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Also in France: financial support


The young Society of Mary did not have the means to finance the missions entrusted to it. Archbishop de Pins had from the beginning involved the Propagation of the Faith, then established in the archdiocese. It gave the Marist missions impressive support: in the four years 1836, 1837, 1838 and 1839 they donated respectively 25.000, 33.200, 52.181 and 78.000 francs, whereby, in today’s money, we must think of amounts in the order of 200.000, 265.600, 417.448 and 624.000 Euro.[1]
Such sums can only have been brought together by regular contributions of many thousands of generous people, probably reading the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi. The missionaries themselves were well known to the clergy of Lyon and Belley. They had studied together and had been their colleagues in the ministry. They will have given full support to the fund raising of the Propagation of the Faith.

And the cream of the nation

Given the image that the Society of Mary was quickly acquiring in France, and the massive support of the laity, it is no wonder that she attracted men of great quality. In the year after the founding chapter of September 1836 no less than sixteen diocesan priests entered the novitiate. By September 1839[2] twenty-seven new Marists had joined the Society, among whom were (Saint) Julien Eymard who would later found the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, two future bishops (Épalle and Viard), one future superior general (Favre), men like Poupinel and Rocher who would soon put the administration of the missions on a solid base and several others who will for ever be venerated as founders of Churches,[3] such as Petit-Jean in Christchurch[4] and Chevron in Tonga. [5] In assigning the missionaries Colin could maintain the high standards of generosity and commitment that he considered essential.

Also in France: a frustrated superior

When, in October 1838, Colin had received Pompallier’s letter of 14 May and the letters that Servant had sent to his two friends,[6] he had simply passed them to the Propagation of the Faith. They were published – nearly in full - in January 1839. [7] Once Colin saw them in print, and possibly because of reactions he picked up from Marists or other readers, he made up his mind not to let that happen again.
A few months later, in April, he received the letters sent in September 1838,[8] and at about the same time those from the missionaries of the second group in Valparaiso.[9] This time he did not send them as such to the Propagation of the Faith but asked his trusted friend Gabriel-Claude Mayet to edit them for publication. It was probably when instructing him on what to take out and what to leave, that Colin showed his irritation, and Mayet took note of his remarks.[10]
With all respect for the bishop’s zeal and hard work Colin could only feel distaste at Pompallier’s impatience and his constant moaning about more men and more money. ‘You must know how to put up with things’, he said. ‘Did Francis Xavier have that much money? Was he also not a long time alone? Planting the faith in a country takes suffering. Isn’t that one of the first things in the apostolic life? In four years, if I am not mistaken, Francis Xavier asked eighteen times for more men, and only four times he got reinforcements from Europe’.
Another thing Colin missed was piety! ‘Where is Our Lady in all of this? The Picpus Fathers put a statue of Our Lady in the pagan temple’, he said, and ‘when we took possession of Puylata we went on our knees and put an image of Our Lady in every room. Mais eux rien! Nothing of that with them! The history of our mission must be edifying!’[11]
What also irritated him was that Servant constantly called Pompallier His Grace (Sa Grandeur) and using phrases such as: ‘I had the honour to accompany His Grace’. Inappropriate for a simply missionary bishop in New Zealand! He grumbled at Pompallier’s description of the new house at Papakawau: ‘the whole episcopal palace!’ And he found the bishop’s remark that for those missions one needed great virtue and scholarship pretentious. He even thought of inserting bits and pieces into the letter, such as: ‘as long as a missionary has his head on his two shoulders, he knows no fear’.
In short, what he wanted to see in the letters was ‘modesty, simplicity, devotion to Our Lady and a manly nerve that rallies the readers with the courage of lions!’ In the end he had Mayet cut out the offending bits but he refrained from entering phrases of his own. In any case, the Annales did not publish the censored version! We do not know why and the text has not survived.[12]


Notes

  1. ↑ Bernard Bourtot, op. cit. p. 28. Cf. Excursus B, above, p. 100.
  2. ↑ Cf. CS I, pp. 652ff
  3. ↑ The expression ‘founding new churches’ is coined later for religious, in the Directives for the mutual relations between Bishops and Religious in the Church, of 14 May 1978, AAS, LXX, 1978, p. 478: sollicitudo in novis fundandis ecclesiis.
  4. ↑ Mary Catherine Goulter, Sons of France, pp. 35ff.
  5. ↑ Jean Coste, Lectures on Society of Mary History, p. 242
  6. ↑ LRO, doc. 24. Servant to Buffard, 22.05.38 & to Thiollière du Treuil, 22.05.38, LRO, docs 26 & 27.
  7. ↑ Annales, LXII, January 1839, pp. 140 – 157. On 1 December he wrote to Pompallier, and 2 December the novices at Puylata also wrote. Both letters are lost. Cf. Pompallier to Colin, 20.08.39, LRO, 35 [1].
  8. ↑ Pompallier to Colin, 04.09 & 14.09, LRO, docs 29 & 30, and Servant to Colin , 16.09, LRO, doc. 31. That these letters arrived in April is clear from Colin to Fransoni, 26.04.39, CS, doc. 63.
  9. ↑ 25.01.39. Cf. above, p. 103f.
  10. ↑ MM I, pp. 186 – 189, printed in full in CS, doc.64.
  11. ↑ This is not mentioned in Pompallier’s account of the visit to the Gambier Islands. The nearest he gets to it is that a pagan temple was turned into a rural chapel (LRO, doc. 21 [4]). Did Colin’s imagination supply the statue? Or is this another trace of Caret’s visit (cf. above p. 69)?
  12. ↑ Colinian language: une mâle intrépidité proper à aguerrir les lecteurs et à les remplir d’un courage de lions. One can understand Colin’s annoyance at those pages of self-pity but his anger gets the better of him when he does not see that the remark on the ‘episcopal palace’ was only ironically meant. In spite of his irritation at the deferential language he did not attempt to introduce a change. It went on for years. The reason for Pompallier’s fit of anger in Valparaiso (above, p. 54) may well have been that the Picpus Fathers were not using the same pompous language. The Marists had evidently agreed to put up with his vanity.



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