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Handout #281 |
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The career of a worker priest |
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Several worker priests of the Mission de Paris recalled their
careers for Mgr. Feltin, the new archbishop of paris, in October 1949. Here
are some extracts from the testimony of a young priest who began by being a
caster in a foundry.
When I arrived at the Compteurs de Montrouge, I had twelve uninterrupted years of seminary life behind me. I went to the working class with what I thought were indispensable riches: culture, a balanced personality, enthusiasm and so on. I believed in personal influence. I valued contacts. I loved discussions. I hoped that my knowledge would impress people. I wanted to give God. And, more seriously, I lived and acted by dissociating my personal faith in God from the world to which the church had sent me. This World of which I knew nothing. This spell of two months at the Compteurs de Montroughe made me lose my illusions. Leaving the factory to be more available to the Paris district of Kremlin-Bicetre and Gentilly, I retained the conviction that I had to lose all my culture, my mentality, my inner attitudes, in order to allow myself to be taken over by the work and hopes of the working class. I came to know the everyday difficulties of mothers: I encountered homes in which ten people were crowded into two small rooms. Above all, I discovered a more or less conscious rebellion, underlying but nevertheless real, on the part of these working-class families against the inhuman conditions that were imposed on them. So in the mission that had been entrusted to me, only one orientation was possible; my priesthood would be their priesthood, or it would not be a priesthood at all. The people who surrounded me, whom I met in the street, with whom I unloaded a truck; whose life and work I shared in the market place where I was a fitter for almost two years, did not expect either advice or service from me. They could only be aware of one thing: we had the same life and were subject to the same destiny. In Les Pretres-Ouvriers, Editions de Minuit 1954. |
