prefers a man to succeed rather than fail, the story of Fr. Maurice Bellière throws a rather puzzling light on Saint Thérèse. Had she not offered her life as a Carmelite nun for missionary priests? Had she not promised to return after her death to spend her heaven doing good in this human world? Yet, here is a missionary priest, one personally known to Saint Thérèse, a priest to whom she had directly promised her unfailing assistance, a priest, moreover, of whose sincerity and commitment there can be no doubt, and he turns out to be a failure. One would imagine that with such assistance behind him, he should have succeeded.

At first, Maurice had fared well in his missionary postings. Because of his knowledge of English, he spent a fruitful year in Algiers as the secretary to Bishop Léon Livinhac, who became his friend. Later, Maurice was sent to a mission station in Nyassa as its superior. These were positions of trust, and Maurice filled them competently enough. Nyassa was unhealthy country for Europeans. Exposed as he was to the tsetse fly, Maurice may have been infected with sleeping sickness, which causes mental deterioration before it kills. This would explain his increasingly erratic behaviour and his early death.

Almost certainly, though, the destructive force that crashed in on Maurice, leaving him permanently untethered, was Bishop Dupont.

Joseph Dupont, Vicar Apostolic of Nyassa from 1897 to 1928, is a legend among African missionaries. Fearless in his confrontations with the colonial powers of Germany and England, and equally fearless in his dealings with hostile tribal chiefs, Bishop Dupont was also a deeply compassionate man, who had gained the respect and the trust of many through his care for the sick and through his advocacy work on behalf of victims of slavery and other injustices. A legend, too, among the Bemba peoples, they had given him an honorary name, Bwana Moto Moto (meaning Master Fire Fire) and they had made him for a time their chief. It is a measure of the esteem in which he was held that in 2000, due to popular demand, his mortal remains were repatriated to Chilubula in present-day Zambia, the site of his first mission station, and given a hero’s funeral.

A former soldier, Bishop Dupont brought to his missionary work the same overwhelming zeal that he had once brought to the French Army. For him, there was no difference between obedience to God out of love and obedience out of fear. He believed in commanding respect wherever he went, and he used the trappings of authority to make sure that he got it. Before the conversion of the Bemba to Christianity, the idea of a White Messiah had played an important mythic role for them, and many Bemba believed that the fiery Bishop was the incarnation of this legendary figure. Bishop Dupont took pleasure in his mythic status and he made use of it for his advantage. His predilection for games of power of this kind together with the relentess pace he forced eventually brought severe conflicts to the mission he led.

In 1905, when Bishop Dupont returned to Nyassa after some years in France, Maurice Bellière was chosen to act as his secretary and companion on an inspection tour of mission stations. When the assignment was over, it was abundantly clear that Maurice had failed to meet expectations. Maurice absented himself without permission, to reappear in France some months later, a physical and mental wreck.

Unfortunately, Maurice was an unfathered man. His mother had died when he was an infant and his natural father had placed him in the care of his wife’s sister and had left the family, never to return. Maurice was brought up with love, but it was quite a shock to the growing boy when he came to know the truth about his parentage. Having discovered that his natural father was living in Paris, Maurice set out for the French capital in the hope of a cordial meeting, only to be rebuffed.

Parental figures are never merely parents; they remain constellations in the mind that channel psychic energies in formative ways. Some psychologists have written of the father-imago as a largely unconscious complex of meanings which can have a strong positive or negative effect on a person’s development and well-being.

One can imagine the crushing impact on Maurice Bellière of Bishop Dupont. Gifted with almost superhuman powers of endurance, the Bishop demanded the impossible from his subordinates. Faced with Maurice’s incapacities, he responded with ridicule and condemnation. A younger man, who had been trained in the newer ways, Maurice may have dissented strongly from the Bishop’s understanding of the task and role of the missionary. If he did, he is not likely to be have been given a hearing.

In Maurice’s over-sensitive mind, Bishop Dupont was stomping around like the father from Hell. That merciless being who had first abandoned him had now returned, to bulldoze him with his peremptory needs. A Bishop, in some respects, stood in the place of God, and Maurice was caught up in a desperate struggle. The God of Merciful Love was beginning to look like Bishop Dupont. He probably had no choice but to run away.

This brings us to Saint Thérèse. Writing on July 18, 1897, she told Maurice what he could expect after her death:
When I shall have come into port, I shall teach you, dear little brother of my soul, how you must sail the stormy sea of the world, with the abandon and love of a child who knows that his Father cherishes him, and would never think of leaving him alone in the hour of danger.

Can Thérèse have kept her promise?

It is true that Maurice stuck it out with Bishop Dupont until his tour of duty was completed. This perseverance, though it represents only the bare minimum for a missionary, seems remarkable under the circumstances. A Catholic would readily see the supernatural assistance of Saint Thérèse at work. But it did not enable a change for the better in Maurice’s painful circumstances nor prevent the final break with the Bishop which cost him his good standing with his Society.

To refuse obedience and abandon one’s post was no small matter for a priest imbued with reverence for ecclesiastical authority. Saint Thérèse may have stiffened his resolve. If she did, there is a potentially subversive quality to her guidance that does not sit easily with how a Saint is usually perceived. Such unboundedness was certainly in her character. As a young girl, when the local superiors had refused to break the rules to allow her to become a nun before the usual age, she importuned the Pope to overrule them. She had a strong, unashamed desire to be a priest, an impossibility for a woman. Not a few of her challenging statements were edited after her death, when the Church, discomfited by her holiness, tried to press her into the usual mould. Saint Thérèse would have wanted Maurice to be more than a textbook priest. Not for her a paper figure eager to show how good he is to his superiors while his heart stays small.

Maurice’s irregular status must have deprived him of the usual official documents and also of money and protection. That he could travel safely from Nyassa to France in such unlikely circumstances again suggests that he was receiving supernatural help. We may note that during the First World War, many French soldiers turned to Thérèse of Lisieux, who had become widely known, though her cult had not yet been approved by the Church. Some of those who came through the hell of the trenches remained convinced to their dying day that they had received help from her in dire need.

But it is in a more fundamental sense, one going much deeper than the assurance of personal safety, that Saint Thérèse kept her promise to Maurice Bellière. The ‘abandon and love of a child’ takes on a new meaning when the father imago has turned malignant, when the conventional social and religious structures are breaking up, when one’s natural strength is lost to illness, and no further attempt can be made to build a life. A new spirit is required. There is a taste of it in a prayer Thérèse sent to Maurice:
I ask of you, O Jesus, a heart that loves you, a heart that cannot be overcome, prepared to resume the fight after each storm, a heart that is free and does not allow itself to be seduced, a heart that is straight and does not follow crooked ways.

Would it have been a surrender to seduction if Maurice had stayed on the missions, and perhaps tried to become more like Bishop Dupont? Would it have made his heart crooked to profess the God of Fear, who was so unlike the God of Love he had learned about from Thérèse? It seems so. Maurice indeed failed as a missionary priest. But what did it matter? Failure may have been the only path still open for a heart determined to be free of false Gods.

When the going got rough, Maurice Bellière threw in the towel and went home. There, however, drifting in and out of madness, his dreams in ruins, his death creeping up on him, he must have had a miraculous new opportunity. In his suffering, he could join with Saint Thérèse, and through her with Jesus, in sacrifice and in triumph. In one of her letters to Maurice, Thérèse had stated that for her little brother there could be no half measures, he would have to become a saint. In the failure of his life, she was surely there to show him the way.

 

Note:
My principal source for the life of Abbé Bellière is Maurice and Thérèse: The Story of a Love, by Patrick Ahern (New York, 1998). My source on Bishop Dupont is Remembering Bishop Joseph Dupont (1850-1930) in Present-Day Zambia, by Marja Hinfelaar, published in the Journal of Religion in Africa, (Vol. 33, November, 2003). The rather speculative interpretations are my own.

EK