On Saturday, July 25, we delved into one of the central themes of our spirituality, following the inspiration of the Good Father: being children of the Cross. The morning was marked by a look from outside to within, and by a formative journey that takes us back to the origins of the Congregation.
A view from outside the Congregation
In the morning we were joined by Jean-Paul Russeil, a diocesan priest and former vicar general of Poitiers, who now lives in the Benedictine community of Ligugé. The idea was clear: to have someone outside the Congregation speak to us about the figure of the Founder with fresh eyes.
Russeil took us to the living sources of the time when Father Coudrin follows in the footsteps of Saint Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, in a Poitiers that was then a university city with a notable presence of jurists, and that lived intensely through the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Church, he recalled, was very present in Montfort's era. He also referred to the figure of Bérulle as the spiritual backdrop of those years.
The young priest Montfort converts a farm in Montbernage into a chapel: always on the margins of the city, because—as Russeil emphasized—history evolves through the peripheries. His first mission was the city's general hospital. He founded the Daughters of Wisdom, with Christ as Wisdom incarnate. He preached three-week missions and composed hymns that people learned by heart, set to the popular music of his time. He also erected a red cross, a symbol of love given.
The heart as response
Poitiers would later become one of the reference points of Sacred Heart spirituality: the heart as a response to the Enlightenment, a deeply biblical theme, and also as a response to the persecution of the French Revolution—ten years of clandestine life for the Church.
Non-juring priests hid in Montbernage, among them Pierre Coudrin. Anyone who came into contact with them ran a serious risk: those who helped non-juring priests ended up in prison, as happened to Henriette Aymer and her mother. Coudrin, following in Montfort's footsteps, also attended to the Hospital of the Incurables, as Montfort himself had prophesied. On numerous occasions, Father Russeil recalled, Coudrin escaped death.
During the Revolution, Montbernage was a center of Christian life amid persecution, with Father Coudrin as parish priest. From there, Russeil posed an open question to the whole assembly: how can Christian life be revived today in Poitiers and in Europe, following the footsteps of holiness of Saint Hilary and other figures, including the Good Father himself.
A people on the way
Father Russeil completed his talk by tracing the Good Father's formative journey up to his priestly ordination. Through the various influences of other priests and the situations he lived through, a central intuition took shape: the Church as an adventure and a caravan, a People on the way that calls everyone to participation and to communal discernment.
We are, in short, a people of men and women on the way. Jean-Paul Russeil closed his talk by recalling the Good Father's own vision: a line of missionaries evangelizing throughout the world, an image that still illuminates the identity of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts today.
In the afternoon, Bertrand Cherrier sscc, Provincial Superior of France, spoke to us about the "Sons of the Cross." Starting from the two references Father Coudrin drew on when speaking of the cross of Jesus — that of Grignion de Montfort and that of André Hubert Fournet — he developed a reading in four keys: historical, biblical, symbolic, and pastoral.
In the historical reading, he recalled that Grignion de Montfort, from his predilection for the Gospel of John, built a theology of friendship with Christ under the motto "Long live Jesus, long live his Cross!," while André Hubert Fournet, founder of the Daughters of the Cross, even went so far as to draft the statutes for a male congregation — the "Sons of the Cross" — which ultimately did not take hold, though its postulants went on to pursue the diocesan priesthood.
From the biblical reading, Father Cherrier situated the shift from "children of God" to "sons of the Cross" characteristic of Picpus spirituality: it is the Cross that gives birth to the sscc religious into the life of God. Citing Madeleine Delbrêl, he emphasized that one can only reach the heart of one's neighbor by letting Christ reach one's own.
The symbolic reading centered on the figure of the child — "infans," the one without words — as an invitation to remain in silence before the Cross: without speaking, but not without seeing or hearing. Coudrin himself was left "without words before the Cross," and from this Bertrand drew a pedagogy of gazing summed up in the formula "become what you behold."
He closed with a pastoral reading inviting us to purify the gaze of young people and to educate in faith by looking and helping others to see, before posing to the assembly four questions for personal reflection on one's own vision of religious life, silent prayer, contemplation, and the way of sharing this vocation to become "sons of the Cross."
That same day, we also discovered today’s ‘Children of the Cross’ through the work with migrants in Poitiers, with testimonies from guests from Sri Lanka, Spain, Iraq and Togo, who live out their faith in the parish run by our SSCC brothers in Buxerolles, in the Diocese of Poitiers.
We closed the day with the celebration of the Eucharist, presided over by Gustavo van Humbeeck mo, who emphasized in his homily that we proclaim Jesus Christ, who in our frailty chose to draw near to us and called us to follow the way of the cross, which leads to life. Even when we feel troubled, perplexed, persecuted, or struck down, becoming aware that Christ dwells within us keeps us from falling into anguish, despair, or a sense of abandonment: Christ always offers us another perspective on frailty — a frailty that can only be appreciated through the eyes of mercy.
07/26/2026