Black fabric sets off diamonds. Similarly, dark eras display the radiant sanctity of extraordinary witnesses: Individuals who—put to horrific test—shine with heroic goodness.
Among those witnesses—his cause for official sainthood under way—is one born on January 29, 1900, in Barentin, a drab little French factory town in Normandy between Le Havre and Rouen. Lucien Bunel was the fourth (third living) child of a textile mill “spinner.” Alfred Bunel was away fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and passed part of Sunday, at the pitiless demand of his employer, cleaning the mill. Yet he could barely feed his family.
Many Norman workers had lost all faith, but Alfred and his tiny, strong-minded wife, Pauline, clung tenaciously to theirs. When a doctor said year-old Lucien was dying, the couple—she five months pregnant—pushed his baby carriage seven miles under heavy rain, saying their rosaries, to the shrine of St. Gerard. Soaked and exhausted, but imperious in personality, Pauline cried aloud to God just to leave the child until he was twenty.
Timidly they lifted the carriage blanket. The dying baby gave them an enormous smile—completely healed.
After that it did not come as a great shock to the Bunels that this child was different. From his earliest years, he wanted to be a priest. When Pauline ordered a beggar “Knock at the doors of the rich …” Lucien ran to fetch food for the old man, who smiled and said, “I knew you would help me,” refused the offering, and vanished according to several astonished nonfamily witnesses.
Given a puppet—any toy a rare event—the child saw a sibling’s yearning eyes and immediately handed it to her. Madeleine Bunel laughed years later that her brother’s amazing generosity did not preclude his taking it back any time she misbehaved.
At age twelve each of two older brothers was at work in the factories. Lucien at twelve asked to enter the junior seminary. Although his paternal grandfather’s two brothers had been priests, his devout parents said “no”: they could feed seven children only by watering each day’s soup and milk while the father drank only water, never coffee or wine. To further deprive six to educate one would be unjust.
Lucien accepted the decision without a murmur. But his appetite failed and he seemed to dwindle away. Eventually the local priest, recognizing an exceptional soul, helped his parents make the impossible possible.
But not without painful humiliations for Lucien. To earn money toward the seminary he retrieved tennis balls for rich kids, who—laughing—threw his pay on the ground.
To spare his reluctant father when the local priest asked the Bunels to seek scholarship help from the mill owner, the twelve-year-old went himself. The beautifully dressed wife and daughter listened with cold politeness, then each gave the boy twenty centimes. He ran home and, throwing the insulting coins on the floor, sobbed in his mother’s arms.
His working-class neighborhood was no phalanx behind him either. The general attitude: A priest’s life was “an escape from the factory to ease.” Ironically, the spinner’s son—with “a heart that beat for others”—would labor apostolically to the last drop, resting, eating, and possessing less (except books) than any manual laborer.
Championing every underdog all his life, his fights against injustice led early to clashes with authority. At the seminary, for instance, as spokesman for his peers, Bunel was ordered in no uncertain terms to deliver birthday greetings to a teacher the students had decided deserved none. Suspicious, the rector made Lucien read the little speech to him first. It began, “Having been ordered to offer you birthday greetings . ..” During his military service, the seminarian—put in charge of food service—took on thieves and swindlers in order to see that the allotted moneys actually fed the men. This led to trouble with certain officers but ordinary soldiers—eating as never before—loved Bunel.
That characteristic ardor for justice caused his rector to include, among more glowing terms in Bunel’s student evaluation, “hard on himself and hard on others.” And in fact the real battle of Lucien Bunel’s life would be fought against his own strong-willed, driving nature, whose very zeal and ardent love for God and man would lead him to excesses, including impulsive candor.
The struggle was worsened by two family traits. The humor of the Bunels, who were great laughers and pranksters—Lucien even staged his own assassination with enormous glee during the Nazi occupation—sometimes took a mocking or caustic bent that was not just irreverent toward authority, but that hurt individuals. His mother’s tendency to imperviousness sometimes popped out, triggered especially by those whose wealth entitled them, they believed, to be overbearing.
Determined to become a saint like fellow-Norman Therese of Lisieux (canonized two months before his July 11, 1925, ordination), Bunel writes: “I feel a need for the religious life, the life of obedience, of being crushed, annihilated, a life of obscurity that would obliterate my immense pride and subdue my terrible spirit of independence.” Longing to become a Trappist, he still obeyed his bishop’s order to join the staff of a Catholic boys’ school in Le Havre. And whatever his “spirit of independence” or “pride” (two intimates judged him humble), Bunel remained obedient year after year as the bishop refused to release him to a religious order.
At Le Havre the five hundred students laughed at first sight of young Abbe Bunel in his rude peasant shoes and unfashionable spectacles. But after his students got to know him, a former pupil recalled, “they loved him and would follow him anywhere.”
This witness adds that Bunel “was—in the positive sense of the word—the most seductive person I ever knew.” Fascinated with this thin-as-a-rail adult—who had such engaging ways with even the most obdurate, and whom they suspected never sat down in study hall from a spirit of mortification—several climbed to an attic to spy into Bunel’s tiny icebox of a room. In awe they watched him kneel, arms crossed, a long time in prayer; then rise and begin to read—standing. They could not see the hairshirt neither did they know of the scourgings he gave himself out of his conviction that it is prayer and sacrifice that draw souls to God.
Yet this ascetic contemplative charged buoyantly through each day with a mischievous proclivity to handing boys bogus detention slips—”always with a perfectly straight face,” one laughs. The prankster had, boys recalled later, “the heart of a mother”—yet he could also push too hard: When he told one boy who thought he had a vocation to give up football for prayer, the boy gave up the vocation instead.
As a seminarian Bunel had created summer programs for poor kids. In Le Havre he also reached beyond the school to this group. To enlarge the world of Boy Scouts from poor families, he cajoled stationmasters into train trips and impetuously sold his only possession, his precious books—forgetting some were borrowed!—to finance a camp-out in England. A scout leader marveled that Abbe Bunel never tried for any effect but spoke to the boys “in low tones with the utmost simplicity” on topics like Jesus in the tabernacle. If they “listened ravished, literally enchanted” it was because the man before them, brimming over with God, was “all fire and love,” as a fellow teacher once put it. The Protestant English scouts and their adult leaders felt this too, asking to assemble each evening for the French Catholic priest’s blessing.
In addition to his enormous success with the young, Abbe Bunel was in demand for retreats by cloistered Carmelites who know a true mystic when they see one. He also gave three-day missions that left pastors marveling. For these, he refused stipends, even though he was sending part of his small teacher’s wage to his unemployed father.
When finally in 1931, after seven years in Le Havre, Abbe Bunel was permitted to enter religion, God led him to the Carmelite Fathers, where his thirst for contemplation could coexist with his extraordinary apostolic gifts. To his amazement—Carmel is not a teaching order—the renamed Pere Jacques of Jesus found himself early in 1934 at Avon (by Fontainebleau) opening a boys’ school. He had confided to a sibling, “you don’t know what it cost to give up children of my own.” Now, as an innovative and successful headmaster, his often-breathless assistant Pere Philippe (who would become Jacques’s first biographer) recalls a larger-than-life figure who proved a real father while daily producing the work of three. Yet between terms he sank gratefully into the silence of the Carmel next door.
“Do you think Pere Jacques will be canonized one day?” a student was overheard asking. “Not him! Never!” came a second boy’s instant reply. If most were under the spell of this virile-father-and-tender-mother-in-one, a handful who had felt the sting of his caustic humor disliked Pere Jacques deeply. More typical is the appraisal of a boy the headmaster expelled. He says Pere Jacques’s look “radiated goodness, sweetness, joy, nobility, and the consuming ardor of an apostle.”
At the height of the school’s success, Germany invaded France. Avon’s Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars, and an incensed Pere Jacques told his pupils to counter this shameful thing by raising their berets in respect. Daringly—and imprudently—he hid Jews, Saint-Sulpice seminarians facing work-deportation, and Resistance fugitives. To a critic he replied, “If by chance I were shot, I would be leaving my pupils an example worth more to them than all the instruction I could give.”
On January 15, 1944, the Gestapo swept in. Under torture a former pupil betrayed three Jewish students. As Pere Jacques and the three boys (a Jewish kitchen worker was successfully hidden) were hustled away, he called as ebulliently as ever to the assembled children “Au revoir, les enfants!”
“Au revoir, Pere Jacques” students and teachers roared back, bursting into spontaneous applause.
Korff, the Gestapo head, soon understood. He would personally murder and/or torture many religious, but he never laid a hand on Pere Jacques, who told him “I know only one law, that of the Gospel and charity. Shoot me instead of the fathers of families. I’m not afraid of dying. Quite the contrary. You don’t frighten me and death was not created to frighten me.”
“What a man. His only fault is not being a Nazi!” Korff marveled to Pere Philippe.
Pere Jacques spoke to Pere Philippe too: “Stop trying to get me out; you have no idea how priests are needed in these places!” Sent with jailmates to a holding camp at Compiegne where priests had separate quarters, he insisted “My place is among my comrades.” Always serving others, the brown- robed Carmelite was soon the camp’s most popular and most loved person, his admirers including four hundred communists. When he said Mass, hundreds came. Standing on a piano stool, he also taught catechism—he had that permission—but his subjects ranging from the importance of purity to the role of government.
When prisoners overflowed the hall, pressing against its open windows to hear him, the alarmed camp commander sent guards to jerk the priest off his stool. Pere Jacques was instantly reclassified “nacht and nebel,” the lowest-class prisoner (who, considered dead, received neither mail nor food parcels) and was sent with sixty-three prisoners to Neue-Breme, a camp whose only purpose was to torture its inmates until death. He said he was glad: “There, men have even more need of help.”
Three weeks later seven of the sixty-three were alive. Pere Jacques, who once told a fellow prisoner matter-of-factly “my vocation is suffering,” not only survived torture but he gained a mysterious ascendancy over an infamous guard named Hornetz.
Although the Carmelite was beaten for asking if he could care for the sick, Hornetz ended up helping him to do so. Inmates gaped to see FlOrnetz trotting doglike as he carried supplies for Pere Jacques. At the cost to Pere Jacques of more beatings and the risk of death (he openly stole medicines from the Nazis’ private pharmacy), the hospital was transformed. At this time a prisoner recalls the magnetic attraction of the priest’s “beautiful face, transfigured by .. . inner life.” Given word that he was to be transferred to a work camp—a prisoner’s only hope to live—Pere Jacques astounded all by begging to stay with his sick.
Refused, Bunel experienced a dark night of faith. Enroute to Mauthausen (where two hundred thousand died), he asked St. Therese to obtain some sign of God’s providence. In a place where three-quarters of the priests were massacred on arrival, it came at once. Polish prisoners there had heard of this extra¬ ordinary priest. They got him transferred from quarry work— certain death—to a satellite-camp munitions factory.
Pere Jacques accepted this reprieve not to save his life but to parcel it out more fully for others: Twice daily he risked his life in forbidden territory visiting the sick. One hospital survivor recalls “a smile from heaven” that rekindled the “flame of life.” During work time, hiding open books while he inspected (and sabotaged) arms, Bunel taught his young coworkers, keeping their hope and intellects alive. Daily he heard confessions and, when possible, said clandestine Masses—both offenses punishable by death.
One well-born French officer became suicidal. Tender with the disadvantaged, Pere Jacques gave him such a talking to that depression fled. But when, witnessing an atrocity, someone muttered bitterly “At least there’ll be no SS in Heaven,” Pere Jacques astounded him by replying dispassionately, “Possibly they are sick and not responsible.”
Grateful prisoners, like the Pole who dubbed Pere Jacques “Christ among us,” gave him extra food. But he defeated these efforts by giving everything to others—including much of his own starvation rations. A friend resorted to crumbling the priest’s slice of bread in liquid so he could not break off part to give away. But no ruse could prevent Pere Jacques from slowly starving himself that others might live. Nor could friends prevent Pere Jacques’ ripping off the coat procured him and handing it to a shivering inmate.
His enormous stamina—honed by years of ascetic self-denial—collapsed as the Germans fled American forces, who, ironically, did not rush help to prisoners written off as “communists. “Perhaps God wills we give our lives,” Pere Jacques had said easily to another priest—who quailed. Unanimously named head of the French-prisoners interim-governing committee, he was running a high fever, desperately ill with bronchial pneumonia, yet worked eighteen-hour days to save the hundreds who were dying daily, mainly from starvation.
Finally transferred to a hospital in Linz, Austria, he refused to accept stretcher space on a plane transporting officers to his beloved France—because he judged it wrong to accept a privilege denied ordinary prisoners. Silently, peacefully, he died in the alien land on June 2, 1945.
A friend has remarked of Pere Jacques that in the camps— where he achieved the total self-immolation and identification with the Passion of Christ that he had thirsted for all his life— this man “whose vocation was hero” finally “found a cloister of his own dimensions.”
But Pere Jacques himself put it more simply. In a 1944 letter to his brother Rene he wrote that if he were shot, Rene should rejoice “because I will have achieved my ideal: to give my life for all those who suffer.”