DREAMING MOREAU'S DREAM

A visit to the birthplace of the Congregation of Holy Cross, hatched by a most interesting and intense young French priest in 1837.
Photographs by: Steven Scardina

In 1821 Basil Moreau was a newly ordained priest of the diocese of Le Mans, France. All of 22 years old, he was initially assigned to teach in the seminary at Le Mans, and around this visionary, intense, and insistent young man there soon gathered a group of priests and seminarians of like mind: to use the genius of education to rebuild a France devastated by civil war, to preach and teach the extraordinary and soul-saving message of Jesus Christ, and to bring that message to every nation on earth.

No small ambition there.

But in 1837 those men, led by Father Moreau and in concert with the local Brothers of Saint Joseph, formed the Congre-gation of Holy Cross, named after the small area of Le Mans were Moreau had established his headquarters. In 1841, in keeping with his dream of a Holy Cross community composed of men and women, lay and ordained, a family of spiritual seekers and teachers, he founded the Holy Cross Sisters.

In subsequent years the men and women of Holy Cross dreamed Moreau’s dream with flair and panache, carrying the order’s devotion to education and service to Africa, the Americas, Europe, and India. Today Holy Cross priests, brothers, and sisters around the world are affiliated with 32 parishes, 19 high schools, and 7 colleges and universities, including the University of Portland, the University of Notre Dame, Stonehill College (Massachusetts), Saint Edward’s University (Texas), King’s College (Pennsylvania), and Our Lady of Holy Cross College (Louisiana).

Moreau’s vision, suffice to say, has sailed around the world and into millions of hearts; for which service to God and humanity he was, this past April, declared Venerable by the Vatican — the first step to sainthood.

We recently asked the Oregon -photographer Steve Scardina to visit some of the places Basil Moreau loved and lived in his time on earth the French houses and chapels and churches and groves where he dreamed a band of men and women unlike any other, a clan and a tribe devoted to Christ’s love, sworn to carry that astounding message to the very ends of the earth. — Editor

STUBBORN & HOLY

There are, by my count, eleven accounts of the life and work of Basil Anthony Mary Moreau, founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross. All were written to point out his heroic virtues and how he lived them; in short, all were apologias. Not until the publication of Marvin O’Connell’s biography of Father Edward Sorin (Notre Dame Press, 2001), is there a serious look at Moreau’s real personality and character.

A reader distilling the Moreau of these twelve volumes finds a most remarkable man. Famed for his holiness and self-discipline, and by all -accounts a man of immense integrity, he was also inclined to be intense, meticulous, organized, ambitious, contentious, rigorous, visionary, -ascetic, rigid, undeviating, steadfast, chilling, forbidding, obsessive, lonely, prickly, fault-finding, controversial, stiff, assertive, self-righteous, reserved, disingenuous, zealous, grave, inflexible, compartmentalized, committed, insistent, consistent, tyrannical, remote, pious, stubborn, and holy.

What we find, in considerable and inarguable detail, from all of these -biographies of Moreau is that the founder of my religious order was a man of admirable, even heroic, virtues. What we cannot know so well is the human being — the man who, as one biographer noted gently, “flinched occasionally.” Because his biographers have been so concerned to defend him, they have not often revealed to us the real man. It would be edifying someday to read about Moreau not so much as the Venerable Basil, perhaps a saint, but as a human being like ourselves, who in spite of his faults and quirks of personality, responded with all his heart and soul to the grace of God.

Father James Connelly, C.S.C., is a professor of history on The Bluff, and the author most recently of The University of Portland, 1901-2001: A Century of Teaching, Faith, and Service. He was for many years the Congregation of Holy Cross archivist and is at work on a history of his order.

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