Belle vie sacerdotale

Un vicaire de banlieue : L'abbé Daniel JOËSSEL

 

     Under the impulse and direction of Canon LIEUTIER, the Priestly Recruitment charity has taken the fortunate initiative of promoting a collection of biographies, which will evoke the figures of priests, attractive by their radiance, leaders by their action. Several volumes have been published by the Bloud et Gay publishing house, each of which could be regarded as a model, for the lively and dynamic example of the hero, for the vivid presentation of his physiognomy, his soul and his ministry.

     Among them all, we would like to choose today the portrait of Father JOËSSEL, parish priest at Sainte-Geneviève d'Asnières, who fell for France in May 1940 at the age of 32. This young priest, whose brief and full life, and humble and fruitful ministry, our colleague and friend François VEUILLOT has recounted, appears to us as the perfect type of suburban parish priest, an animator of works and a conqueror of souls.

     The story of his life, reduced to the highlights, can be summed up in a few lines. When he left school, he had an ardent and profound nature and was impatient to respond to God's call; but he still hesitated between the apostolate of the missions and the contemplation of the cloister. In fact, before his military service, he spent several months at the Abbey of Solesmes, for which he always felt a secret nostalgia; but on his return from the barracks, he entered the Carmelite Seminary, where the testimony of his teachers, echoed after his death by the confidences in his retreat diary, would attest to the fervent and intense growth of this elite soul.

     "He had the practical cult of the Gospel", said his Superior, and wanted to imitate Jesus “as the saints did”. And he himself: "We are deceiving ourselves," he wrote in his notes, "when we suppress the austere character of the Gospel on the pretext of making it more accessible to the world". As far as he was concerned, he attached himself to it with an extraordinary intensity that raised him to the love of Christ and inspired him to a rigorous immolation of himself, including "the complete sacrifice of the heart", offered "with joy", the joy which, from then on, in the eyes of his fellow students, appeared to be the natural flowering of this interiorly austere and mortified soul... but which would above all be its supernatural radiance until the end. It is rooted in total and constant union with Jesus, maintained by an energetic, perpetual and secret effort of will. Father JOËSSEL fixed his ideal in this exclamation revealed by his notes: "Simplicity of life, because Jesus does everything, without exception!" And that is why, at the Carmelite monastery, attached at first to what was necessary, we noticed that, in spite of his ardour for work and his thirst for the apostolate, he subordinated all things to the spiritual life, to the point that he seemed to ignore the fever of examinations and to lose interest in future apostolates. At the seminary, he wanted exclusively to forge the moldable, adaptable, docile tool that God could use.

     This analysis of priestly training, and later the study of the soul of a priest committed to action, are not the least appealing pages in the volume, nor, above all, the least instructive: they conclude the portrait of the man, and highlight the example and teaching of his life.

     However, the evocative chapters on his ministry go beyond a simple account of events and take on the appeal of an adventure story or golden legend.

     Father JOËSSEL was appointed curate at Sainte-Geneviève d'Asnières in july 1935. He remained there until the call to arms at the beginning of september 1939, and wholeheartedly until his death at the end of May 1940. Put in charge of male youth in this parish of 48,000 souls, this was enough time for him to carry out a generous and fruitful action and to earn affectionate popularity and works of sanctity among the churchgoers, especially his "kids" and their parents.

     Not only does he perfect, expand and enliven existing works, he also creates new ones. The foundation of Les Cœurs Vaillants, while intensifying the life of the patronage, steadily increased the number of members; just established, a Jociste section is reported to be one of the most active; the holiday camp, now enlarged, can also be cited as a model.

     But the in-depth progress is even more remarkable. This is where Father JOËSSEL's apostolate really comes into its own as an example and a lesson.

     From the simple, vivid account of the facts emerges the spirit.

     If the work of the young priest has this ardour and energy, it is obviously partly by virtue of the innate gifts that Providence has given him and which he uses to the full for the good of the souls entrusted to him.

     His contagious enthusiasm and his "broad smile", the charm and the bonus of his friendship which, by turns, penetrates and takes away, his delicate attentions and even his casual jokes, his speech, always simple and direct, depending on the circumstances, the people and the needs, becomes energetic or tender, moving, laughing, even at times, his suppleness and his sporting vigour, all combine to give him naturally an extraordinary dynamism over young people. One of his teachers once explained to his parents, who were a little frightened by their young Daniel's apostolate to his classmates: "We love him and we follow him". And later, the Superior of the Carmelites, emphasising that Father JOËSSEL's hold over his fellow students in no way countered the governing authority: "You could feel, he remarks, that he was lighting up other souls when they came into contact with his own". His entire influence as a priest is summed up in these two observations, the second of which completes and expands the first by taking it to the supernatural level: "We couldn't help but love him," says one of his kids; and another: "With him, it's impossible not to go up".

     He could think of no other supernatural way. A community superior who knew him in depth said: "Apart from God, there was no question for him". And it is another nun who defines the influence of this spirituality in these terms: "He was so full of inner life that it was reflected in others."

     He was a priest through and through, from his devotion at the altar to his liveliness at play. The fervour of his mass struck all the witnesses interviewed by the author: "At the Elevation, when he raises the host", says a local woman, "it looks like he's going to leave with it... He can't get away from it". On the other hand, the Jocistes, when asked whether the familiarity, almost the companionship that he showed them and inspired in them, was not detrimental to the deference demanded by his priesthood, unanimously protested: "He was an amazing guy," says one of them, "but you could always tell he was a priest."

     And here we have the secret of his spiritual conquests: "It's not what you do that produces the fruits of the apostolate", he used to say, "but what you are". Yet he was all priest and nothing but priest. "That is to say," he once explained to his children, "this man called by God who, from an early age, so understood Christ's love for mankind that he preferred his Jesus crucified for him to everything else."

     "That's why, even in the most overworked and at the same time the most well-ordered of activities, this director and leader of youth movements, inwardly absorbed in continual meditation," said one of his confreres, "always retreats," according to a religious who knew him well, "into the silent intimacy of life with Christ".

     And this is also why, passionate for souls after the example of the One who died for them, his most constant and highest ambition is not only to win his brothers to Jesus Christ : "That's all that matters," he once wrote to one of his parents, but also to make them, in their turn, "collaborators with Christ".

     To achieve this, he will not be satisfied with action, example or even prayer; he will secretly add the most rigorous mortifications, his radiant smile and perpetual cheerfulness conceal fearsome tortures. Like his divine model, it is sometimes with the price of his blood that he seeks to redeem souls in danger of being lost, or to raise up those who are still on the rise. And "for them", having given everything, he will offer his life as well. Certain intimacies suggest that his tragic death was truly the holocaust called for by an unquenchable thirst for sacrifice.

 But these moving details must be read in the final chapters of the volume, where the author follows "Lieutenant JOËSSEL" step by step, as much a priest as ever, first in his intense and fruitful apostolate in the background, then at the height of the turmoil, and finally on the ambulance bed, where he dies, with a smile on his face, in the joy of immolation...

     The parishioners of Sainte-Geneviève d'Asnières venerate him and pray to him. As for the Superior of the Carmelites, who, having studied him in depth at the Seminary, never ceased to follow him during his brief existence, he gives him this high testimony: "There was holiness in him, I would even say holiness of great style..."