By Fr Patrick O’Donohue, FSSP
Have you ever doubted God’s presence with you in times of trouble? When you ponder the increasingly secularised society surrounding you are you ever tempted to wonder, ‘Why doesn’t God intervene?’ Georges Bernanos’ 1936 novel, The Diary of a Country Priest tracks the struggle of a nameless young cleric in poor health while serving in a rural French parish where people have abandoned the faith. The parish is filled with troubled souls. It is a grim and joyless place, peppered with unloving and seemingly unlovable characters. Even the brats in his catechism class taunt him with an irreverence that is beyond their age: “Children are children—but, oh, why should these little girls be so full of enmity?” The malice and gossiping of the villagers increase as the priest’s stomach cancer grows worse. This bleak plot is accentuated even more starkly in the crisp black and white film version made in 1951. What the priest confides in his diary is like an echo of the Reproaches in Holy Week which express the remonstrance of Christ with His people: “My people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me!”
Meanwhile his brother priests’ preoccupation with tackling social justice problems is to the detriment of their priestly mission. They are not interested in his plans for renewal and prefer instead to address in a “masterly fashion” the problem of village banks and co-operative farming: “Not one of those men would ever suppose that the Church could be in danger, no matter for what reason…. Money matters seem to have a strange fascination for them.” Since the main character’s only care is for souls, it leaves him feeling useless: “Somehow I can never quite believe that God will really employ me—to the utmost: make complete use of me as He does of the others.”
This creeping secularisation within the Church leads to a despondency that pervades his life and that of his superiors: “a shameful form of despair in some way like the fermentation of a Christianity in decay… Our superiors are no longer official optimists. Those who still profess the rule of hope, teach optimism only by force of habit, without believing in what they say.” Nevertheless, the young priest is faithful in the face of his flock’s faithlessness and in the face of a friend from seminary abandoning his vocation and the promises he made on his ordination day.
Then at the end of the novel, when the priest is on his deathbed, he makes the sudden realisation, through what must be a divine illumination, that “Grace is … everywhere.” God has all along been at his side and has operated through his priesthood which seemed so unimpressive and insignificant in worldly eyes. This casts the entirety of the diary in a new light. Even though he had felt “that my life, all the sap of my life will flow to waste in sand”, it is now like a revelation that his sacrifices were not in vain. All along they had been accepted by God and grafted into the mysterious redemptive suffering of the Tree of Life, and in this way, they became channels of grace into the world. Nothing was wasted despite the outward futility and obscurity of his pastoral efforts and prayers. In this final moment of light, he is made to understand that God was not indifferent, for even a single moment, to his plight or his diary’s cri de cœur. Though He seemed absent, God’s divine grace never ceased operating in the priest’s soul.
What was the country priest’s greatest fault? It was his lack of trust in God accomplishing His holy will in the face of hopelessness and apparent human failure, just as Our Lord saved the world in the apparent defeat of the Cross. 3pm on Good Friday looked like an unmitigated disaster on the surface, but it was at that precise moment that He triumphed over sin and death. The world’s metrics of success are not God’s. Christ Crucified turned the horror of the Cross inside out and made it the way to eternal life. All this invites the reader to look at the mundane complications of life from the perspective of eternity. The slings and arrows which the priest character endured had been a hidden source of power and light, not in and of themselves, but through the mystery of the Cross which God has ordained for those who love Him. This is the marvel of the grace hidden behind the trials and tribulations of life. A salutary thought for our times.
Article first published in Dowry No53, Spring 2022