Madeline Delbrel

By Sister Irene Hartman, OP
Holy Ones of Our Time

In a recent meeting of youth, a cardinal urged the audience to “take up the arduous battle of holiness” and he cited Madeline Delbrel as a model in the same category as St. Francis of Assisi and Pope John XXIII. The laywoman Madeline Delbrel has recently been beatified as a future saint. Madeline had been an example of a mission to the Church and an advocate of apostolic activity. At the age of 17, Madeline had called herself a strict atheist, living in an increasingly absurd world. She was even writing, “God is dead .... Long live death.” But she had a conversion at the age of 20 as a student in Parish.
“By reading and reflecting, I found God, or rather, God found me. By praying, I came to know that we can love Him in the same way we love a person.”
For the next 40 years, Madeline described herself as “a reporter of God’s eternal newness.” Her Christian faith was an all or nothing proposition. Her fortitude was compared to that of Joan of Arc; her mission to the Church to St. Therese; her apostolic activity to that of Dorothy Day.
In 1933, Madeline arrived in a Paris suburb which was a hot bed of Communism. She soon was on the city’s payroll in her work for the ordinary people of the streets. Madeline developed a special fondness for the worker priests and was disappointed when the Vatican forbade priests to work in factories. This strengthened her resolve in her apostolate and she spent much time in prayer. She loved solitude and silence was a part of her life.
“To find God is to find solitude .... Silence doesn’t mean running away, but rather recollecting ourselves in the open space of God.”
One of Madeline’s special interests was dialogue with Communists. She looked on them through the same lens that she looked at God’s poor: as neighbors and persons created in God’s own likeness. She could see genuine love in the aspirations of the Communist for the working class. Since she followed the mandate to be evangelized by the poor, the goodness imbedded in the Communist ideals could not be rejected either. Madeline believed that in a deep Communist milieu there is no separation between Christian life and apostolic life. She addressed her neighbors by their first name and was able to assist many with their personal problems.
Madeline labored with one person at a time to carry the force of Jesus’ Gospel into the hearts and minds of those she encountered day by day.