Can there ever be such a thing as having a vocation to choose the wrong vocation? A man adopts a career only to discover too late that it is the wrong career; marries a woman only to find too late that she is the wrong woman; settles down into a fixed, narrow groove only to find that at heart he is a wanderer. Perhaps we should see these errors of judgment as being no more than permitted by God; what is certain is that, the false situation once established, the frustration set up, the sufferer must surely see his vocation as being not at an end but at a beginning: something of value has to be made somehow out of the muddle.

There are of course many other types of frustration, and they are tragically common. There is the outwardly successful marriage which in reality has become empty of meaning: the husband and wife continuing—for the sake of appearances, or from a sense of duty, or because of the children— to act as a happy couple while in reality there is no longer any real communion between them or any hope of any. There are the men and women who long for married life but never achieve it. There are those who have a deep desire to become this or that, to achieve this or that, but have in the end to admit that they lack the necessary gifts. There are those who long for friends, for companionship, but are condemned to loneliness; there are those who never seem to be able to make a real success of anything to which they put their hands. In the moral sphere there are those who long to make something worthy of their lives but who feel hopelessly defeated by some vice which they lack the strength to conquer; there are the cases of undeveloped conscience or deep character defect where a vague desire to ‘be good’ is at times of emotional exaltation raised to grandiose heights of resolution only to be dashed again into the depths of despair when the next defeat occurs.

The centenary of the death of Frederick Ozanam has passed practically unnoticed. A few articles in the Catholic Press, a couple of small and unpretentious works from Ireland, a meeting of the Brothers of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in Paris 5 this seems a meagre tribute to pay to one of the greatest Catholic laymen of our time. The reason is, I think, that Ozanam presents a difficult problem for many of his most fervent admirers. They are attracted by his spirituality, his deep sense of Christian charity, his love of God and of the poor. But there is a whole side of Ozanam which is out of keeping with what English Catholic publicists are pleased to call the ‘Catholic tradition’. He was a man of bold and original views, a republican, a radical and a democrat at a time when most French Catholics were devoted to the principles of absolute monarchy; he had an intense dislike for aggressive apologetics, and showed to Protestants and unbelievers a spirit of tolerance which many considered to be treason to the Faith. The failure of the revolution of 1848, the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon and the rejection of democracy by Pius IX, dealt a crushing blow to all the social and political ideals of Christian democracy for which Ozanam had fought, and his hagio- graphers have therefore had a tendency to suppress or tone down the more awkward facts, presenting us with edifying little biographies, full of touching and pious incidents, which fail absolutely to give us an idea of his striking originality.

The little story that follows has something in common with Guareschi’s Don Camillo tales, but it has the advantage of being true; and truth is more interesting than fiction even when the latter is written by a humorist of genius. My true story is not funny, but most Italian priests who know communism at close quarters do not—sometimes for different reasons—find the situation at all funny, and are even inclined to blame Guareschi for having, as one of them said to me, ‘joked about things that are tragic’. That may not be quite fair to Guareschi, but it is a point of view which his non-Italian admirers should not overlook.

As for my story, its setting is the Tuscan countryside today, where three-quarters of the population are communist and therefore officially excommunicated by the Church. That is the first point to grasp. Try to imagine the more obvious difficulties confronting a priest in this situation. Is he to refuse the Sacraments to everyone who has the party membership card and will not throw it away? If so, he knows that he is shutting the church door in the face of most of the men in his parish and more than half the women. Over large zones of central Italy the peasants just assume, as a thing too obvious to need discussion, that the communist party is their party. E il nostro partito: the phrase comes out pat as a matter of course. Moreover it is widely assumed in Italy (at least verbally) that communism is simply Christianity in practice, and that the priests at the bottom of their hearts know this. In other words it is assumed that the barrier between Church and communism is no more than a legal device erected by the priests because their self-interest ties them to the other political faction.

Beggars can’t be choosers, and when it was evident that the French strikes would make transport indefinitely doubtful, we decided to renounce the tidy shape of our original plans and let chance offers on the road take us where they might. Perhaps even in the limited time at our disposal—three days only—we should see something of St Bernard’s country and the places where he had been. So we set out, the two of us, hopefully.

The first offer, taking us beyond Auxerre, came after no more than five minutes walking and we were soon moving through the forest of Fontainebleau in the morning sunshine. The rain which had broken the oppressive heat of the previous two days had left the leaves clean and shining, and beyond the wood the blue sky opened that was above us all the way; a route through Moret with its narrow gates and an old house in a world of moving waters, past Sens, and gradually into downland till you are on a ridge of hills. The trees along the road change from poplar to unclipped chestnut and then to generous plane and, now in the Côte d’Or, the Yonne lies below on the right, a broad and pleasant river in a singularly favoured land. To have read in one’s history books of the power of the medieval Dukes of Burgundy is to have learned the hard way. Here one has only to look to understand. A country of such resources, so royally self-sufficient and assured, could scarcely be less than a kingdom. The light has a quality all its own, the very air moving among the leaves in the orchards seems blended according to secret ingredients. And white and honey-coloured in this light, bathed in this air, on the crown of a steep hill stands the abbey of Vézelay.

It was only to be expected that in the great effort which has been made in recent times in France to go back to the sources of Christian tradition and to recover its principles, an attempt should have been made to reconsider the nature of the monastic life and its place in the life of the Church. Of these attempts the most remarkable is the work of the Oratorian Père Bouyer on Le Sens de la Vie Monastique. It may be a matter of surprise that this should be the work of one who is not himself a monk. But the reason for this becomes clear when it is seen that for Père Bouyer the monastic life is simply the life of Christian perfection. ‘To be a monk’, as he says, ‘is simply to be an integral Christian.’ Viewed in this light, the first chapters of his book form one of the most memorable studies of the ideal of Christian perfection in modern times. They are distinguished from the work of Père Garrigou-Lagrange on the same subject in that they are based not on the teaching of St Thomas and the Carmelite mystics, but on the doctrine of the Fathers, and especially the Greek Fathers. This gives his view a richness and depth which is lacking in the work of Garrigou-Lagrange, but it also brings with it certain dangers. This becomes evident in the second part, where he turns from the theory to the practice of the monastic life; for he bases himself here largely on the teaching of the Fathers of the Desert. Now this teaching has, of course, immense value, and the fundamental principles of prayer and asceticism and spiritual perfection were laid down at this period for all time. But there were also defects and excesses in their outlook which make them often dangerous guides, and one does not feel that Père Bouyer has altogether escaped the dangers. As Father Aelred Sillem pointed out in a review in The Life of the Spirit, the fact that the Fathers of the Desert went out into the desert ‘to fight with demons’ is not really of much relevance to the vocation of a monk today.