DESPISING JEAN DANIELOU
by Matthew Schmitz
Jean Danielou died in disgrace. In 1974, at age sixty-nine, the noted advisor to the Second Vatican Council who had been made a cardinal by Pope Paul VI was found dead in the home of a Parisian prostitute. France’s Catholic bishops, trying to calm rumors, published a letter in Le Monde saying that “everyone is aware that, from the first, his apostolate reached out into the most varied milieux and often to the most abandoned and desperate cases.” An editorial note accompanying their letter wondered, however, whether “there might have been another side to the cardinal, hitherto unknown.”
Along with the derisive cackles there was a defensive silence. Initial reports falsely claimed that he had died of a heart attack while dining with friends. Then the Catholic press began to report that he had been visiting a “cabaret singer.” Those within the Church, as much as those outside it, seemed to suspect his death was one of a sinner rather than a saint.
It was not just the company he kept, but also the ecclesial politics he espoused, that led to the silence. His fellow Jesuits were rankled by a 1972 interview he gave to Vatican Radio that said religious orders had succumbed to “decadence” stemming from “a false interpretation of Vatican II.” That same year, he moved out of the Jesuit religious house in which he had lived for decades.
One person who stood by him was his brother, Alain, a convert to Hinduism and partner of the Swiss photographer Raymond Burnier. Though a Hindu, he was ready to consider this Catholic a saint:
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Read more: www.firstthings.com
Jean Danielou died in disgrace. In 1974, at age sixty-nine, the noted advisor to the Second Vatican Council who had been made a cardinal by Pope Paul VI was found dead in the home of a Parisian prostitute. France’s Catholic bishops, trying to calm rumors, published a letter in Le Monde saying that “everyone is aware that, from the first, his apostolate reached out into the most varied milieux and often to the most abandoned and desperate cases.” An editorial note accompanying their letter wondered, however, whether “there might have been another side to the cardinal, hitherto unknown.”
Along with the derisive cackles there was a defensive silence. Initial reports falsely claimed that he had died of a heart attack while dining with friends. Then the Catholic press began to report that he had been visiting a “cabaret singer.” Those within the Church, as much as those outside it, seemed to suspect his death was one of a sinner rather than a saint.
It was not just the company he kept, but also the ecclesial politics he espoused, that led to the silence. His fellow Jesuits were rankled by a 1972 interview he gave to Vatican Radio that said religious orders had succumbed to “decadence” stemming from “a false interpretation of Vatican II.” That same year, he moved out of the Jesuit religious house in which he had lived for decades.
One person who stood by him was his brother, Alain, a convert to Hinduism and partner of the Swiss photographer Raymond Burnier. Though a Hindu, he was ready to consider this Catholic a saint:
His death and the scandal provoked by it, when he had become one of the leading figures of the Church, was a sort of posthumous vendetta, one of those favors that the gods bestow on those whom they love. If he had died just a little while sooner or later, or if he had been visiting a lady of the sixteenth arrondissement under the pretext of works of charity, instead of bringing the revenue of his theological writings to a poor and needy woman, there would have been no scandal.
Jean had always dedicated himself to disregarded people. For a certain period he had celebrated a Mass for the sake of homosexuals. He tried to help prisoners, criminals, troubled young people, prostitutes. I deeply admired this ending of life similar to that of the martyrs, whose fragrance rises to heaven amid the opprobrium and sarcasm of the crowd. He died as true saints die, in ignominy, in mockery, in the disdain of a spiteful and vile society.
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Read more: www.firstthings.com
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