Reliving Christ with Ven. Madeleine Delbrêl

Introducing an "everyday" saint.

Madeleine Delbrêl was determined to do one thing: to relive Christ. She wanted to live the Gospel without limit. This did not mean working for Christ. Working for Christ was too distant, too transactional. She didn’t want to be Jesus’ functionary. She didn’t want to be his employee or volunteer. She didn’t want to be “used” by Jesus. No. She set out to “relive Christ in the midst of a de-Christianized world.” This was her aim. She wanted to be so united with Jesus as to relive him. She wanted to become Christ. 

In this post, I’m happy to introduce Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, one of the lesser-known venerables in the US. However, her popularity is increasing with excerpts of her work published in the Magnificat and recent translations of her work published by Ignatius Press (The Dazzling Light of God and The Holiness of Ordinary People) and Sophia Institute Press (The Joy of Believing).

Biographical Information

Madeleine was born on October 24, 1904 in a small town in western France, not far from Bordeaux. She was the only child of Jules and Lucille. Her father was the manager of a train station and loved discussing politics and philosophy with his freethinking friends. Her mother was from a family of candlemakers. She appreciated the arts. They were essentially agnostic intellectuals. They handed on their keen interest in education, philosophy, and art to Madeleine. They handed on their unbelief as well.

Madeleine made her first communion, but after the death of her grandfather, the family’s faith practices fizzled. Sound familiar? This is the same story of so many Catholic families today. Over the years, her parents’ marriage crumbled, and they eventually separated after Madeleine left home. 

A year after her grandfather passed, the family moved to Paris. It was 1916, the middle of WWI. Here, Madeleine became an atheist. She also became well acquainted with nihilism. She said that in her atheism “the world grew for me more absurd by the day.” At age 17, she wrote: “God is dead, long live death…Death of God makes our own more sure. Death has become the surest thing.” Peering through the years immediately following WWI, years marked by the absence of so many men, she said, “Death is doing just fine…Even if we muzzle the war, out of 100 men, 100 will continue to die, that is to say 100%.” For Madeleine, in her atheistic straightjacket, the world had become meaningless and death the only reasonable absolute. ¹

Oddly enough, Madeleine did not despair. In fact, she did the opposite. She continued searching for meaning. This quest eventually led her to a small group of Christians and the question God’s existence rose on her mental horizon. But it didn’t stay there, as an intellectual pursuit alone. Because of this little community and their honest search, she prayed for the first time. And everything changed. She says that in this experience: “I believed that God found me and that he is the living truth, and that we can love him as we love a person.”² We can love him as we love a person because God is personal. God is a Trinity of persons and God has taken flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. God is not abstract, far off, or untouchable. God is real, he is close, and he has flesh. Madeleine encountered this God and her life changed — all because of an honest prayer, all because of a fundamental openness to God. It’s reminscent of Blaise Pascal’s night of fire and his discovery of a personal, not purely abstract, God:

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.

Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.

God of Jesus Christ.

During this time, she fell in love with Jean Maydieu, a member of the little Christian community. However, he eventually entered the Dominican novitiate, breaking Madeleine’s heart. Yet through Maydieu’s deeper entry into Catholicism, Madeleine rediscovered the Catholic liturgy and became acquainted with a parish priest who put Madeleine in touch with the Gospel. From then on, Madeleine read from the Gospels daily. Praying with Scripture daily became the beating heart of her spiritual life. Her Catholic roots had been restored, and new spiritual life was coursing through her veins. 

Madeleine earned degrees in nursing and social work, and set off to work in Ivry, a working-class Communist suburb of Paris. She went there with two other young women (and eventually others), to do what? Help the poor. And to help atheists. (Remember, Communism was built on Marxism – an atheist philosophy.) She saw her vocation as not going on a special mission to some foreign land, but to be present to the poor and the unbelievers God put right in front of her. So, she and the women with her, founded a contemplative lay community, took vows of celibacy, and took up jobs within the community. The community became known as “the Charity of Jesus,” and they sought to incarnate the love of God wherever they were. 

Madeleine was a prodigious writer, publishing articles and books. She died unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage at her writing desk on Oct. 13, 1964. Madeleine’s cause for canonization was opened in 1988. This was validated by Rome in 1996, giving her the title “Servant of God.” In 2018, Pope Francis declared Madeleine “Venerable.” Because of her dedication to the social issues of her country, you might hear people refer to Madeleine as a “French Dorothy Day” — a nod to her American contemporary. 

Everyday Holiness

With this biographical sketch in place, I’d like to shift focus just a bit. What does Madeleine teach us about living life well? What does she teach us about everyday holiness? What kind of vision does she give us for living with Christ at the center of our lives? So, what does she teach us about everyday holiness? What does reliving Christ look like? 

Encountering Jesus

Reliving Christ first means encountering Christ. “It is necessary to rediscover the face of Christ with all its intensity,” Delbrêl states.³ Reliving Christ begins with this rediscovery — being encountered by him. This was the case for Madeleine and her moment of fire in prayer. This remained the case for her, because prayer has to do with allowing God to act on us, allowing God to act in us. Prayer, for Madeleine, had a concrete basis. It was no abstraction. The basis was twofold: Scripture and Sacraments, the Bible and the Liturgy. Madeleine says, “The Gospel is the Book of the Life of the Lord. It was made in order to become the book of our life. It was not made to be understood but to be approached as a threshold of mystery. It was not made to be read, but to be received in us. Each of its words is spirit and life…Alive, they are themselves like the initial leavening that will attack our dough and ferment it into a new way of life…The words of the Gospel knead us, modify us, assimilate us, so to speak, into themselves. The words of the Gospel are miraculous.”⁴ 

And what can we say about liturgy? Well, Madeleine claims that “it is in the Church that I live Jesus Christ, that I am in Jesus Christ; in the Church as a member of a body, as a cell in living matter. My personal Christian life is the result of this communal life of the Church. The communal prayer of the Church, the liturgical prayer, is inseparable from the sacraments; it is wholly based on the Eucharist.”⁵ Elsewhere, she says, “When love of the Church has bitten our heart, her own prayer becomes almost necessary to us.”⁶ We live from the Liturgy. We must learn to live from the liturgy, at the heart of which we find the Eucharist, in order to relive Christ. 

To Be Acted Upon

Next, we can say reliving Christ means being acted upon by Christ. We must allow his love to animate our whole being, that we allow his love to act in our every circumstance no matter how ordinary and banal. Look at these passages: 

Lord, Lord, at least let this rind that covers me not be a barrier to you. Pass through. My eyes, my hands, my mouth are yours. This woman so sad before me: here is my mouth so that you can smile at her. This child is almost gray, he is so pale: here are my eyes so that you can look upon him. This man so tired, so very tired, here is my whole body so that you can give him my seat, and my voice so that you can say very gently to him: “Sit down.” This boy, so smug, so foolish, so tough, here is my heart for you to love him with, harder than he has ever been loved.⁷

Let us take a very small piece of our life and set free the charity of Christ in it to everything it can do, everything it wants to do, and to let it do it. You change trains, you wait in the waiting room in the middle of the night. The charity of the Lord is in you in the midst of this waiting room. What is it going to do? What will that very polite lady, this very proper gentleman say when you share coffee from your thermos with the neighbor to your right, your bread and your cheese with the neighbor to your left, if you wrap that child in your coat…But what will Christ say if you do not do it? The holy Church expects saints, and saints are those who love.⁸

Holiness Here and Now

Madeleine teaches us that we are all called to be holy regardless of where God places us, regardless of the circumstances he gives us. She says:

There are some people whom God takes and sets apart. There are others whom he leaves in the masses and whom he does not “withdraw from the world.” They are people who do ordinary jobs, who have an ordinary household or an ordinary single life. People who have ordinary illnesses, ordinary deaths. People who have an ordinary house, ordinary clothes, these are the people of ordinary life. The people we meet on any street…We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, that this world where God has placed us, is, for us, the site of our holiness.

One need not be removed from the ordinariness of life to become holy. No. Ordinariness is the site of one’s holiness. The normal and mundane can become ground zero for God’s grace. Madeleine is pushing against this idea that sainthood, that holiness is only for priests and religious or the ultra pious or the mystical. She’s pushing against the idea of holiness being some extraordinary thing, some heroic accomplishment, and driving at the fact that holiness is possible for every person regardless of their station in life. 

Everyone a Missionary; Everywhere a Mission Field

Finally, I want to highlight mission. Like her point about holiness not being a reality for an exceptional few or for those who have been removed from the hustle and bustle of life and cloistered, Madeleine sees mission, she sees evangelization as the call for every baptized person. Sharing the Gospel is not something that professionals do or priests do or sisters do. It’s something that every Catholic does. And, it’s not something that requires venturing to some foreign land — the land of missions. Mission-land is right here. So she describes her little group of lay women as “missionaries without boats.” They are missionaries on no strange land, but missionaries amid the strangers in their own land. For this reason, she says, “Let us descend into the depths of this world, to take there the Word of God lived with all the strength of our heart.”⁹ 

Delbrêl and the Anticipation of Vatican II

We could say much more about Madeleine Delbrêl, the everyday saint, but we can leave it here for now. In so many ways, she anticipated Vatican II, which said that every person is called to holiness, including lay people, and your station in life is the site of your holiness. It said that every baptized Catholic is called to evangelize and your mission field is wherever you are. 

To carry the call, to relive Christ today, Madeleine made prayer the foundation of her life. This meant time with the Gospels each day and engaging in the liturgical life of the Church as much as her daily responsibilities would allow her to. And, she saw every circumstance in front of her as an invitation to exercise charity. She wanted Christ to exercise his charity through her — to love the people in front of her through her. She wanted him to love the poor, the Communists, the atheists, and even the people vastly different than her. Madeleine could love freely and without fear because she was secure in God’s love for her. 

1. Delbrêl, The Dazzling Light of God, 10.

2. Delbrêl, The Dazzling Light of God, 10.

3. Delbrêl, The Holiness of Ordinary People, 64.

4. Delbrêl, The Dazzling Light of God, 44.

5. Delbrêl, The Dazzling Light of God, 122.

6. Delbrêl, The Holiness of Ordinary People, 125.

7. Delbrêl, The Holiness of Ordinary People, 82.

8. Delbrêl, The Holiness of Ordinary People, 86.

9. Delbrêl, The Holiness of Ordinary People, 91.