By Fr Armand de Malleray, FSSP, Head of Tintinology at St Alban House, Bedford
Fictional Belgian reporter Tintin is possibly the most significant comic strip character due to his seminal influence over that pictorial genre worldwide, through the intrinsic genius of its author Georges Prosper Remi (1907–1983) better known as Hergé. It was a Belgian Catholic priest and journalist, Fr Norbert Wallez (1882–1952) who “discovered” young Hergé. As editor of the Belgian daily newspaper The Twentieth Century (in French, Le Vingtième Siècle) between 1924 and 1933, Father Wallez commissioned Hergé his first comic strips for his daily’s youth supplement The Little Twentieth (in French Le Petit Vingtième). Thus in 1928 Hergé illustrated Flup, Nénesse, Poussette and Piglet, a childish adventure story written by a colleague. It looks like a draft for Tintin in the Congo, since the children characters end up in the Belgian colony where a white missionary priest visits them after they have escaped cannibals. In this instance the priest is depicted as performing unmistakably Catholic ministry, blessing the children who throw themselves into his fatherly arms, and the natives in awe who kiss the hem of his cassock. The priest stays on at the village for a few days, evangelising the inhabitants. The text reads, describing the feelings of the priest: “His eyes shining with happiness.”
A few months after that first collaboration, Father Wallez asked Hergé to design his own character, “with a dog companion, of which children are fond.” Tintin was created as the mascot reporter for the youth publication, with his pet companion Snowy, the most famous Fox Terrier in the world. However, given the Catholic background of Hergé in then staunchly Catholic Belgium, and the mentor figure of Father Wallez (who even matchmade Hergé’s marriage to Germaine Kieckens, his own secretary at the newspaper), clerics are strikingly absent from the Tintin comics. The only one is a missionary priest in Tintin in the Congo, the second episode of the series out of twenty-four albums. The unnamed priest, a bearded European missionary wearing a long white cassock, saves Tintin’s life twice. Despite his clerical garb, the priest is portrayed as an action man more than as theologian, building, hunting, civilising without any explicit Catholic or even religious design. When Tintin steps in at the mission school for a sick religious teacher, it is geography that he teaches, not catechism.
Again two Catholic priests, Abbés Courtois and Pihan involved in youth publications, asked Hergé to create a comic series with more “normal” characters, that is, with children depicted as part of a family, unlike parentless Tintin. Thus appeared the shorter series of The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko, the two children of Mr and Mrs Legrand and their pet chimpanzee. It included only five albums published between 1951 and 1957. Priests are no more conspicuous in that latter series. In parallel with the White Father missionary in Tintin in the Congo, a polar missionary is given a cameo appearance in Destination New York, when he saves Jo and Zette after their crash-landing near the North Pole. The priest is depicted wearing a long black cassock underneath his thick fur jacket. Instead of a biretta his head is covered by a high black fur bonnet similar to those worn by Russian Cossacks. He is addressed as Père Francœur (which translates in English as Father Fairheart). In later versions of the album, though, the Catholic mission has become a scientific outpost, Father Fairheart is renamed Professor Nielsen, and a radio antenna has replaced the cross on the top of the small mission chapel. Like those of the African missionary in Tintin in Congo, the days of the polar priest are numbered if revisionist censors have their way.
Thus evaporates the already scarce priestly presence in Hergé’s pictorial world, a trend which he might not have deplored, since he had left his devout wife for her colleague Fanny Vlamynck, a colourist at his Studio Hergé, and had quietly distanced himself from Catholicism, feeling drawn to Buddhism, a popular shift in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed the religion and its clerics granted by far the broadest exposure across all of Tintin’s adventures is Buddhism, depicted with warm appreciation in Tintin in Tibet released in 1960. By the time the final album Tintin and the Picaros was published in 1976, the absence of manifest clerical figures might have been a blessing in disguise. It might have spared Tintin enthusiasts the consternation of seeing a Liberation Theology padre lead the coup against right-wing General Tapioca, “all in the best interests of the people.” Hergé would have reached the opposite end of the political spectrum then, since his earlier mentor Fr Norbert Wallez had been imprisoned under the charge of collaboration with the German occupier during WWII. Put under investigation himself after the war, Hergé had felt deeply wounded by such suspicion. Suffering from depression, he seriously contemplated relocating to Argentina, sharing the fascination for Amerindian cultures of his friend Father Gall, a Cistercian monk at Scourmont Abbey. When the latter (eccentric and somehow unbalanced) was devastated by the death of his pet goat, on 12th January 1983 Hergé wrote a letter to him expressing sympathy while pointing to the love of God as the raison d’être of Christians and of monks.
Was that letter the testament of Tintin’s father? Within seven weeks, Hergé had died of leukaemia. Let us hope that the former boy scout and playful Catholic who gave joy to millions of readers of all ages through lively characters such as Tintin, Snowy, Thomson and Thompson, and Captain Haddock, now rests in the peace of the divine Author. The soul of Hergé may have yet another priest as intercessor in the person of Dom Pierre-Célestin, a Benedictine monk at Saint Andrew’s Abbey in Bruges, Belgium. A former Premier of the Republic of China then known as Lou Tseng-tsiang (spelled Lu Zhengxiang in English), he had converted and ended his life as a Catholic monk. Tintinologues know that in The Blue Lotus, the mysterious initials L.T.T. signing an article in the Shanghai News (erroneously altered into L.G.T. in the English version) are Hergé’s hint at his convert friend Lou Tseng-tsiang (1871-1949).
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Catholicism was symbolically woven into Lord of the Rings; that of Hergé also implicitly defines the behaviour of his characters, especially Tintin, a brave, courteous, chaste, fair, and generous young man. We don’t see Tintin kneel down in churches and yet, it is in one such place that he discovers the lost treasure, thanks to his Catholic learning. In Red Rackham’s Treasure, Tintin inspects the crypt under Marlinspike Hall and, pointing at a statue in a niche, comments to Captain Haddock: “Look, that’s St. John the Evangelist. We must be in an old chapel… He is always depicted with an eagle… And he’s called the Eagle of Patmos, after the island where he wrote his Revelation.” This is the most explicit and detailed Catholic exposition in Hergé’s work. In this context, it seems very likely that the phrasing of the Unicorn cypher “For tis from the Light that Light will dawn. And then shines forth the Eagle’s cross” is inspired from St John’s Prologue “and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness”, which Hergé would have heard at the end of every Mass until the late 1960s.
St. John the Apostle is very much a priest, even a bishop and, in this album, he is also the guardian of the riches buried in the underground church supporting Marlinspike Hall. In this happy mansion Tintin, Haddock and Calculus will come and live in blessed companionship: a fitting symbol for the discreet influence of priests supporting Hergé’s Catholic faith.
Article first published in Dowry No63, Autumn 2024