The Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964) is one of the great spiritual figures of twentieth-century France: a young atheist turned mystic, a poet turned social worker, a woman who remained lay "in the very midst of the world" and chose to live the Gospel where no one expected God — in the heart of Ivry-sur-Seine, the working-class, Communist banlieue of Paris.[1][2] She remained there for thirty years, praying and serving the poor among a people largely won over to Marxism, convinced that that street, that ordinary world, was for her the very place of her holiness.[3][4]
Converted at twenty after a teenage years of militant unbelief — at seventeen she had written a text with the provocative title "God is dead… long live death" — Madeleine Delbrêl experienced in 1924 a dazzlement before God that never left her until her death.[5][6] From that encounter was born an original spirituality: neither retreat into the cloister nor disembodied activism, but prayer at the heart of ordinary life, a holiness of the "people of the streets" joining inseparably the love of God and the concrete service of one's brother.[7][8]
This article belongs to the Ignispedia series devoted to the twentieth-century venerables and servants of God, alongside Venerable Marthe Robin, Venerable Fulton Sheen and Venerable Jérôme Lejeune. Like them, Madeleine Delbrêl shows that holiness is not reserved to monasteries: it is played out in a lay life, offered entirely to God in the midst of men.
The child of Mussidan and the young atheist
A birth in Périgord (1904)
Anne-Marie Madeleine Delbrêl was born on 24 October 1904 in Mussidan, a small town in the Dordogne, in the Périgord.[9][10] Her father, Jules Delbrêl, was a railway employee — his father and paternal grandfather had been railwaymen — a cultured man, gifted in letters and sensitive to art; her mother was more fragile and anxious.[11] Madeleine was an only child, pampered and precocious. The family followed her father's postings and eventually settled in Paris.
Nothing in this milieu predisposed the little girl to faith: her parents were not believers, and the religious education she received remained purely formal.[12] She would make her First Communion without conviction and soon abandon all practice.
The Sorbonne, poetry and artists' circles
A brilliant teenager, Madeleine studied philosophy and the arts; she frequented the literary and artistic milieus of 1920s Paris, wrote poems — she published a collection, La Route (The Road), at around seventeen — and proved a gifted pianist.[13][14] She thirsted for the absolute, for beauty, for intensity; but that thirst, she then believed, could be quenched without God.
"God is dead… long live death": a teenager's atheism
At around fifteen, Madeleine declared herself an atheist. She experienced life as absurd and, in her own words, "professed atheism".[15] At seventeen, she wrote a manifesto-like text with the chilling title "God is dead… long live death", in which she radicalised her negation: since God does not exist, all is vain, and death alone reigns.[16][17]
As she would later re-read her atheism, the world then appeared to her as an immense futility, with no other outcome but death.[18]
That atheism was no lukewarm affair: it was a thought-through, almost despairing position taken by a gifted young girl who had stared nothingness in the face. It is precisely that seriousness which would make her conversion so radical — and which would later make her a lucid interlocutor of her century's unbelief.
The conversion: dazzled by God (1924)
The shock and the search
Two trials shook the young woman in the early 1920s: the progressive blindness of her father, whom she tenderly loved, and the decision of her fiancé, Jean Maydieu, to enter the Dominicans — a departure experienced as an abandonment.[19] But above all, Madeleine met Christian students who astonished her: intelligent, joyful, free, they believed in God without naivety. The contrast unsettled her and forced her to reopen a question she had thought closed.
"I decided to pray"
Rather than reasoning endlessly, Madeleine made an existential wager: she decided to pray, to see. She would leave a testimony of it that has become famous:
"I decided to pray. […] Since then, by reading and reflecting, I have found God; but by praying, I believed that God found me and that he is the living truth, and that one can love him as one loves a person." — Madeleine Delbrêl, on her conversion[20]
Everything is there, in that sentence: Madeleine's conversion is not first a conclusion of reason, but an encounter — God is not a theorem but someone, a "living truth" whom one can love. She would date precisely to 29 March 1924 that "year of her conversion"[21] and keep until her death that dazzlement before God.[22][23]
According to the Zenit article that announced her declaration as venerable, a few months before her death she was still saying she had remained as though dazzled by God since her conversion.[24]
The temptation of Carmel and the choice of the world
Like so many fervent converts, Madeleine first thought of Carmel: leaving everything for enclosure and pure prayer, in the manner of St Thérèse of Lisieux, whom she admired.[25] But gradually another certainty took shape in her: her place was not behind a grille, but in the world, among those who do not know God. She would remain lay — neither a religious, nor quite "like the others" — consecrated to God in the heart of the city.[26]
Ivry-sur-Seine: a mystic in Marxist land
The 1933 settling and the little community
In 1933, Madeleine Delbrêl settled with a few women friends in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the southern banlieue of Paris — one of France's first Communist-run municipalities, administered since 1925 by mayor Georges Marrane[27][28]. The choice was deliberate and daring: to live the Gospel not apart from the working-class, atheist world, but at its heart, as a praying, fraternal presence.
Around her grew a small community of laywomen, celibate, resolved to live together a life of charity and prayer while keeping a secular job: this is the group that would be called "la Charité" (Charity), later the Équipes Madeleine Delbrêl (Madeleine Delbrêl Teams).[29][30] Settled first in a parish social centre near the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, then, from 1935, at 11 rue Raspail, these women wore no habit and did not withdraw from the world: they were, in the fine phrase, "neither lay nor religious".[31][32]
A social worker at the service of all
To live among the poor, one must share their condition. Madeleine earned a social-work diploma and practised that profession, in pioneering fashion, at the service of the municipality of Ivry, during and after the Second World War.[33][34] She organised relief, visited families, tended to concrete miseries — housing, sickness, unemployment — never separating social service from Christian charity.
Her goodness and her openness to all, believers or not, left a lasting mark on the town.[35] Communists and Catholics alike respected her; she never set the proclamation of God against the service of man, but held the two together in a single movement of love.
"We ask you, Lord, for the bread of doing your will, today and every day of our lives." — the spirit of Madeleine Delbrêl's daily prayer[36]
"Marxist city, mission land"
In 1957, Madeleine published Ville marxiste, terre de mission (Marxist City, Mission Land), the fruit of more than twenty years of experience.[37][38] The title says her whole project: the Marxist world is not an enemy to be fought from afar, but a mission land — a people to be loved, to be understood, and before whom the Christian must give an account of his hope.
Madeleine took Marxism seriously; she knew its texts, measured its power of attraction over the workers, and took apart its dead ends. Her answer was neither fear nor compromise, but witness: showing, by a life given, that God is not the "opium of the people" but the source of the only liberation that counts. She would also publish a study on Les formes contemporaines de l'athéisme (Contemporary Forms of Atheism, 1962), a sign of that lucid attention to the unbelief of her time.[39]
A spirituality of the street
"We, the people of the street"
The heart of Madeleine Delbrêl's spirituality lies in a founding text, written as early as 1938, which would give its title to the great posthumous collection Nous autres, gens des rues (We, the People of the Streets).[40][41] In it she overturns a received idea: holiness is found not only in the desert or the monastery, but in the most ordinary life — that of streets, work, neighbours.
"We, the people of the street, believe with all our strength that this street, that this world where God has placed us, is for us the place of our holiness." — Madeleine Delbrêl, Nous autres, gens des rues (We, the People of the Streets)[42]
The street thus becomes a cloister: a place of encounter with God as much as with men. That intuition brings her close to the "little way" of St Thérèse of Lisieux — the holiness of little things done out of love — and to the long Catholic tradition that refuses to reserve the interior life to an elite.
Prayer at the heart of the ordinary world
That presence to the world has nothing of activism about it: it springs from an intense life of prayer. Madeleine Delbrêl was first of all a woman of prayer; action, in her eyes, is worth only what is plugged into contemplation. She refused to separate prayer and service: the two are one in love.
"Our steps walk along one street, but our heart beats for the whole world. That is why our small acts, in which we cannot tell action from prayer, unite so perfectly the love of God and the love of our brothers." — Madeleine Delbrêl, Nous autres, gens des rues (We, the People of the Streets)[43]
In her, contemplation does not flee the real: it passes through it. It is a spirituality of abandonment and availability, ordered entirely to the will of God received in the present moment — a path close to the one described in the Ignispedia dossier How to grow in abandonment to God.
The ball of obedience
Madeleine's own genius is to join that depth to a rare joy and humour. Her most famous poem, Le Bal de l'obéissance (The Ball of Obedience, written around 1949), compares the Christian life to a dance: obeying God is not stiffening oneself, but letting oneself be led by a beloved partner.[44][45]
"To be a good dancer, with you as elsewhere, one must not know where it leads. One must follow, be cheerful, be light, and above all not be stiff." — Madeleine Delbrêl, Le Bal de l'obéissance (The Ball of Obedience)[46]
"Make us live our life, not as a game of chess where everything is calculated, not as a match where everything is hard, not as a theorem that racks our brains, but as an endless feast where our encounter with you is renewed, as a ball, as a dance, in the arms of your grace, in the universal music of love." — Madeleine Delbrêl, Le Bal de l'obéissance (The Ball of Obedience)[47]
That image of the dance says all her interior freedom: where others would make obedience a constraint, she makes of it a light joy, a trust that accepts "turning, going sideways", stopping, without ever asking God for explanations of his steps.
The ecclesial trial: the worker-priest crisis
Madeleine's fidelity to the Church was tested by a major crisis of French Catholicism: that of the worker-priests. From the post-war years, priests had chosen to work in factories to evangelise the working world; but their commitment, sometimes sliding towards trade-union and political action close to Communism, worried Rome.[48]
The Holy Office intervened — notably with the decree of 1 July 1949 condemning active collaboration with Communist parties, then with a series of measures tightening the supervision of worker-priests: a ban on factory placements for seminarians on 27 July 1953, the closure of the Mission de France seminary on 7 September 1953, then, on 19 January 1954, the limitation of worker-priests' labour to three hours a day and a ban on all trade-union responsibility.[49] Those decisions, taken in the wake of Pope Pius XI's encyclical Divini Redemptoris (1937), which called Communism "intrinsically perverse", provoked sharp tensions and heartbreaks in the Church of France, where many felt disowned.
Madeleine, who knew the Marxist terrain better than anyone, could have balked. She chose instead filial obedience — without bitterness, but without naivety either. It is in that climate that Madeleine composed, from 1949, Le Bal de l'obéissance (The Ball of Obedience)[50]: not a resigned submission, but a joyful, free way of "dancing" God's will as handed on by the Church, even when it runs counter.[51] Where others broke away, she remained — persuaded that obedience, lived out of love, is fruitful and not sterile, keeping both her freedom of judgement on the Marxist terrain and her obedience to Roman orientations.[52]
Death and posterity
Death at her desk (1964)
Madeleine Delbrêl died suddenly on 13 October 1964, in Ivry-sur-Seine, struck down by a cerebral haemorrhage — she was found dead at her work desk, pen in hand, eleven days before her sixtieth birthday.[53][54] A discreet death, in the image of her hidden life: without fanfare, in the midst of labour, among the people she had chosen to serve.
The posthumous writings
In her lifetime, Madeleine had published little. It was after her death that her work was gathered and revealed, disclosing the scope of a first-rate spiritual mind. There appeared in particular Nous autres, gens des rues (We, the People of the Streets, 1966) and La joie de croire (The Joy of Believing, 1968), soon translated into many languages.[55] Her complete works are published today, and her spirituality of the "holiness of ordinary people" nourishes retreats, movements and readers far beyond French borders.
Pope Francis himself quoted and recommended Madeleine Delbrêl as a model of faith lived at the heart of the world, a Christian woman who knew how to "follow Christ" in everyday banality.[56]
The cause: servant of God, then venerable
The beatification cause of Madeleine Delbrêl was introduced as early as 1987 in the diocese of Créteil, on the initiative of Bishop François Frétellière.[57][58] The diocesan inquiry, conducted by Father Pierre Branchereau, ran from September 1993 to October 1994; in 1996, Madeleine was declared Servant of God.[59][60]
On 26 January 2018, Pope Francis authorised the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to promulgate the decree recognising the heroic nature of her virtues: Madeleine Delbrêl was henceforth Venerable.[61][62] As with every venerable, beatification now requires the recognition of a miracle obtained through her intercession.
| Stage of the cause | Date | Actor |
|---|---|---|
| Death of Madeleine Delbrêl | 13 October 1964 | Ivry-sur-Seine |
| Introduction of the cause | 1987 | Diocese of Créteil (Bishop Frétellière) |
| Diocesan inquiry | Sept. 1993 – Oct. 1994 | Diocese of Créteil |
| Declared Servant of God | 1996 | Diocese of Créteil |
| Decree of heroic virtue (Venerable) | 26 January 2018 | Pope Francis |
| Beatification | To come (miracle required) | — |
To go further
- Read How to grow in abandonment to God: confident abandonment to God's will, which Madeleine Delbrêl "danced" all her life in her Ball of Obedience.
- Discover St Thérèse of Lisieux: the "little way" of the holiness of little things, of which Madeleine's spirituality of the street is a lay, urban sister.
- Read the Venerable Marthe Robin: another great twentieth-century French lay mystic, whose radiance, like Madeleine's, sprang from prayer and self-gift.
- Read the Venerable Fulton Sheen and the Venerable Jérôme Lejeune: two other twentieth-century venerables who, each in his own way, carried the Gospel to the heart of the modern world.
- Compare with the Servant of God Élisabeth Leseur: another French laywoman radiating the faith in an unbelieving milieu, a few decades earlier.
- Keep the essential: the Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, a young atheist converted in 1924 and left dazzled by God, chose to live for thirty years in Ivry-sur-Seine, one of France's first Communist-run towns, as a social worker, poet and mystic. Her spirituality of the street — "this world where God has placed us is the place of our holiness" — joins inseparably prayer, the service of the poor and mission in unbelieving land. Dead at her work desk in 1964, she was declared venerable by Pope Francis on 26 January 2018.
Notes and References
Wikipedia (EN), "Madeleine Delbrêl": en.wikipedia.org. Reference encyclopedia entry — born 24 October 1904 in Mussidan (Dordogne), father and grandfather railwaymen, philosophy and art studies at the Sorbonne, atheism at fifteen and the "God is dead — long live [death]" text at seventeen, conversion around 1924 (fiancé entered the Dominicans, father's blindness), settling in Ivry-sur-Seine (Communist municipality), social-work diploma and profession, works (Ville marxiste, terre de mission 1957, Les formes contemporaines de l'athéisme 1962, Nous autres, gens des rues 1966, La joie de croire 1968), death from a cerebral haemorrhage on 13 October 1964, cause opened by the diocese of Créteil, declared venerable on 26 January 2018 by Pope Francis. Used for cross-checking biographical dates and facts.
1 5 9 11 12 13 15 16 18 19 25 33 37 39 53 55 62Official website — madeleine-delbrel.net, "Une vie passionnée / Biographie" ("A passionate life / Biography"): madeleine-delbrel.net. Official source of the Association of the Friends of Madeleine Delbrêl — key dates (birth 1904, conversion 1924 presented as a dazzlement before God after meeting Christian students, commitment to scouting and to the poor from 1926, common-life project 1930-1932, settling in Ivry in 1933 and pioneering social-work profession, worker-priest crisis 1952-1954, publication of Ville marxiste, terre de mission in 1957, welcome at 11 rue Raspail, death on 13 October 1964), presentation "by turns poet, social worker and mystic, a woman of prayer and action". Used for the biographical thread and the Ivry setting.
2 4 8 14 23 28 34 36 38Madeleine Delbrêl, "La sainteté des gens ordinaires" ("The holiness of ordinary people"), excerpt from Nous autres, gens des rues (We, the People of the Streets, founding text written in 1938; posthumous collection Éditions du Seuil, 1966), reprinted in the Œuvres complètes (Complete Works), vol. VII, Éditions Nouvelle Cité, 2009, pp. 23-24 — full text verified on madeleine-delbrel.net and in the Orléans diocese dossier orleans.catholique.fr. Word-for-word verified source of the two quotations "Nous autres, gens de la rue, croyons de toutes nos forces que cette rue, que ce monde où Dieu nous a mis est pour nous le lieu de notre sainteté" and "Nos pas marchent dans une rue mais notre cœur bat dans le monde entier…".
3 7 40 42 43Zenit (French edition), "Madeleine Delbrêl déclarée « vénérable »" ("Madeleine Delbrêl declared 'venerable'", 27 January 2018): fr.zenit.org. Release on the recognition of heroic virtue — French laywoman (1904-1964), social worker, essayist and poet recognised as a Christian mystic, born in Mussidan, converted at twenty after a spiritual experience in Paris in 1924, thirty years in Ivry-sur-Seine (Communist municipality) where she founded the "Équipes Madeleine Delbrêl", favourable opinion of the cardinals on 16 January 2018 and signing of the decree by Pope Francis on 26 January 2018; the article reports that, a few months before her death, she said she had remained dazzled by God since her conversion (the journalist's wording, not verified in her writings). Used for the date of the declaration and the biographical summary.
6 10 17 22 24 30 54 61Madeleine Delbrêl, testimony on her conversion of 29 March 1924, quoted in Nous autres, gens des rues (We, the People of the Streets), Éditions du Seuil, coll. Foi Vivante, 1970, p. 251 (1995 ed., p. 203) — text verified on madeleine-delbrel.net. Reproduces the full testimony: "Je décidai de prier. (…) Dès la première fois je priai à genoux par crainte, encore, de l'idéalisme. Je l'ai fait ce jour-là et beaucoup d'autres jours et sans chronométrage. Depuis, lisant et réfléchissant, j'ai trouvé Dieu ; mais en priant j'ai cru que Dieu me trouvait et qu'il est la vérité vivante, et qu'on peut l'aimer comme on aime une personne." Used for the conversion quotation in the blockquote and the exact date.
20 21Journal Vies Consacrées, "« Ni laïque, ni religieuse », Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964)" ("'Neither lay nor religious', Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964)", vol. 90, 2018): vies-consacrees.be. Study of Madeleine's original status — consecrated in the world, neither cloistered religious nor mere laywoman, founder of a secular community form of life. Used to characterise her state of life.
26 32"Ceinture rouge" ("Red Belt"): fr.wikipedia.org — from the 1925 municipal elections, the PCF (French Communist Party) ran nine towns including Ivry-sur-Seine (Georges Marrane) and Saint-Denis (historian Emmanuel Bellanger); in 1935, it administered 26 communes of the Seine. Jacques Doriot, elected mayor of Saint-Denis in February 1931 on a Communist list (excluded from the PCF in 1934, mayor until 1937): fr.wikipedia.org. Used to correct "the only Communist municipality" to "one of the first Communist-run municipalities".
27Catholic Church in Ivry-sur-Seine, "Madeleine Delbrêl": ivry-eglise.catholique.fr. Local source — community of consecrated laywomen "la Charité", housed first in a parish social centre near the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste then, from 1935, at 11 rue Raspail, social-work profession, and the observation that "Madeleine profoundly marked the town of Ivry by her goodness and her openness to all, believers or not". Used for community life and the Ivry roots.
29 31 35Prie en Chemin / NDWeb (portal of the Ignatian family), spiritual sheets "Nous autres, gens des rues" and "Le Bal de l'obéissance": prieenchemin.org. Presentation of Madeleine Delbrêl (24.10.1904 – 13.10.1964) as "apostle of the 20th century, living and praying in the heart of the world, in the heart of a working-class neighbourhood", and full reproduction of both spiritual texts. Used for the verbatim text of the poems and the presentation of her urban mission.
41 45Madeleine Delbrêl, Le Bal de l'obéissance (The Ball of Obedience, in Nous autres, gens des rues), text reproduced on prieenchemin.org / NDWeb. Poem meditating on obedience as a dance — quotations "Pour être un bon danseur… il ne faut pas savoir où cela mène. Il faut suivre, être allègre, être léger, et surtout ne pas être raide" and "Faites-nous vivre notre vie… comme un bal, comme une danse, entre les bras de votre grâce, dans la musique universelle de l'amour". Written in the context of the 1949 tensions over collaboration with the Communists. Used for the blockquotes on the joy of obedience.
44 46 47 51Federica Cogo, "Madeleine Delbrêl et les prêtres-ouvriers" ("Madeleine Delbrêl and the worker-priests"), Revue Sources, 26 September 2016: revue-sources.org. Precise chronology of the worker-priest crisis — Holy Office decree of 1 July 1949 condemning collaboration with the Communists (in the wake of Pope Pius XI's encyclical Divini Redemptoris, 1937, calling Communism "intrinsically perverse"), ban on factory placements for seminarians on 27 July 1953, closure of the Mission de France seminary on 7 September 1953, limitation of worker-priests' labour to three hours a day and trade-union ban on 19 January 1954. Used for the section on the ecclesial trial.
48 49Federica Cogo, "Madeleine Delbrêl et les prêtres-ouvriers" ("Madeleine Delbrêl and the worker-priests"), Revue Sources, 26 September 2016: revue-sources.org. Establishes that Madeleine composed Le Bal de l'obéissance (The Ball of Obedience) in 1949, as a direct response to the Holy Office decree, and stresses that she held together her freedom of judgement on the Marxist terrain and her obedience to Roman orientations, without yielding to excessive specialisation in the worker apostolate. Used for the genesis of the poem and the freedom/obedience balance.
50 52RCF, "Le pape François invite à découvrir la spiritualité de la française Madeleine Delbrêl" ("Pope Francis invites the discovery of the spirituality of Frenchwoman Madeleine Delbrêl"): rcf.fr. Shows Pope Francis's recommendation of Madeleine Delbrêl's spirituality as a model of Christian life at the heart of the ordinary world. Used for posterity and contemporary influence.
56Diocese of Créteil, "Madeleine Delbrêl — Processus de béatification" ("Beatification process"): catholiques-val-de-marne.cef.fr. Chronology of the cause — introduction in 1987 by Bishop François Frétellière, diocesan inquiry commission (1990), inquiry conducted by Father Pierre Branchereau from September 1993 to October 1994, declaration as Servant of God in 1996, then venerable on 26 January 2018. Used for the table of the cause.
57 59Diocese of Créteil / cath.ch, dossier "Madeleine Delbrêl" and "Un nouveau postulateur pour la cause de Madeleine Delbrêl" ("A new postulator for Madeleine Delbrêl's cause"): cath.ch. Confirms the course of the cause in the diocese of Créteil and the title of Servant of God (1996), cross-checked with the diocese's official page. Used for cross-checking the cause dates.
58 60