Briefly Reviewed: July-August 2025
The Holiness of Ordinary People
By Madeleine Delbrêl
Publisher: Ignatius
Pages: 187
Price: $17.95
Review Author: Elizabeth Hanink
Before there was wider acknowledgement of the universal call to holiness through the promulgation of Lumen Gentium, Vatican II’s “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” various saintly men and women wrote of this imperative and lived lives that exemplified it. Most saintly men and women we know of were consecrated religious living with likeminded people under a specific rule. Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964), on the other hand, was a laywoman who lived pretty much like any other French man or woman of her time — going to work, visiting neighbors, caring for aging parents, making dinner, and getting up the next day to do more of the same. Yet, within the ordinariness of her life, she found deep spiritual nourishment.
Delbrêl was born in Mussidan to a nominally Catholic family. Her poor health, which lasted her entire life, required her to receive an unconventional education, and she was writing poetry by the time she was 12 and winning prizes by the time she was 18. At 17 she declared herself an atheist, and when a beloved friend entered the Dominican order, she wrote, “God is dead…. Long live death.” This adolescent angst did not last, and the example of her believing friends eventually led Delbrêl to return to the Church in her early 20s. It was then that she decided not to enter religious life but to work for God in the world. She qualified as a social worker and spent many years working for various government entities.
We should all be “missionaries without a boat,” she said, bringing the world to God wherever we are. With a few friends who also thought ordinary people could help the world by doing Christ’s work within it, she established a household in Ivry, a communist suburb of Paris, chosen because Delbrêl had heard that many poor and nonbelieving people lived there. Later known as the Charity of Jesus, the group of women living with Delbrêl took vows of celibacy, worked at jobs in the community, and opened their home to all who sought them out. It was a genuine family home, with neighbors and their children dropping in throughout the day. In time, Delbrêl became a popular speaker and writer, while continuing her work for the city. The Holiness of Ordinary People is a collection of her writings that combines random jottings with short excerpts from previously published works scattered among various journals. The title is taken from her own collected reflections, We, the Ordinary People of the Streets.
Living out the Gospel where you are, in whatever circumstances you find yourself, is the main theme of Delbrêl’s approach to sanctity. Taking care to make each situation a source of grace is key. Delbrêl writes of prayer while peeling vegetables for dinner, of moments of solitude while on the bus, and of finding Christ in each person we encounter. Oddly enough, she drew great inspiration from St. Charles de Foucauld, a French Catholic priest who removed himself to the Sahara Desert only to be martyred by Toureg tribesmen — hardly ordinary. A significant section of this short book is devoted to Delbrêl’s thoughts on this most extraordinary man, who also had no big plan except to witness to Christ by simply living among non-Christians.
Because she lived in the world, its troubles took much of Delbrêl’s attention, and she never forgot the pain and absurdity of life she had experienced as a youth. She had no use for Marxism but was able to work alongside its proponents for the good of the community even while lecturing and writing about its inherent flaws.
The liturgical life of the Church was the source of her strength — the Mass, of course, but also the Liturgy of the Hours, which was not a common practice for laypeople at the time. The power of the entire Church praying in unison was irresistible to her.
For us today, Delbrêl offers several ideas: the possibility of living a holy life surrounded by other ordinary people; practical suggestions on how to free ourselves from the constraints of family, work, and distractions; and assurance that “to save the world is not to give it happiness.” Alternating between a sympathetic acknowledgement of these limitations and pithy instructions that leave no wiggle room for our lazy, uncommitted selves, Delbrêl points to sources of inspiration on which we can draw for our own “ordinary lives.” She was nothing if not direct. “The Gospel,” she writes, “was not made for spirits in search of ideas. It was made for disciples who want to obey.” And elsewhere: “The Gospel isn’t a book of historical studies: it is the face of Christ for us to imitate, his commandments for us to take literally and put into action.” If we can’t get to daily Mass or the Liturgy of the Hours, she offers concrete suggestions on how to participate with the time we do have: “What action of daily life does not leave an easy place for the cry of our heart: ‘Kyrie eleison’? What vision of our days does not help us to bounce back in the ‘Gloria in excelsis’?” If you can’t, because of family demands, get to Morning Prayer, pray the Hour it is when you do have time. Something is better than nothing.
Although this book offers only a tiny fraction of what Delbrêl wrote, it is well worth reading and is a good introduction to someone the Church now calls venerable. Its comprehensive timeline is helpful and offers enough biographical information for the uninitiated to get a sense of Delbrêl’s time and place.
He Gave Us So Much: A Tribute to Benedict XVI
By Robert Cardinal Sarah
Publisher: Ignatius
Pages: 209
Price: $24.95
Review Author: Christopher Beiting
In 2020 Robert Cardinal Sarah generated something of a stir when he co-authored the book From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy, and the Crisis of the Catholic Church with then-Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (reviewed by yours truly in the Jul.-Aug. 2020 NOR). For those who may have wondered how close Cardinal Sarah and Pope Benedict actually were, along comes He Gave Us So Much. It is both an affectionate tribute by a grateful disciple to a former mentor and a memoir that highlights its subject’s best qualities. Sarah clearly misses Benedict, as do many rank-and-file Catholics.
Although tripartite in organization, He Gave Us So Much is really divided into two sections. The first is a series of reflections about Benedict and some of the key themes in his thought and pontificate. All these reflections were either written by Sarah specifically for this volume or gathered from his previously published works. The second section is a series of texts and homilies written by Benedict himself, all collected here for the first time, and all selected and arranged by Sarah, not just to give a sample of Benedict’s thought but also to provide impressions of Christ that serve as a “spiritual itinerary” for prayer and meditation on the life and message of Our Lord.
Though it is the work of two men, a number of common themes run through He Gave Us So Much, connecting it like threads in a garment. Much of Benedict’s personality is evident, both in his own writings and in Sarah’s reflections on him, and, contrary to those who viewed him as a Panzerkardinal, the impression this book gives is that of Benedict as a pastor — a pastor with a great deal of humility and shyness. Sarah shares some anecdotes from Benedict’s life and pontificate that few know, such as the great joy he took in making private visits to sick children in Roman hospitals, and how much he enjoyed bringing each of them little presents, like a latter-day Kris Kringle.
Sarah stresses the pastoral element of Benedict’s pontificate as a way of highlighting the importance of the pastoral element of the Catholic priesthood itself. This provides him the opportunity to examine the theme of “priest as father.” Sarah particularly expresses his gratitude for the spiritual fatherhood Benedict showed him. He also takes great care to glean from Benedict’s works material that presents an image of the Catholic priesthood that is, first and foremost, a spiritual one. In an age that often attempts to reduce the Catholic priesthood to a merely ministerial office, Benedict strove to remind us that a priest’s first “job” is a sacramental and liturgical one. Benedict always believed that to prioritize the ministerial over the sacramental is to diminish the stature of the priesthood. Indeed, he firmly placed the blame for the sexual-abuse crisis in the Church on a crisis of faith and holiness among her priests. He also firmly believed that the only way of moving beyond it would be for priests to recover a sense of holiness and to remember the sacred nature of what they are called to do.
Sarah stresses Benedict’s “hermeneutic of continuity” as the way to view many things in the Church, not just the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Biblical scholars, for example, ought not to study the Old Testament on its own but to view it through the lens of the New Testament. Liturgy, in particular, ought to be viewed in continuity with the past. Finally, like Sarah, Benedict was a proponent of greater silence in our lives and in our worship, stressing the need not just for clergy but for all people to recover a sense of the sacred in the world.
The greatest surprise of this work was when it transitioned from the portions by Sarah to those by Benedict. It took me a while to notice and remember that I was reading the work of two different men! There is scarcely better proof of the commonality of thought between the two than that. He Gave Us So Much will not go down in history as the greatest or deepest study of Pope Benedict XVI and his thought, but it is an approachable, readable, and deeply affectionate study, well worth the time of any reader who appreciates the work of the late pope or the good cardinal. At a time when publications that issue from the highest levels of the Church are often an occasion of dread for faithful Catholics, it is good to be reminded of a time when such was not the case, and to have hope that such a time will come again.
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