The Soul of the Apostolate by Chautard - Part One (cont.)

4. IGNORANCE AND NEGLECT OF THIS INTERIOR LIFE

St. Gregory the Great

- St. Gregory the Great, who was as skillful an administrator and as zealous as an apostle as he was great in contemplation  sums up in two words: Secum vivebat - To live with oneself, within oneself; to desire self-control, and not allow oneself to be dominated by exterior things...to make the will conform, without ceasing, with the will of God.
- [The] frenzy for exterior life finally succeeds in gaining over us an attraction which we can no longer resist. Is there any reason to be surprised, then, that the interior life is neglected? " Neglected" is putting it mildly. It is often enough despised and turned to ridicule by the very people who ought to be the first to appreciate its advantages and its necessity.
- Priests are so anxious to avoid the effort required to live an interior life that they reach the point of overlooking the value of living with Christ...everything, in the plan of Redemption, is based on the Eucharistic life as much as it is upon the rock of Peter.

Empty

- True, the Church has not yet become for them a Protestant chapel; the Tabernacle is not empty yet. But in their eyes, the Eucharistic life can hardly be adapted to the needs of modern civilization...The interior life, which is a necessary consequence of the Eucharistic life, has had its day.
For people steeped in these theories, and their number is legion, Holy Communion has lost the true meaning which the early Christians were able to see in it. They believe in the Eucharist, yes; but they no longer see in it something absolutely necessary.
(Wow...bear in mind this was written 100 years ago. What would he say today now that the Tabernacles have been hidden? Now that the candles are no longer even kept lit next to the hidden Tabernacles? Now that people not only receive Our Lord dressed immodestly and with little to no reverence but those same people also administer Him!)
- A number of the faithful, and even of priests and religious, follow this cult of action to the point of making it a kind of dogma which inspires their attitude and all their actions, and leads them to throw themselves without restraint into a life of extroversion.
(Some priests now spend more time, as it would seem, on social media and in the public eye than perhaps interiorly. This is certainly not a hard and fast, definitive identification of any specific priests as only God knows this, but one cannot doubt it is a sweeping problem on some scale)

- [For] the man of exterior works, when he has to consider the interior life, he disdains, or, rather, detests it all the more because it has the only remedy to his morbid state...What Our Lord is looking for, above all, is adorers in the spirit and in truth. But these activistic heretics, for their part, imagine that they are giving greater glory to God in aiming above all at external results...these activists will not be content merely to treat as slackers and visionaries those who give themselves, in the cloister, to prayer and penance with an ardor for souls equal to that of the most tireless missionary.
(Today, overall religious vocations are down DRASTICALLY trending toward extinction; and many of the remaining religious are so secularized they don't wear habits/cassocks, they dress in street clothes and spend little to no time cloistered)

5. REPLY TO A FIRST OBJECTION: IS THE INTERIOR LIFE LAZY?
-The life of prayer is a source of activity beyond compare
- Dom Sebastian Wyart said there are three kinds of works:

Laborer, Intellect, & Monk

1. Almost exclusively physical work of those who live by manual labor, by a craft, or in the army...this kind of work is the easiest of the three.
2. Intellectual toil of the scholar, the thinker, in his often arduous pursuit of truth; that of the writer, the professor, the diplomat, the financier, the engineer...this labor in itself is, he said, far more difficult than the first kind.
3. The labor of interior life...when it is taken seriously it is by far the most exacting. But at the same time, it is this kind that offers us the most satisfaction here on earth. It is likewise the most important...the first two types of labor, which lead to wealth and fame, but who, when it comes to the effort to acquire virtue, are totally deficient in ambition, energy or courage.
- A man who is determined to acquire an interior life must take, for his ideal, unremitting domination of self and complete control over his environment  in order to act in all things solely for the glory of God...to achieve this result, what an effort it will cost him! ...In all things, and always, he endeavors to keep his course dead ahead, in the direction of God's good pleasure.
- Neither the troubles of his life, nor the storms aroused by passion, will succeed in turning him aside from the line of conduct, he has laid down for himself. But on the other hand, if he does weaken for a moment, he pulls himself together at once, and pressed forward with even more determination than before.

- To withdraw for three days from a life which, though full of things to be done, is easy, and to live on the supernatural plane, making the supernatural sink into every detail of our existence during this retreat; to compel one's mind to see everything, during this time, by the light of faith alone, and one's heart to forget everything in order to seek Christ alone, and His life...if only three days of such occupation may seem already so exhausting, what does nature think of the idea of an entire life to be gradually made subject to the rule of the interior life?
- By constant vigilance, self-denial, and mortification, we have to tear away from thoughts of earth a heart made heavy with all the weight of a corrupted nature, gravi corde (Psalm 4)...We have to resist the allurement of pleasures that are both sensible and present, for the hope of a spiritual happiness which we shall only loose from everything that can cause us to love this world.
- "Add half an hour of meditation every morning. Not only will you get through all your business, but you will find time for still more."

6. REPLY TO ANOTHER OBJECTION: IS THE INTERIOR LIFE SELFISH?
- Let us not speak of the lazy man or the spiritual glutton for whom the interior life consists in the delights of a pleasurable idleness, and who are much more avid for the consolations of God than for the God of consolations. They have only a false piety.
(This is indeed what can be a primary problem with charismatics; relying too much upon feelings and consolations)
- We have already said that this life is the pure and abundant source of the most generous works of charity for souls and of charity which seeks to alleviate the sufferings of this world. But let us consider the usefulness of this life from another point of view. Was the interior life of Mary and Joseph selfish and sterile? What blasphemy, and what absurdity!..."My sister hath left me alone to serve" (in Martha's words) [says] the presumptuous idiot who sees nothing but his own exterior works and their result.
- "And for them do I sanctify myself that they also may be sanctified in truth," the soul that has realized all the implications of the Master's phrase, "that they also," and who, knowing the value of prayer and sacrifice, unites to the tears and the blood of a heart that purifies itself more and more each day.
- "Those who pray," said the eminent statesman Donoso Cortes, after his conversion, "do more for the world than those who fight, and if the world is going from bad to worse, it is because there are more battles than prayers."
- St. Augustine [said that] people forget that their prayers, purified by this complete separation from the world, were all the more powerful and more NECESSARY for a depraved society.

St. Teresa's Transverberation

- A short but fervent prayer will usually do more to bring about a conversion than long discussions or fine speeches...A single burning prayer of the seraphic St. Theresa [of Avila] (as was learned through a highly credible revelation) converted TEN THOUSAND heretics.
- This, indeed, is the whole work of the Carmelite, the Trappistine, the Poor Clare. See how they follow the advance of the apostle, supplying him with the overflow of their prayers and penances.
- No one in this world knows the reason for the conversions of pagans at the very ends of the earth, for the heroic endurance of Christians under persecution, for the heavenly joy of martyred missionaries. All this invisibly bound up with the prayer of some humble, cloistered nun.

- "Ten Carmelite nuns, praying," said a Bishop of Cochin-China to the Governor of Saigon, "will be of greater help to me than twenty missionaries preaching."
- Was the life of the Curé d'Ars selfish and sterile? Such a statement would only be worthy of a silent contempt. Anyone able to judge in such matters knows that it was precisely the perfection of his intimate union with God that was the reason for the zeal and success of this priest without natural talents, but who, as contemplative as a Carthusian, thirsted for souls with a thirst that his inner life had made unquenchable.
- Nowadays, the whole power of hell seems more than ever bent upon fighting the moral power of the Church and suffocating the divine life in souls...the fact that France got back on her feet after the revolution must be accredited to a priesthood that learned the interior life the hard way, by persecution. But through these men a current of divine life came to enliven a generation which seemed condemned to death by apostasy and an indifference which no human power seemed able to overcome.
- And yet now, how is it that we have been unable to form, in our nation, a majority with enough real Christianity in it to fight against the coalition of the followers of Satan? No doubt, the abandonment of the liturgical life and the cessation of its influence upon the faithful have contributed to this impotence...But is there not another cause to be traced to the fact that we priests and educators, because we lack an intensive inner life, are unable to beget in souls anything more than a surface piety, without any powerful ideals or strong convictions?
(ACCOUNTABILITY! Pope St. Pius V, "All the problems in the world are due to lukewarm catholics")
- If the priest is a saint (the saying goes), the people will be fervent; if the priest is fervent, the people will be pious; if the priest is pious, the people will at least be decent. But if the priest is only decent, the people will be godless.

St. Alphonsus Liguori

- St. Alphonsus [said], "The good morals and the salvation of the people depend on good pastors. If there is a good priest in charge of the parish, you will soon see devotion flourishing, people frequenting the Sacraments, and honoring the practice of mental prayer."
(By their fruits you shall know them!)






7. NO CONFLICT BETWEEN THE INTERIOR LIFE AND THE SALVATION OF SOULS
- Work is prayer. Sacrifice excels prayer. And does not St. Gregory call the zeal for souls the most pleasing sacrifice anyone could offer to God?...Of all goods, the most pleasing that man can offer to God is, undeniable the salvation of a soul. But every one must FIRST offer HIS OWN SOUL, according to what is said in Scripture: "If you wish to please God, have pity on your own soul."
- The necessity of the interior life is so far from being an obstacle to zealous activity in generous souls...it would be the greatest possible mistake for such persons to renounce this work..."Woe unto me," says St. Paul, "if I preach not the gospel." It would be an even greater mistake to devote oneself to the conversion of souls while forgetting one's own salvation.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux

- St. Bernard, who was himself a rare miracle of apostolic zeal, [said] "I do not tell you," writes the same saint to Pope Bl. Eugenius III, "to withdraw completely from secular operations. I only exhort you not to throw yourself entirely into them. If you are a man belonging to everybody, belong also to yourself. Otherwise what good would it do you to save everybody else, if you were to be lost yourself?"
- Bishop Dupanloup [said], "God has given me the grace to recognize that the big obstacle to my acquiring a peaceful and fruitful interior life is my natural activity, and my tendency to be carried away by my work. And I have recognized, besides, that this lack of interior life is the source of all my faults, all my troubles, my dryness, my fits of disgust, and my bad health. I have therefore...drawn up the following points with that end in view:

Bishop Dupanloup

1. I will always take more time than is necessary, to do everything. This is the way to avoid being in a hurry and getting excited.
2. Since I invariably have more things to do than time in which to do them, and this prospect preoccupies me and gets me all worked up, I will cease to think about all that I have to do, and only consider the time I have at my disposal. I will make use of that time, without losing a moment of it."
- Satan does not hesitate to encourage a purely superficial success, if he can by this success prevent the apostle from making progress in the interior life.




Continue to Part Two...

The Soul of the Apostolate by Chautard - Part One

1. GOD WANTS GOOD WORKS AND, THEREFORE, HE WANTS ZEALOUS ACTION
- In the earliest centuries, came the contemplative orders, whose ceaseless prayer and fierce penances were a powerful aid in the conversion of the pagan world. In the Middle Ages, the preaching orders sprang up, with the mendicant and military orders, and those vowed to the ransom of captives in the powers of infidels. Finally, modern times have seen the birth of crowds of teaching institutes, missionary societies, congregations of all sorts, whose mission is to spread abroad every kind of spiritual and material good.
- We see a multitude of works that were scarcely even heard of, a generation ago, rise up in opposition to evils of the most serious kind: Catechism classes for first communicants and converts, as well as for abandoned children, all types of Catholic societies, sodalities, and confraternities, laymen's retreats for young and old of both sexes, Apostleship of Prayer, the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, Catholic action in student and military circles, Catholic press association and other works of both general and local usefulness.
- May these humble pages go out to the soldiers of Christ...to fight against an excessive exteriorization through good works. St. Paul [wrote]: "Woe unto me if I preach not the Gospel" [which] does not entitle us to forget: "What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?"
- [We] will better understand the need not only of a pious, but of an interior life, if [our] zeal is to have any success.

2. GOD WILLS THAT THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE OF OUR WORK BE CHRIST HIMSELF
- Science is proud of its immense success, and justly so. And yet there has always been and always will be [something] impossible to it: to create life...God reserves for Himself the power of creating life.
(It would seem this is to be understood in the sense that you need the correct "matter" to create life. You can't make a tree from a piece of iron ore. You can't make a child, whether conceived in the womb or test tube baby, without a sperm and egg.)
- HE ALONE, JESUS, IS THE LIFE.
- Men, called to the honor of working with the Savior in transmitting the divine life to souls, ought to consider themselves mere channels, whose function is to draw from this one and only source.
(Make me a channel of your peace...)
- If the apostle were to forget this truth in his actions and were to insult Jesus Christ by relying on his own powers, it would be a...disorder...insufferable in the sight of God. To reject the truth, or to ignore it in one's actions, always constitutes and intellectual disorder. (Pelagianism) 
- Now, for a man, in his practical conduct, to go about this active works as if Jesus were not his one end only life-principle, is what Cardinal Mermillod has called the "HERESY OF GOOD WORKS." Feverish activity taking the place of God; grace ignored; human pride trying to thrust Jesus from His throne...in this age of naturalism.

3. WHAT IS THE INTERIOR LIFE?
- EVERYONE is obliged to accept the following principles as absolutely certain, and base his inner life upon them:
FIRST TRUTH
- Supernatural life is the life of Jesus Christ Himself in my soul, by faith, hope and charity...the presence of our Lord by this supernatural life is not the real presence proper to Holy Communion, but a presence of vital action like that of the action of the head or heart upon the members of the body.
- This life, begun in Baptism by the state of grace, perfected at Confirmation, recovered by Penance and enriched by the Holy Eucharist, is my Christian life.

St. Paul the Apostle

SECOND TRUTH
- By this life, Jesus Christ imparts to me His Spirit...St. Paul wrote, "I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me."
- The state of activity of a soul which strives against its natural inclinations in order to regulate them, and endeavors to acquire the HABIT of judging and direction its movements in ALL THINGS according to the light of the Gospel and the example of Our Lord.
- The soul wishes in this way to be faithful to the grace which Our Lord offers to it at every moment.
THIRD TRUTH
- [We need] to strive after a precise and certain faith of Jesus with us, not merely a living, but an extremely vital reality. When Jesus in this manner becomes my light, my ideal, my counsel, my support, my refuge, my strength, my healer, my consolation, my joy, my love, in a word my life, I shall acquire all the virtues.
FOURTH TRUTH
- My supernatural life may increase at every moment by a new infusion of the grace of the active presence of Jesus in me; an infused produced:
1. By each meritorious act (virtue, work, suffering under all forms [such as privation of creatures, physical or moral pain, humiliation, self-denial], prayer, Mass, acts of devotion to Our Lady, etc.)
2. By the Sacraments especially the Eucharist.
- Thou, Jesus, dost present Thyself, objectively to me, at every instant of the day...and dost request my co-operation to increase Thy life in myself.
FIFTH TRUTH
- The triple concupiscence caused by original sin and increased by every one of my actual sins establishes elements of death that militate against the life of Jesus in me...Nevertheless, inclinations and feelings contrary to that life, and temptations, even violent and prolonged, can do no harm as long as my will resists them.
SIXTH TRUTH
- If I am not faithful in the use of certain means, my intelligence will become blind and my will too weak to co-operate with Jesus...I shall find myself slipping into tepidity of the will:
(This tepidity is clearly distinct from the dryness and even disgust which fervent souls experience in spite of themselves...the soul that is poisoned with this kind of tepidity manifests two opposing wills: it avoids evident mortal sin...[but] it wants all the comforts of a free and easy life, and that is why it allows itself to commit deliberate venial sins. 
- [In order to break out of this tepidity], I would have to revive fear of God in my soul by imagining myself, as vividly as possible, face to face with my last end, and to revive compunction by the sweet science of Thy wounds.
SEVENTH TRUTH
- I must seriously fear that I do not have the degree of interior life that Jesus demands of me:
1. If I cease to increase my thirst...I necessarily cease to increase this thirst if I no longer make use of the means for doing so: morning mental-prayer, Mass, Sacraments, and Office, general and particular examinations of conscience, and spiritual reading.
2. If I do not have a minimum recollection to watch over my heart and keep it pure and generous enough not to silence the voice of Lord when He warns me of the elements of death. I cannot possibly retain this minimum if I make no use of the means that will secure it: liturgical life, aspirations, especially in the form of supplication, spiritual communion, practice of the presence of God, and so on.
- Without this, my life will soon be crawling with venial sins, perhaps without my being aware of it, self-delusion will throw up a smoke screen of a seeming piety that is more speculative than practical...and my blindness will be imputed to me as sin...
EIGHTH TRUTH
- Custody of the heart is simply a HABITUAL or at least frequent anxiety to preserve in all my acts from anything that might spoil their motive or their execution. It is a peaceful, unexcited anxiety, without any trace of strain, yet powerful because it is based on childlike confidence in God.
- Quo vadam et ad quid? Where am I going and why? What would Jesus do? How would He act in my place?
- For the soul that goes to Jesus through Mary, this custody of the heart takes on a still more affectionate quality, and recourse to this dear Mother becomes a continual need for his heart.
NINTH TRUTH
- Jesus Christ reigns in a soul that aspires to imitate Him seriously. Following the example of Jesus, it seeks no other rule, in this, but the will of God: "I came down from Heaven not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me." The soul shows more readiness in doing things that are contrary to its nature, and repugnant to it..."For Christ did not please Himself."
TENTH TRUTH
- If I am only willing to pray and become faithful to grace, Jesus offers me every means of returning to an inner life that will restore to me my intimacy with Him...my soul will not cease to possess joy...and the Lord will give me rest continually.
ELEVENTH TRUTH
- My efforts, by themselves, are nothing, absolutely nothing. "Without Me you can do nothing." They will only be useful, and blessed by God, if by means of a  genuine interior life I unite them constantly to the life-giving action of Jesus. But then they will become all-powerful: "I can do all things in Him who strengthens me." But should they spring from pride and self-satisfaction, from confidence in my own talents, from the desire to shine, they will be rejected by God. This conviction...will make me really feel the need to pray that I may obtain humility, which is such a treasure for my soul, since it is a guarantee of God's help and of success in my labors.
- I must have the following:
1. My conviction of the nothingness of my own activity, left to itself
2. I am ruthless in stamping out all self-satisfaction and vanity, all self-admiration in my apostolate
3. I continue unwaveringly to distrust myself
4. I am praying to God to preserve me from pride.
- THE INTERIOR LIFE IS THE LIFE OF THE ELECT

St. Margaret Mary 

- It fits with the end God had in view when He created us...It is a state of complete happiness: "The end of human creatures is union with God; and in this their happiness consists."
- Heavenly state! The soul becomes a living heaven. Then, like St. Margaret Mary, I can sing:
Je possède en tout temps et je porte en tout lieu et le Dieu de mon coeur et le Coeur de mon Dieu.
I ever possess, and take with me everywhere, the God of my heart and the Heart of my God.
Grace is the seed of heaven.


4. IGNORANCE AND NEGLECT OF THIS INTERIOR LIFE
(to be continued...)

The Soul of the Apostolate by Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard OSCO (TAN) - Intro/Biography

I began reading this book recently after it was recommended by a catholic theologian who presents on a variety of traditional catholic subjects. It is about 300 pages long, so it will take some time to summarize it all on here as I slowly and methodically read through it. But so far, it is incredible...and if anything re-typing out the parts I am highlighting helps me to better retain it.

The book can be viewed/purchased directly from TAN books ($10 at the moment) on Amazon (about $14). You can also check your parish or local bookstores if they have one.

"O infinite Charity, make our wills burn with thirst for the interior life. Penetrate and flood our hearts with Thy sweetness and strength, and show them that even here on this earth there is no real happiness except in this life of imitation and sharing in Thine own life and in that of the Heart of Jesus in the bosom of the Father of all mercy and all kindness."

 A Biographical Note
- The author of this modern spiritual classic was born on the feast of St. Gregory the Great, March 1, 1858...The reason why St. Gregory the Great was so perfect in expounding the relation of action and contemplation is that, called from the cloister to the Papacy in one of the crises in the history of the Church, he found out what that relation was in the crucible of trial and labor and distraction and struggle. And the reason why Dom Chautard has been able to write so well on the same theme for our own age is that he too was so often torn by the hand of God from the cloister and made an instrument of Divine Power and Providence...
- The Chautards ran a little bookshop, and the father of the future monk was one of those purely nominal Catholics who sometimes go to Mass, but whose principles are entirely vitiated by the materialistic and utilitarian views of the middle class to which they belong. The mother was in a different category. She had more faith, and she saw to it that her children were educated as Catholics. However, neither [Jean-Baptiste] nor they had an idea of his entering religion. He went to Marseilles to study economics at the university, with a commercial career in mind...[but] affected by the simple devotion a priest had to his Breviary, he began to ask himself why he did not pray more himself.
- [He found in a Catholic youth club] more than a tame and sheepish attempt to rival the attractions of the dance hall and the cafe by vainly trying to beat them at their own game of pleasing and entertaining human nature. There was something more, something that appealed to a much deeper and more urgent and more vital necessity: faith, supernatural charity, a deep and simple and unbreakable solidarity among souls united, as he was to discover, in Christ. And, as a result of all this, he began to taste "that peace which the world cannot give."

- He was admitted as a postulant at the Trappist Abbey of Aiguebelle in 1877. Here he began to learn, with an inexpressible joy, how to live the contemplative life...He began to live the life of a White Monk, that life of obscurity, obedience, silence, poverty, solitude, hidden in the "secret of God's face," that is, of His presence and of His will...a life of ceaseless praise.
- [In that time], Aiguebelle was faced with complete ruin...The Abbot took the bold step of sending him to Paris to try and use his ingenuity to save his community. But all Fr. Chautard's native ability and eloquence and learning and economics proved useless. Finally, he threw himself down in prayer at the shrine of Our Lady of Victories...the rest of the story can be guessed.

- [Eventually] the order, Sept-Fons, needed a new abbot. Dom Chautard was elected. He made use of his right to refuse, but when Dom Sebastian appealed to the Pope, Leo XIII expressed his desire that Dom Chautard accept, and he yielded to the will of God.
- In 1901, when one of the frequent attacks against the Church burst out again in France, Dom Chautard was chosen to represent the Cistercians of the Strict Observance in Paris...the Order at large was spared. Others were by no means so fortunate.

- During the First World War, Dom Chautard gave shelter at Sept-Fons to a community of Belgian Cistercians, another community from Palestine, the orphans from an asylum at Arras, and the inmates of an old men's home. Dom Chautard added to this a much more important work of mercy in the spiritual order. A magazine for French priests, conscripted and sent to the front [lines]. [When these priests returned from war], they needed nothing so much as the consolations and medicine of a doctrine like Dom Chautard's, which placed the greatest emphasis on the one source of all our strength: God's grace, obtained in ever greater abundance by a life of prayer and mortification.
- THE FRUITFULNESS OF AN ACTIVE LIFE [HAS] ITS ROOTS DEEP IN PRAYER AND PENANCE.
- Dom Chautard's keen eye had discovered a glaring inconsistency in the reaction of a certain type of Catholic leader. He observed that some priests, some organizers of Catholic Action, imagined that they could fight political enemies with more or less worldly and political weapons. In defending the Church against state persecutions, they thought the most important thing was to gain and preserve political and social power.
A few items come to mind here:

St. Louis de Montfort Secret of the Rosary 
Jesus in a vision to Dominic: "Dominic, I rejoice to see that you are not 

relying on your own wisdom and that, rather than seek the empty praise of men, 

you are working with great humility for the salvation of souls."

1 Corinthians 2:4-8

 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. 

6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

- Such apostles tended to congratulate themselves when they had raised large sums of money, or when the churches were filled with great throngs of people, without reference to what might be going on in the souls of all those who were present. To the eyes of the Cistercian Abbot, a man who had learned his wisdom close to God, in the silence of the cloister, before the Tabernacle, there was a deep-seated and subtly pernicious error to all this.
- The Church is built of living stones. It is built of saints. And saints are made only by the grace of God and the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, not by speeches and publicity and campaigns which are all doomed to sterility without the essential means of prayer and mortification.
- Dom Chautard saw that all this came from the subtle infection of Modernism and kindred heresies, bred of contact with a purely materialistic and secular culture. And he, like the saintly Pontiff under whose reign he was then living, saw that the only remedy was a return to the fundamentals of Christian Doctrine in all the power and beauty of their traditional presentation. (see also here)
- The Soul of the Apostolate recommends itself with even more urgency in our time, when the world is barely recovering from the most frightful social cataclysm in the history of man, with no prospect of anything brighter in the future.
- [Dom Chautard] had an unconquerable love of Christ and of His Immaculate Mother...steering clear of the two equally noxious extremes of quietism and the heresy of works.
- In his later years, he was persecuted by ill-health, and spent many nights without sleep, in between his days of arduous work for his Order and for souls. But all this, far from breaking his morale and leading him into the morass of self-pitying discouragement, only intensified his union with God...a deep interior life...a charity, indeed, which was hungry.
- If there is one concept that is capable of summing up Dom Chautard's spirituality, it is "GOD ALONE." God in everything, God in anything, God in His will, God in other men, God present in his own soul.



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