In the Footsteps of St. Louis Marie de Montfort

"Footsteps Online"

Autumn 2000 (Volume 5, Issue 3)

"And they recognised him in the breaking of bread" (Luke 24:35)

Jesus cancelled out all barriers by the simple choice of those with whom He ate.

He is found in the house of Levi with public sinners, but He is also found in the house of Simon the Pharisee. Into that 'holy place' He empowers a public prostitute to make her way for forgiveness. He is found in the house of Martha and Mary at Bethany where He shares in ordinary human friendship ... and in the fisherman's cottage of Simon Peter where He embodies Wisdom's healing presence … and at the Last Supper He finds a way to be present in the breaking of bread and in the drinking of wine, across all the limits of time, space, nationality, tribe and caste. Jesus as Wisdom Incarnate transcends the artificial barriers of the social system into which He was born. Jesus embodies in His very life the ultimate symbol of feeding the multitudes and multiplying the bread. Finally, at Emmaus after the Resurrection the disciples recognise Him in the breaking of bread!

Montfort understood this symbolic gesture of Jesus Wisdom and lived it to the full.

He shared food with everyone along the way, and He did so in a variety of inventive ways. He took food from his parents' table and took it outside to the beggars. Or he did the opposite: he led a band of hungry people into his parents' house. He organised the inmates of the poorhouse of Poitiers to share their food fairly: he persuaded the rich to feed the poor by taking a donkey and two baskets out into the street of that same city to bring back the surplus of the merchants and nobles to the poorhouse. He insisted that Marie Louise Trichet, first Daughter of Wisdom, undergo the discipleship of eating each day among the inmates of the poorhouse. He organised parishes to feed the poor during each day of the mission. He brought Madame d'Orion down to a barn to learn what it meant to eat among the poor. And sometimes he brought a poor person up to her chateau to eat at the table of the rich.

No one of his century succeeded as much as Montfort did in breaking down the false boundaries between insiders and outsiders by the simple means of sharing a meal and the breaking of bread.

In the light of this, Pontchâteau became Wisdom's banquet and the triumph of Montfort's life. For fifteen months people worked free of charge on the Calvary and everyday all of them were fed. Some days there were as many as five hundred people working on the project. The poor brought their black bread and shared it. The middle class smallholders and farmers were approached over and over again during this year and three months for help in feeding the crowd.

Elegant ladies and gentlemen arrived, removed their fine clothes and laboured side by side with the peasants. No doubt they also contributed substantially to the feeding of the people. Most accounts of Montfort's multiplying grain or bread cluster around this monumental feeding of the multitudes at Pontchâteau. Just as the crucifixion of Jesus could not take away the knowing of Him in the breaking of bread, so the destruction of the Calvary at Pontchâteau could never take away the faith and love left in the depths of the hearts of the people by this prolonged and lived Eucharistic experience.

Sr. Ann Neilsen DW

You might like to reflect further on the following:

  • I am the Bread of Life (John 6:35)
  • I am the true Vine (John 15:1,5)