Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time, the time between Candlemas and the 40 days of Lent, which begins next week on Ash Wednesday.
Charlotte and I are back in Stony Stratford, having spent two days in Paris. In these 11 days in Ordinary Time, my reflections each morning are drawing on the lives of 11 French saints and spiritual writers.
As this series of reflections began, I admitted I am often uncomfortable with many aspects of French spirituality, and that I need to broaden my reading in French spirituality. So, I have turned to 11 figures or writers you might not otherwise expect. They include men and women, Jews and Christians, immigrants and emigrants, monks and philosophers, Catholics and Protestants, and even a few Anglicans.
I have a medical appointment later today. But, before this day gets busy, I am taking some quiet time early this morning for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, A reflection on a French saint or writer in spirituality;
2, today’s Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
French saints and writers: 7, André and Magda Trocmé:
André Trocmé (1901-1971) and his wife Magda Trocmé (1901-1996), a French couple, have been designated Righteous Among the Nations. For 15 years, André was a pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a remote parish on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in south-central France.
His Christian pacifist positions were not well received by the French Protestant Church. In his preaching, he spoke out against discrimination as the Nazis were gaining power in Germany and he urged his Huguenot congregation to hide Jewish refugees from the Holocaust during World War II.
André Trocmé was born on 7 April 1901 in Saint-Quentin-en-Tourmont to a large and economically comfortable Protestant family. When he was 10, his mother Pauline (Schwerdtmenn) died after a car crash, and he was raised by his distant but demanding father, Paul Trocmé, a prosperous curtain manufacturer.
His upbringing was sheltered and strict, but he faced reality when World War I reached his hometown. Trocmé was only 13 as he watched soldiers struggle through the streets after battle. In 1916 he saw the trains taking dead soldiers to the crematoria. His family was split between his mother's German heritage and his half-French brothers, and Trocmé became aware of the notions of identity and loyalty.
His views on pacifism matured through lengthy conversations with a young soldier about the ideals of nonviolence. When the young soldier was killed in battle, Trocmé became more committed to the ideals of pacifism.
When their town was bombed in 1917 by the Germans, the Trocmé family were evacuated to southern Belgium as refugees. This gave André Trocmé an understanding of what it meant to be poor, in contrast to the wealthy life he had known.
After World War I, the Trocmé family moved to Paris, where André studied at the Faculty of Protestant Theology and at the Sorbonne. His convictions about nonviolence and Christian socialism deepened as he studied the Bible and met many like-minded students like himself, including Edouard Theis (1899-1984), who would later join Trocmé in Le Chambon.
Trocmé’s studies were interrupted by conscription in 1921-1923). He did not resist because he wanted to experience the placement in Morocco. When his conscription ended, Trocmé and several of his university colleagues joined the French branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.
He received a one-year bursary in 1925 for young French theologians from Union Theological Seminary, New York. There Trocmé was a tutor to the children of John D Rockefeller Jr to pay his expenses, and there too he met Magda Grilli, a Russian-Italian woman who was studying social work.
Magda Elisa Larissa Grilli di Cortona was born on 2 November 1901 in Florence. Her father was an Italian born into Florentine. Her Russian-born mother died shortly after giving birth, and for the rest of his wife Magda’s father was a distant figure.
A scholarship in 1925 enabled Magda to attended the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University. She and André met in New York, and they married in 1926.
André Trocmé’s first appointment as a pastor was in Maubeuge, a town in northern France that had been destroyed during World War I. Although French pastors at the time were prohibited from advocating conscientious objection, Trocmé supported men in his town who resisted conscription.
The Trocmé family stayed in Maubeuge for seven years. But by 1932 the dusty, polluted air was taking its toll on them. He searched for a new parish, but was turned down by the first two he applied to. The third, Le Chambon, was more open to pacifists and admired his faith.
André Trocmé and the Revd Edouard Theis founded the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in 1938, and it later became Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International. Its initial purpose was to prepare young local people to enter university. As war loomed on the horizon, it took in many young Jewish refugees who wished to continue their education.
When Nazi Germany overran France in 1940, André and Magda Trocmé became involved in a network organising the rescue of Jews fleeing Nazi deportations. When the Vichy regime was set up, Trocmé and neighbouring pastors area encouraged their congregations to shelter ‘the people of the Bible’ and for their cities to be a ‘city of refuge.’
Through Trocmé’s role as a catalyst, Le Chambon and surrounding villages became a haven in Nazi-occupied France. Trocmé and his church helped the town develop ways of resisting the Nazis, and they created a number of safe houses to hide Jews and other refugees.
The work was supported financially with contributions from Quakers, the Salvation Army, the Congregational Church in the US, the pacifist movement Fellowship of Reconciliation, Jewish and Christian groups, the French Protestant student organisation Cimade and Help to Children, based in Switzerland. This support helped to house and buy food for refugees. Many refugees escapes to Switzerland on an underground railroad network, many were placed in family homes and children were enrolled in schools using false names.
When the Vichy puppet regime demanded a list of all the Jews in the town, Trocmé refused to accept their definitions and told them: ‘These people came here for help and for shelter. I am their shepherd. A shepherd does not forsake his flock … I do not know what a Jew is. I know only human beings.’
Anti-Jewish Vichy security agents were sent to search in the town, but most of their efforts were without success. One arrest by the Gestapo led to the death of several young Jewish men in deportation camps. Daniel Trocmé (1910-1944), the director of their residence, La Maison des Roches, was André Trocmé’s second cousin. He refused to let the young adults put in his care to be sent away without him. He was arrested and later murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp.
When Georges Lamirand, a minister in the Vichy government, visited Le Chambon on 15 August 1942, Trocmé forcibly told him of his views and beliefs. Days later, Vichy gendarmes were sent to the town to locate ‘illegal’ aliens. In the face of rumours that Trocmé was about to be arrested, he urged his parishioners to ‘do the will of God, not of men.’ He quoted Deuteronomy 19: 2-10, which speaks of the entitlement of the persecuted to shelter, ‘so that the blood of an innocent person may not be shed in the land.’ The gendarmes were unsuccessful and left the town.
Trocmé was arrested in February 1943, along with Edouard Theis and the school headmaster Roger Darcissac, and they were sent to Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux, near Limoges. They were released after four weeks and pressed to sign a commitment to obey all government orders. Although Trocmé and Theis refused, they were released and went underground. Trocmé continued to run the rescue and sanctuary efforts with the help of many friends and supporters.
After World War II, André and Magda were co-secretaries of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in Europe. During the Algerian War, they set up the group Eirene in Morocco, with the aid of the Mennonites, to help French conscientious objectors. They advocated for Algerian independence, demonstrated against nuclear weapons and campaigned for drafting a world constitution.
André Trocmé spent his final years as a Reformed Church pastor in Geneva, and died there on 5 June 1971; Magda died in Paris on 10 October 1996. They are buried together in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
Months before he died, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem, recognised André Trocmé as Righteous among the Nations. His cousin Daniel Trocmé was recognised in March 1944, and Magda was recognised in July 1986.
The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon have become a symbol of the rescue of Jews in France during World War II. Yad Vashem honoured the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the neighbouring communities with an engraved stele in the memorial park. It was the second time Yad Vashem honoured a whole community, the first time being the Dutch village of Nieuwlande in 1988.
Muriel Rosenberg, in her book Mais combien étaient-ils? (2021), estimates that between 1940 and 1945, at least 2,000 Jewish refugees, including many children, were saved by the small village of Le Chambon and the communities on the surrounding plateau because the people resisted the demands of the Vichy and Nazi police and military.
Their contemporaries included the Revd Jacques Martin (1906-2001), a French pastor, pacifist and conscientious objector whose involvement in the Resistance and the protection of Jews brought him recognition from Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Baron Roland de Pury (1907-1979), a Swiss Protestant theologian, pastor and writer who lived in France during World War II, helped Jewish refugees to escape to Switzerland, and was arrested by the Gestapo. He too was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
The French theologian Madeleine Barot (1909-1995) was active in the Resistance, in human rights movement, and the early work of the World Council of Churches. She too was given the status of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Marie Elmes (1908-2002) from Cork, who worked with American Friends Service Committee in Perpignan during world War II, saved the lives of 200 Jewish children in Vichy France, hiding them in the boot of her car. She is the first Irish person honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Mark 7: 31-37 (NRSVA):
31 Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32 They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34 Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ 35 And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36 Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37 They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’
Today’s Prayers (Friday 9 February 2024):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Gender Justice in Christ.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by Ellen McMibanga, Zambia Anglican Council Outreach Programme.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (9 February 2024) invites us to pray in these words:
Help us O Lord to ensure that we treat everyone we encounter with respect and love.
The Collect:
Almighty God,
you have created the heavens and the earth
and made us in your own image:
teach us to discern your hand in all your works
and your likeness in all your children;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who with you and the Holy Spirit reigns supreme over all things,
now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
God our creator,
by your gift
the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise,
and the bread of life at the heart of your Church:
may we who have been nourished at your table on earth
be transformed by the glory of the Saviour’s cross
and enjoy the delights of eternity;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Almighty God,
give us reverence for all creation
and respect for every person,
that we may mirror your likeness
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflection (Simon Weil, 1909-1943)
Continued Tomorrow (Thomas Merton, 1915-1968)
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
