Word: abbe
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Sahara Parish. Still restless, he dropped in on an abbé of his acquaintance for advice. "Kneel and confess!" thundered the abbé. To his own surprise, Foucauld did. "As soon as I believed that there was a God," he wrote to a friend, "I realized that I could not do otherwise than live for Him." At the age of 31, he entered the Trappist order...
...could not fail to impress the Tuareg. They called him the Great White Marabout (holy man), and kissed the hem of his robe. But by the middle of World War I, a group of fanatic Moslems, incited by the Turks, had marked him for capture. A native trusted by Abbé de Foucauld decoyed him from the new French fort at Tamanrasset. Grilled by his captors, he prayed in silence, made no resistance, and said only: "Baghi n'mout-This is the hour of my death." Shortly after, his chief captor put a carbine muzzle against Foucauld...
...children shyly touched the young man's raincoat. Older people stared as at a mirage. For this indeed was young (22) King Baudouin of Belgium, out among the poorest of his subjects, without guard or escort, in the company of Public Health Minister Alfred de Taeye and Abbé Eduard Froidure. It had all begun with the abbe's eloquent pamphlet on Brussels' slums, unnoticed by cabinet ministers but read by a shocked Baudouin, who determined to see for himself. A veteran slum worker, the abbe led Baudouin from one foul tenement to another...
...every home the King left a small sum of money. One old seamstress refused to accept her envelope, saying, "There are people worse off than I, monsieur." When the abbe told her the identity of her benefactor, she accepted. One man refused, saying, "I work for my living." It was night when Abbé Froidure drove the King back to Laeken Palace. Said Baudouin: "It's scandalous that people are living in such conditions." To Health Minister de Taeye he said: "Something must be done about it." Asked next day exactly what he was going to do about...
Prudence & Plexiglass. Five days later, his Plexiglas support left behind at Lourdes, Gilbert Godard was back in Chaumont, the talk of the town. Why, asked a few skeptical citizens, should such grace have fallen on him when better folk had been bypassed? "The bounty of God," said Abbé Desprez, "can fall on anyone, good or not so good. God loves us all." Some accepted the explanation. But others whispered to neighbors' dark suggestions that here was no miracle. The clergy at Lourdes were noncommittal. "The Church," said Abbé Jeanson, "reserves absolutely its judgment on M. Godard...