Number 210 - April 2002 (Pages 65 to 68, 71 to 74 )

Centenary of the birth of Marthe Robin : 13th March 1902 - 13 March 2002

Why do Bishops ask to have a Foyer?

Centenary of the birth of Marthe Robin : 13th March 1902 - 13 March 2002

Didier-Leon MARCHAND
Emeritus bishop of Valence

(Alouette N° 210 - page 71)

On the 13th March 1902, at the Moilles farm at the Plaine, a little girl was born whose parents named her Martha. She was to be baptized under this name a few days later. She received life from her parents, and, from the Baptism desired by her parents, the necessary grace to enter fully into life and become a daughter of the Church. What would she be this little Martha? That is the mystery of every life that begins. Today we can look at Martha's life to give thanks and to recognize what the Lord did with her and through her. Like when one celebrates an anniversary in a family we are speaking together of our centenary. But we speak of it looking also at what the Word of God of this Wednesday of the 4th week of Lent says to us.

For Martha as for each one of us, the Lord is there from the beginning. "He who is full of tenderness for them will lead them", Isaiah tells us. "He will lead them towards springs of water to refresh themselves... He shows His tenderness to the humiliated... even if a mother could abandon her child, says the Lord, I will not forget you". This marvellous word of God in Isaiah is there to remind us that every person, every child who comes into the world, is accompanied by this tenderness of God. It bore fruit in her in a marvellous way.

Marthe's intimacy with the Lord

One cannot look at Martha's life, read the pages of her intimate diary, without discovering this intimacy lived with her Lord. This tenderness of which Isaiah speaks, filled Martha's heart. She let herself be loved. She let herself be led towards the spring of living water and towards the light: "May I be constantly a little glowing fire" she writes. "For me, Christ is my life, my eyes and my heart, all my being is filled with Him". To let oneself be loved is sometimes more difficult than to love, or to think one is loving. It's a spiritual combat, that of abandon and union. She writes: "My abandon is all made up of confidence, humility and love... the most difficult path is made easy by abandon and love". (1931). This language is not in accordance with the logic of the world.

Marthe's fruitfulness passes through the cross

From this way made by Martha flows a fruitfulness which it was impossible even to imagine o the day of her birth. The fruitfulness of Martha, as for Jesus and with Him, passes by the Cross. Jesus has told us clearly: "He who doesn't carry his Cross and follow me cannot be my disciple". (Luke 14,27). Martha wants to be a disciple of Jesus. She also wants, as she wrote in 1932, to be: "the partner of Jesus in His work of redemption". She let herself be filled by the tenderness of God, she abandoned herself to this tenderness, and here she is a partner in the work of the Redemption. "I complete in my flesh what is to be added to the sufferings of Christ". (Col. 1,24) writes St. Paul to the Colossians. St. Augustin also thinks that every Christian is called to be in communion with the sufferings of Christ to the profit of the community of the Church.

It is Christ, and He alone who realizes this redeeming fruitfulness. That is what makes Martha say that her "cross is a cross of love", and that "the heart of Jesus on the Cross is the inviolable dwelling place that she has chosen on Earth".

Martha is intimately associated with the Cross of Christ with the "crucified God" preached by St. Paul. She is so in several ways. What we call the Passions of Martha are these times of contemplation of the crucified God. These days where she re-lives the Passion of Jesus are the source of her fruitfulness. The way in which she takes on herself her illness and her handicap, during which, gradually, as it develops, she abandons her hands, her eyes, her body, offering them to the Lord is source of fruitfulness. In that Martha lights up the path of those who have to bear difficult things in their illness or handicap. Also, realities which are difficult to bear in daily and social life: unemployment, break-ups, family or conjugal failures, exclusions, solitude. Martha was always close to the miseries of men, and above all the poorest, the unfavoured , the prisoners. She still is today:
Bearer of hope, there where despair is creeping in.
"Little light" when darkness is setting up.
Source of clear, limpid water, in the midst of aridity.
She shows also, as every Christian must do, the attentive closeness of He whom she calls her "beloved". She does it with her discretion and her littleness, the awareness of her poverty, what she calls her "incapacity for anything". (Oct. 1931).

Marthe daughter of God and daughter of the Church

What strikes one about Martha really is her littleness. She is reduced to nothing, and the source from which she draws does everything in her. Ill and in reclusion, she is full of missionary activity. She is a daughter of the Church who, from the place where she is, fills her mission of a baptized person. She is one of the "faithful of Christ" who welcomes. The tens of thousands of people who came to her give witness to this. Simply, with her good sense of a peasant and her faith of a daughter of God and daughter of the Church, she communicates some of the joy which the Lord put in her. She radiates the hope that inhabits her. She favourizes the encounter of love which she draws from the heart of God. She carries them or takes them into her prayer, as she liked to say.

In these encounters all marked with simplicity and authenticity, vocations become clear. Groups or Church movements are born or consolidated, a bit like an abounding around a spring or a well.

To welcome is a true mission of the Church. Today more than ever the Church needs people who welcome. It is a mission for all Christians, in particular in the new parishes.

The founding of the Work

Martha is ready for all audacities when it is a question, as she writes "of the love and the glory of God". She takes the initiative, bedridden and handicapped as she is, of creating a Christian school for the children. It is Father Faure, parish priest of the village who has his feet well on the ground, who is charged with carrying out this initiative of Martha.

A daring project in a local context which is more or less hostile at that time. The work of the Foyers was to begin with this little school and the prayer of the children. On the arrival of Father Finet the work of the Foyers develops. The first retreats are preached, and, soon, Foyers are constructed in France, Europe and throughout the world: Foyers of Light, Love and Charity. In 1986 the Foyers are raised to an association of pontifical law. In the Jubilee Year 2000 the definitive statutes are approved, in a document dated the 8th December 1999. Martha has hoped for a "new Pentecost of love". That is realized by Foyers and takes all its force with the Council which Martha expected and which she received as a gift of God for the Church and for the world. According to the very beautiful expression of Pope Paul VI, the Foyers bring "a supplement of soul".

"It's by its fruit that one recognizes a tree" (Math. 12,33) Jesus tells us. In celebrating the centenary of the birth of Martha, we give thanks. We have looked together at some clearly visible fruits which illustrate Martha's life. There are others, many others. These fruits come from the Lord who was welcomed in the very simple life of His humble servant. Martha gave her will, and all she was without any reservations. It's the part she took and it's an essential part. She did it accompanied by Mary whom she loved so much, her "darling Mummy". It's in the same spirit as the "yes" of Mary that she did it. She made her consecration to Mary in the terms of St. Louis Grignion de Montfort: "I choose you, today, oh Mary, as my Mother and my Queen..."

And now, with Martha, let us say the prayer that was hers and that the Foyers often say:

"Oh beloved Mother, you who know so well the ways of holiness and Love, teach us to often raise our spirits and our hearts towards the Trinity, to fix there our respectful and affectionate attention. And, as you walk with us along the path of eternal life, do not remain a stranger to the fragile pilgrims whom your charity accepts to welcome; turn towards us your merciful eyes, draw us into your clarity, flood us with your gentleness, carry us off into Light and into Love, carry us off, always further and very high into the splendours of Heaven. That nothing may ever trouble our peace, or bring us out of the thought of God; but that each minute may carry us further forwards into the depths of the august Mystery, until the day when our souls, fully opened out to the illuminations of the divine union, will see all things in eternal Love, and in Unity". Amen.

Why do Bishops ask to have a Foyer?

Father Bernard MICHON

(Alouette N° 210 ­ page 64)

When, the day after his first meeting with Marthe Robin, Father Finet went to ask advice from his spiritual director Father Albert Valensin, this good Jesuit father said to him" "Marthe Robin, like Catherine of Sienna! She's of the Church! Go ahead!" This word was a great support for Father Finet, for in the years to follow, the recognition by the Church was neither rapid nor massive. The bishops of Valence have always, each with his temperament, supported "Marthe et Châteauneuf", that's to say the Foyer with its retreatants, the schools and all those who came to confide themselves to the prayer at the Plaine. This support of the successive bishops of Valence counted a lot for Marthe herself, for it took years and long awaiting for Father Finet to be officially detached full-time for Châteauneuf. From the part of the Cardinal Archbishop of Lyon, it was, indeed, a semi-recognition of the ministry he was accomplishing at Châteauneuf and so, implicitly, of the one who, in silence and offering carried this Work which was still being born. This constant support of the bishops of Valence came as a confirmation of the local taking root of the Work in its early days. Marthe saw clearly that it was "in the parish", we would say today "in the local Church" that Jesus wanted to root and begin this great project of His Heart. But that was to take time, and moving forwards in faith, for the unfavourable opinions, and even the criticisms weren't lacking. Even for Marthe, her constant certainty that the Foyer was Jesus' Work and not hers was tried by nights and doubts which put everything into question. Walking with the Church doesn't mean that everything is always clear and sure. That is what Father Finet called obedience to the Church: an obedience which is fruitful certainly, but costly.

During these long years ­ from 1936 till the recognition of the Work of the Foyers by the Pontifical Council for the Laity in 1986 ­ other Foyers were born, firstly in France and Europe, then from 1961 in Africa, with the Foyer of Togo, and in Latin America, thanks to Laetitia van Hissenhoven, this lay woman who, after having known Marthe, wanted to pass on in Columbia the great themes of the fundamental retreat heard at Châteauneuf.

This blossoming was, one could say, above all charismatic, which does not mean that everything was done without pain or difficulties. Discreetly, each week, Marthe prayed, suffered, offered. The Foyers were born in prayer sometimes long years before any realization, or in the prayer of a group of friends and former retreatants. Quite often a priest, very marked by what he had seen and received at Châteauneuf, wanted to transpose, rather than reproduce what he had received from Marthe and Father Finet. For that it needed the agreement of his bishop, who might show himself to be prudent, consenting or reserved with regard to this Work and, above all, this founders, Marthe Robin and Father Finet.

Vatican Council II came along, with its great texts on the Church, the call to saintliness of everyone, the mission of all the baptized, the Word of God, the place of the Virgin Mary in the whole of the Plan of God. It was a powerful confirmation of the principle accents already given by Marthe in her first meeting with Father Finet on the 10th February 1936; it was above all the extension to all the life of the Church of this mysterious ad marvellous Pentecost, new Pentecost or Pentecost of Love, called for by Marthe in her prayer and already becoming visible at the end of each retreat.

The reference to the bishop, even if it is not the first thing, gives cohesion and development to a Foyer and to the Work as a whole. In the same way that, in each community, the Foyer Father "builds" the Foyer with the members, so the bishop establishes a bond of communion with the local Church ad with all the Church, in this ecclesiology of communion promoted by the Council. The majority of Foyers have been born by the precise request of a priest who has come to Châteauneuf, and who obtains the agreement of the bishop of a diocese where a Foyer could be set up. Bishops themselves come to Châteauneuf, meet Marthe, take part in the end of a retreat and thus realize better what they had heard of. To a bishop who came to ask her for a Foyer de Charité to support a seminary which was getting started, Marthe, after a moment of silence, replied: "No, Foyers are for lay people. Seminarists and priests can also come on retreat". Those were the days when Father Finet, on his visits to Foyers, was very keen on meeting the bishops, to show them that the Foyers are truly a Work of the Church; at each Mass he prayed "for all the bishops of our Foyers de Charité"!

The most recent requests (you will understand if I don't name them) come from bishops who have never yet come to Châteauneuf. These bishops have discovered a Foyer in their country or in a neighbouring country; they have appreciated its radiation, in particular through the retreats, and desire that a Foyer may also be set up in their region. "I pray that there may, one day, be a Foyer de Charité in our diocese or in the region, for I know that you are a Work which is serious and discreet". Another request: "My diocese is still very young, and with the establishment of a university, it is vital that there should be a place of Christian formation for all these students". Or again: "The diocese which has been confided to me is a land of first evangelization. The environment is semi-islamic but very proselyte. The population is young. A Foyer de Charité in view of the announcement of the Gospel of salvation will be a precious contribution to those in search of God and His Word. It will be a great chance for our diocese".

Marthe has not yet been beatified, and we will do nothing to anticipate the judgement of the Church. That being said, the initial charisma of the Foyers continues to bear beautiful fruit: visits to the Plaine, discreet but often decisive, retreats which continue with the witness of those who have participated in them: the bishops know now what the Foyers are: it's a question of a real baptismal vocation, with a call to be verified, a formation to be promoted, a total and definitive consecration to Jesus through Mary which is the basis and requirement of each of our days. The newness also of our "family life", a priest with lay people, all consecrated in view of a mission of evangelization through the retreats, in the schools where there are schools, in the prolongation of a local apostolate, this newness is not yet perceived by all. For that is our newness: not in being a community, there have been for ages, both old and new, but in being priest and lay people together: the priestly ministry of the priest at the service of the members, and, with them, at the service of a mission of evangelization. The members of the Foyer, by their baptismal vocation, their daily life and the offering of themselves, are the agents, like the relays of this mission which comes from Christ and the apostles.

That is why we are very attentive to what Bishop Rylko suggests to us: "your mission is not only diocesan, it is universal; it is right to make your origins known, this unique charisma which began with Marthe Robin and Father Finet and which, like all charisma since they come from God who is Life, asks nothing more than to progress and be heard". It's up to us then, with the bishops, to watch that this growth be in cohesion with the grace of the beginnings. The definitive recognition of the Foyers de Charité on the 8th December 1999, and the official delivery of the Decree of approval by Cardinal Stafford in January 2000 at the time of the Jubilee pilgrimage of the Foyers, marked and will mark certainly a new stage. If the Foyers are a "Private Association of the faithful of an international character", the characteristic of a private Association safeguards, precisely, the initial charisma, which came neither from a particular diocese nor from a bishop, but from Marthe Robin with Father Finet. With the members and their Fathers, the Foyers, together, are those first responsible for the development of this charisma. I understand better and better one of the frequent expressions of Father Finet when he spoke of the "moving forwards of the Foyers", insisting on the fact that in his eyes the Foyers de Charité are only at their beginnings.