wrote of with an arresting vigor, as in this passage:

"My third piece of advice" he says in an address to his religious, "is that you slough off a certain prudence, which is often the refuge of shameful laziness. 'Prudent' sometimes means faint-hearted. Now more than ever is the time to repeat Bossuet's saying, 'Faith is daring.' Let us have the boldness of faith, even though some might call it foolhardiness. Real prudence is the queen of the moral virtues; and a queen commands, acts, and, if necessary, fights. Some have transformed prudence into a frightened old woman. Such prudence is in bed slippers and a dressing-gown, with a cold, coughing a lot. Conventional prudence, I do not want. You must not heed such prudence. As far as I am concerned, I always want to trust madly in God's Providence, even though, abandoned by all, I end up dying in a hospital."

Unrequited Charity

Saint Paul told the ungrateful Corinthians, "But I most gladly will spend and be spent myself for your souls; although loving you more, I be loved less" (2 Cor. 12:15). Such a spirit of loving service amid ingratitude was a mark of Venerable Emmanuel's work. In 1900, the Assumptionists were given a great cross and a great distinction: They were expelled from France by the Masonic Third Republic. This was a full five years before the expulsion of the rest of the nation's religious Orders.

Not surprisingly, Father d'Alzon is still hated by the enemies of the Church in France and elsewhere. Secularists who would marginalize the Church's influence on society routinely vilify him, as they do other courageous priests of character. David I. Kertzer's 2001 book, The Pope Against the Jews, recklessly attacked the entire Assumptionist congregation: "It was the lower clergy that played the leading role in the development of the modern French anti-Semitic movement and among the priests involved by far the most influential was the small religious order of the Assumptionist Fathers." A Google book search reveals numerous such passages from the pages of anti-Christian screeds.

So, the Assumptionist "Triple Love" had its price. But, as with the Great Lover Himself, the Assumptionists proved their true charity with their blood. In 1952, a Communist kangaroo court found three Augustinians of the Assumption guilty of crimes against the state for laboring to reunite Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Christians with Rome. Fathers Kamen Vitchev, Pavel Djidjov and Josaphat Chichkov were shot by a firing squad at Sophia, Bulgaria, during the night of November 11-12, 1952. These triple martyrs who testified to their "Triple Love" were beatified by Pope John Paul II on May 26, 2002.

God be praised for their "noble and frank intolerance"!

-----

There is little available in English concerning our subject, and very little on the web. To learn more about Venerable Emmanuel d'Alzon, the reader is referred to the article by Mr. Gary Potter, Thy Kingdom Come.