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Index
Short
biography
Childhood
Adolescence
Conversion
Seminarian
Curate
Foundation
Like
a tree
Apostolic
project
A
Family grows
Contemplative
in action
Spiritual
Guide
Spiritual
Testament
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A
Family Growing in Unity and Diversity
One
tree, one sap, many branches, the same Founder, the same spirit,
different
ministries and vocations.
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Island and
Chapel of Our Lady of All Graces, Martillac, France
Here Fr.
Noailles drew up the Rules and Statuts of the Association
of the
Holy Family.
Portrait of
Fr. Noailles
by de Galard,
a painter of Bordeaux
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A Single Family
revealing
the Church-as-Family
Pierre
Bienvenu Noailles dreamed of a new society. Faithful to his vision,
he laid the foundations of his project and realised it, not in the
manner of a politician but rather like a mystic. It was the work of a
lifetime. He opened up new ways, skilfully using the loopholes of
civil and church law which left little place for new types of
religious foundations.
Canon
law separated the different forms of religious life in order to
distinguish more easily between them. Fr. Noailles, on the contrary,
envisaged a spiritual family that would transcend these separations
by offering the Church and the world a witness of unity while
respecting the diversity of vocations and commitments.
His
would be a flexible Family, in which laity, priests, religious
women, would know they were called to holiness by virtue of their
baptism, a Family where all are called to proclaim the gospel, each
according to his or her state in life, mutually enriching one another
through their differences, inspired by the Holy Family where Jesus,
the perfect priest and the first person consecrated by the Father
receives all from Mary and Joseph; where Mary and Joseph live their
vocation as a married couple in mutual love.
The
very structures of what Fr. Noailles was trying to build were
'charismatic' and reveal, quite apart from the witness of its
members, this aspect of the "Church-as-Family" Constitutions
article 3.
This
vision was revolutionary for his time. Pierre Bienvenu Noailles
worked all his life to further it, drawing up rules for each branch
and for the Association as a whole, going to Rome to present them to
Popes Gregory XVl and Pius lX.
He
experienced failure. Some branches of the tree died. The priestly
branch, founded in 1822 after several attempts, did not develop as he
hoped, the priests remaining only as Associates. Even though he was
affected by schisms and departures they never made him deviate from
his initial vision.
The
world of his day had to be given new life and its wounds healed.
Whereas a few centuries previously, St. Sergio of Radonège (a
14th centure monk and patron of Russia) proposed "conquering the
divisions in the world by the contemplation of the Blessed
Trinity", Fr. Noailles presented the contemplation of the Holy
Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the "lovely image of the
Trinity", as a source of unity for his spiritual family, the
church and the world. This contemplation, far from being passive, led
him to act to alleviate suffering wherever he saw it so that it could
be said of this man what was said of Jesus himself:
"He
went about doing good..." (Acts
10, 38) |
