The Tears of a Cleric

The Diary of a Country Priest.

By Georges Bernanos.

In The Diary of a Country Priest, first published in France in 1936, Georges Bernanos presents the secret history of a year in the life of a nameless young priest who is serving in his first parish. Unaware that he will die of stomach cancer before the year is over, this priest decides to record in a diary the details of his “ordinary” life as pastor and then destroy the diary at the end of the year. His life, however, is anything but ordinary.

A true priest, he writes, is one who has accepted, once and for all, the “terrifying presence” of God in each instant of his life. Of course, there are “mediocre” priests all around him — for example, the retired bishop with literary pretensions who is “as scrupulously careful of his diction as of his hands,” and his own superior, the Dean of Blangermont, who humiliates him for his supposed “lack of charity” toward the shopkeepers who “rob us” but at least “respect us.”

The priest arrives in Ambricourt with a “soaring love” for his parish, which he wants to cherish as a “living cell” of the Mystical Body of Christ. But he soon experiences physical and then spiritual pain — a keen sense of God’s abandonment. He suffers a Christ-like agony as he discovers how far his people are from real Christianity and how powerless he seems to be to convert them.

When, after six months, he reflects on the confessions he has been hearing, he laments that the people skim the “surface of conscience” and disguise the “petrification” beneath. A little while after recording his disillusionment, he experiences a night of desolation, as though his soul were “bleeding to death.” He even fancies that the village has “nailed me up here on a cross and is at least watching me die.” As the story unfolds, the priest finds that he cannot keep anything in his stomach but bread and wine — the implication being that only his reliance on the Eucharist will enable him to survive in the spiritual desert of Ambricourt.

Yet he learns to respond to every “profound spiritual hurt,” even that of supposed atheists like the bitter Dr. Maxence Delbende, by internalizing the pain, making it his own, and loving it. This Christ-like response to the anguish brought on by others takes an immense toll on him. When Mademoiselle Chantal, who is full of hatred and fury, comes to see him, he senses that she is a “wounded creature,” and he opens himself to share her sadness, “to let it flood my soul, my heart.” He knows that this cruel young woman, the daughter of the Count and Countess, is slandering him across the parish, but instead of protecting himself, he ministers to her soul, which he sees as engaged in a final struggle against God. He confides in his diary that ever since the Fall, man cannot perceive anything “except in the form of agony.” Suffering, then, is the only way he can penetrate the depths of the human hearts around him.

Sometimes, though, as in the case of Mademoiselle Louise and his seminary friend Abbé Dupréty, he encounters the kind of suffering he cannot share because it is only “tortured vanity.” It soon becomes clear that what’s causing the priest’s pain is his parishioners’ lack of faith. At one point, his sacristan declares to him that although he and his family have always been churchgoers, he truly believes that physical death is the end of us. The priest writes that the sacristan’s words “froze me, and suddenly I had lost heart. I said I felt ill and left him.”

The priest hopes to find consolation in the village children while preparing them for Holy Communion, “as recommended by that saintly Pope, Pius X.” Instead he finds their innocence vitiated by the movies they’ve seen. The boys already see “love” as something to be ridiculed, and the girls have “hard” faces. Even his best pupil, Seraphita, when asked if she is eager to receive Communion, says “no.” Then she starts to entertain the other girls by flirting openly with the priest. After this, he has horrible nights with “evil dreams.”

One of the themes of Diary of a Country Priest is our Lord’s command, “When you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants'” (Lk. 17:10). The young priest does all he can to shepherd his flock, and he attributes his failures to his “inexplicable incompetence” and “superhuman clumsiness.” When the dark night of desolation descends on him and deprives him of inner peace in prayer, he believes himself unworthy of that grace and sees himself as the cause of the apparent divine absence: “I, myself, am the night,” he writes. He sleeps at the foot of his bed, prone on the floor, in a “gesture of complete acceptance” of the darkness that has befallen him.

On top of this, he is attacked, like the Curé of Ars, St. Jean Vianney, by the Devil. The priest hears his garden gate banging but knows, after the first time, that he will find it shut; and he keeps hearing his name called from outside but knows, after the first time, that he will find no one there. But the priest also receives supernatural light. At various points he knows that Chantal has a malicious letter in her purse and that the Countess has for many years refused to say, “Thy will be done.”

Another instance of this mysterious light occurs when the priest’s eyes meet those of Sulpice Mitonnet, a young man from the village, and he sees “the lie” in him, not a particular lie “but the will to lie.” Sulpice realizes he is unmasked, his lips quiver, and he leaves in silence. Also, when the priest first encounters the Count, he regards him as a man of “breeding and grace,” but later he perceives the local aristocrat, who is having an affair with Louise, the family governess, more accurately as shifty-eyed and “a little vulgar.”

One of the book’s crucial dialogues, which spans nearly an entire chapter, is that between the priest and the Countess on the eve of her death. Their discussion takes on a supernatural dimension, and the priest finds himself engaged in an all-out battle with the Devil for the woman’s soul. The priest wonders whether his mere presence has drawn sin out into the open, as if “the enemy scorned to hide himself from such a puny adversary, as though he came to defy me openly, laugh in my face.”

At the start, the Countess, who fell away from the faith years earlier, is full of hatred and despair, but at the end she exclaims with joy, “I’ve willfully sinned against hope, every day for eleven years. Yet now I hope again!” She had retreated into a cold, inhuman solitude after the sudden death of her eighteen-month-old son, and she hardened her heart against God and against her daughter, Chantal. The turning point in the dialogue occurs when she watches a single tear fall on the priest’s cheek.

In her letter to him that evening, she writes that just as she once died spiritually because of the loss of a child, so now “it seems to me that another child has brought me to life again.” When she surrenders, she wants it to be to him alone, but he replies that he is too insignificant: “It’s as though you were to put a gold coin in a pierced hand.” The phrase pierced hand implies that the priest is acting in the person of Christ. His description of himself as the Devil’s “puny adversary” is reminiscent of St. Paul’s observation that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27).

Diary of a Country Priest contains several unforgettable passages about damnation, one of them in this very dialogue with the Countess. The priest reflects somberly that one day, “in the eyes of eternal God,” unrepentant sinners “will be no more than a mass of perpetual slime over which the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” When rebuking the Countess for her hardness of heart, he warns her that by damning herself she would cut herself off from her son forever. It would then be impossible for her to enjoy her child in eternity because the damned have lost their “very essence,” the capacity to love. Even if those “charred stones” had once been our dearest ones, there would be “nothing more to be shared” with them.

In several dialogues, the priest discusses the hard-heartedness of the rich toward the poor. This is an important matter for Bernanos, who once wrote, “I humbly endure the shame of having so far only spattered with ink the face of injustice, whose incessant outrages are my zest for life.” One of the book’s dialogues that address this theme is between the young priest and the Curé of Torcy, a priest from a neighboring village. At first the young priest considers the Curé of Torcy to be rather worldly, but once the older cleric takes him into the “bare little room” where he prays — a room that represents his heart — he accepts the Curé of Torcy as his friend. He discovers that the Curé of Torcy “could never humiliate a soul” and that there is something “strangely, indefinably pure” in his eyes, which tend to get filled with tears at the memory of injustices.

A larger-than-life Flemish priest, the Curé of Torcy has been badly hurt in the past because of his love for the poor, but he still feels a righteous indignation at the injustice they have to endure. When Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum on social justice first came out, the Curé of Torcy explained it carefully to the poor miners of his district. As a result, the “pious peasants” there called him a socialist and drove him out of his parish. He tells the priest that he didn’t care about this “disgrace,” but the young man, seeing the Curé of Torcy’s “magnificent eyes full of tears,” realizes “how deep the wound must have been,” and suffers with him. He reveres the Curé of Torcy for his love for the poor and says he “could have kissed his hands” at that very moment. Those large hands shake as the old cleric remembers those “terrible struggles” that nearly cost him his reason and his faith. At the end of this dialogue, the Curé of Torcy tells his protégé, “I respect you…you’ve got grit.” The priest does not think he deserves that trust, but tells himself that he won’t betray it.

The Curé of Torcy warns the young priest not to believe that there is progress in society just because slavery has been abolished, for it is always being revived “under one name or another.” He warns him, too, against charlatans who merely reform the world on paper, and against those who want to abolish poverty, by which they mean to give a “death-sentence” to the “weak,” whom they see as an “insufferable burden.” In 1936 these last words had a special application to the Nazis.

In a witty passage, the Curé of Torcy reminds us that Christ was addressing Judas when He said, “The poor you have always with you” (Mt. 26:11). For Judas was “already interested in the pauper problem, like any millionaire.” While the rich take Christ’s words as a justification for selfishness, He is in fact reminding us that there will always be hard, grasping men around, like Judas.

As passionate as the Curé of Torcy is about justice, he often exudes sheer joy. He sees joy as “the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share,” and he insists that whatever is done against the Church is done against joy. It is the Church that confers on the poor the great dignity of being seen as “worth the blood of Our Lord.”

The only time the Curé of Torcy comes close to real sadness is when his friend Dr. Delbende commits suicide. At this juncture, the young priest finds his friend’s face full of suffering — yet it is a suffering that is accompanied by “a truly royal simplicity…an authority, a majesty.” His grief comes with a “supernatural strength,” comparable to “vast, calm waters” beneath a storm. The Curé of Torcy slowly recovers his joy when he gives the young priest a summary of the life and character of Delbende. Though an atheist, the doctor was a “just man” who realized that society would never be “cured of its injustice,” and that therefore there will always be a need for unrelenting warfare. Despite his poverty, the doctor once “paid off an old woman’s debt who was about to lose her land.” True, he had lost his faith a long time ago, the Curé of Torcy says, but he kept “looking for God among the poor,” where he thought he had “the best chance of ever finding Him.” The Curé of Torcy ends his tribute by praising Delbende’s courage: “A chest is a chest when you get to the trenches. And one less counts!”

The young priest’s dark night of the soul ends abruptly after he converts the Countess on her deathbed with a “single tear.” From this point on, he keeps shedding tears in the manner of Christ weeping over Jerusalem. After the Countess dies and Chantal slanders him by saying that he caused her mother’s heart attack, the Curé of Torcy comes for a visit. He urges his protégé to contemplate the life of Jesus and think of the day on which our Lord summoned him to be a priest. The young man remains silent for a while but then starts to weep because he has suddenly realized that he was summoned at Gethsemane and that his “eternal place” is the Agony in the Garden. He feels overwhelmed, for “who would dare take such an honor upon himself?”

The young priest weeps again when Olivier, the nephew of the Countess and an officer of the Foreign Legion, launches into a diatribe against the Church for letting the banks and the state get the upper hand in society. He speaks of the pretended “justice” of the governing class as being in reality a “sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery.” Olivier’s tirade stirs the priest “to the very depths of his heart.” Already weak from vomiting blood, he hides his face in his hands and then is deeply ashamed to find himself weeping “like a child” in the soldier’s presence. He fears the soldier will pity him, but instead he awakens the child in the soldier’s heart. “You’re a good lad,” Olivier tells him. “I wouldn’t like any priest but you around when I was dying.” Olivier then kisses him “as children do, on both cheeks.”

By now the priest’s sense of his unworthiness is so overwhelming that when he receives a vision of the Virgin Mary, his mind refuses the “boldness” of believing it to be real. In the vision, he catches the Virgin’s hand, the rough hand of a child of the poor, and glimpses in her face a grief so innocent that it is beyond his sharing. If God had not “veiled that virgin sorrow” when she was alive, he writes, fallen men would have risen together and “made for her a rampart of their mortal flesh.”

Right before he dies, the priest meets a nameless woman who loves and supports (by cleaning houses) Dufréty, an ex-priest and a vain man who doesn’t realize he is dying of tuberculosis. This poor woman is a not-so-distant reflection of the Virgin from the priest’s vision. Even though she says, “I ain’t got much religion,” her selfless devotion to Dufréty has a religious dimension. She has contracted his disease and is dying too, yet she feels joy in her new sense of solidarity with the poor across the world. This is just what the priest had experienced as a child when he read Gorky and lost his loneliness in a sense of solidarity with the Russian poor.

The priest weeps one last time when the doctor informs him that he will soon die of stomach cancer. On this occasion, his tears humiliate him so much that he wants to die of “self-loathing.” Yet it turns out that these are “tears of love” for the world he is leaving behind, a place full of “rivers of light and shadow bearing the dreams of the poor.” He had not realized before how much he loves humanity and the rest of creation.

In the last pages of his Diary, the priest finally reconciles himself to his childlike “awkwardness,” which at least won him the affection of the Curé of Torcy. For the first time he understands that what he considered his deficiency was in fact his virtue: “I have always known that I possessed the spirit of poverty. The spirit of childhood is much akin. No doubt they are really one and the same thing.”

Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), a layman, was truly inspired when he created this unique and unforgettable image of the holy Catholic priest. He has much to teach us about the clerical state, particularly that being a priest is not really about power, unless it is the power of self-sacrifice and dying for others.