Portland Magazine
January 18, 2019
Last summer 12 UP faculty went on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Holy Cross order. Here is one pilgrim’s meditation on the man who started it all.
by Karen Eifler
On day two of our pilgrimage in France, we visited the Solitude of St. Joseph, the convent where Blessed Basil Moreau spent his final days. His bed and his cassock—both on display— were a revelation. They were tiny. The man must have been five-foot-nothing, if that. For some reason, we had thought the founder of a religious congregation would be tall.
The chapel of Notre-Dame de L’Habit was also minuscule (12 UP pilgrims filled it). Fr. Moreau walked to this chapel from the city of Le Mans and back again nearly every day. The roundtrip distance is 27 miles. Twenty-seven miles most days of his public ministry. Twenty-seven miles on those short legs, his serge cassock stirring up dust or picking up mud, depending on the season. (We made the trek in our air-conditioned motor coach with a bottomless supply of ice water, dodging the occasional sheep, cruising comfortably over the wagon ruts that had been carved into the country roads in the 1800s.)
Moreau went to the chapel of Notre-Dame de L’Habit for private prayer and to check in on the new schools his fledgling congregation was staffing. He then walked back to Le Mans the same day, where heaps of paperwork awaited him.
Fr. Moreau’s to-do list would bring the sturdiest among us to our knees today. He walked those miles while founding a congregation and getting it approved by Rome. While maintaining hundreds of correspondences. While building new churches, hospitals, and schools to help his region of France rebuild from the Revolution. While teaching grandparents— not just their children and their children’s children—the rudiments of the Catholic faith along with basic literacy. He also walked those 27 miles many times a week to pray, perhaps allowing himself simply to be with the One who called and sustained him.
Maybe my presumption about the man’s height came from the lone image we have of him—the one that shows up on all the posters, prayer cards, and Holy Cross public relations materials. His presence looms large. He has pursed lips, a furrowed brow. He is a man straining to get past his viewer. The image crackles with impatience. It’s easy to imagine him brushing past the painter who was slowing him down for something as trivial as a portrait for posterity, especially when the present moment held so many shards in need of gathering and repair. “Hurry, then, and take up this work of resurrection” is one of Moreau’s countless exhortations to his nascent religious congregation. His regular insistence on hurrying those 27 miles in order to breathe, to ponder, to pray seems to be a secret worth sharing.
KAREN EIFLER is a professor of education on The Bluff, and co-director of UP’s Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life and American Culture.
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