VATICAN - Pope Francis: Madeleine Delbrêl. The joy of faith among non-believers

Rome (Agenzia Fides) - The witnesses and confessors of the faith in Christ are always called to live in their time, to "share life with others, to mingle with the joys and sorrows of the world". And also to be in contact with people and environments that do not know or reject the Gospel can help believers to advance on the path of conversion and to "rediscover faith it its essentiality".
Pope Francis recalled this at today's general audience on Wednesday, November 8th. and thus continued the cycle of catechesis dedicated to the witnesses of the passion for the proclamation of the Gospel. Before the crowd gathered in St. Peter's Square, the Pope recalled the venerable Servant of God Madeleine Delbrêl, who testified her love for Christ by living in the poor working-class neighborhoods of Paris for more than thirty years, in an environment dominated by Marxist ideologies.
A social worker, writer and mystic, Madeleine was born in 1904 and grew up in a France that was characterized by profound processes of de-Christianization. She herself proclaimed the “death of God” in her first writings as a young woman. But then - Pope Francis recalled - "at the age of around twenty Madeleine encountered the Lord, struck by the witness of some friends who were believers". She came to learn that the "emptiness that cried out her anguish in her was God who sought her". And the "joy of faith gave rise to a decision for a life entirely dedicated to God, in the midst of the Church and the world, sharing in the spirit of fraternity the life of the “street people”". Because "Once we have come to know the word of God", writes the servant of God in one of the passages cited by Pope Francis "we have no right not to receive it; once we have received it, we have no right not to let it be incarnated in us; once it has been incarnated in us, we have no right to keep it for ourselves: from that moment on, we belong to those who await it".

Another passage by the Venerable Frenchwoman taken up by Pope Francis, alluded to what she herself called the 'spirituality of the bicycle': "To be with You on Your path", wrote Madeleine addressing Jesus "we must go, even when our laziness begs us to stay. You have chosen us to stay in a strange balance, a balance that can be achieved and maintained only in movement, only in momentum. A bit like a bicycle, which does not stay upright unless its wheels turn. … We can stay upright only by going forward, moving, in a surge of charity".

Madeleine had a constantly outgoing heart and this led Madeleine to live her life among the poor and the workers, in an environment that seemed to have lost all connection with the Church and Christianity. Madeleine always had an open heart and allowed herself to be challenged by the cry of the poor. "She", said Pope Francis, "felt that the Living God of the Gospel should burn within us until we have taken his name to those who have not yet found it". Madeleine Delbrêl taught us with her experience, said the Bishop of Rome in the last part of his catechesis, "that by evangelizing one is evangelized: by evangelizing we are evangelized. Therefore, she used to say, echoing Saint Paul: 'woe to me if evangelizing, I do not evangelize myself' ". (GV) (Agenzia Fides, 8/11/2023)

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