Part 18

I craved courage and light, and sought them in such thoughts as these: A disaster has visited the world, and our beloved little Belgium, a nation so faithful in the great mass of her population to God, so upright in her patriotism, so noble in her King and Government, is the first sufferer. She bleeds; her sons are stricken down within her fortresses and upon her fields, in defense of her rights and of her territory.

Soon there will not be one Belgian family not in mourning. Why all this sorrow, my God? Lord, Lord, hast Thou forsaken us? Then I looked upon the Crucifix. I looked upon Jesus, most gentle and humble Lamb of God, crushed, clothed in His blood as in a garment, and I thought I heard from His own mouth the words which the psalmist uttered in His name: "O God, my God, look upon me; why hast Thou forsaken me? O my God, I shall cry, and Thou wilt not hear."

And forthwith the murmur died upon my lips, and I remembered what our Divine Saviour said in His gospel: "The disciple is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord." The Christian is the servant of a God who became man in order to suffer and to die.

To rebel against pain, to revolt against Providence because it permits grief and bereavement, is to forget whence we came, the school in which we have been taught, the example that each of us carries graven in the name of a Christian, which each of us honors at his hearth, contemplates at the altar of his prayers, and of which he desires that his tomb, the place of his last sleep, shall bear the sign.

My dearest brethren, I shall return by and by to the providential law of suffering, but you will agree that since it has pleased a God-made man who was holy, innocent, without stain, to suffer and to die for us who are sinners, who are guilty, who are perhaps criminals, it ill becomes us to complain whatever we may be called upon to endure. The truth is that no disaster on earth, striking creatures only, is comparable with that which our sins provoked and whereof God Himself chose to be the blameless victim.

Having recalled to mind this fundamental truth, I find it easier to summon you to face what has befallen us and to speak to you simply and directly of what is your duty and of what may be your hope. That duty I shall express in two words--patriotism and endurance.

My dearest brethren, I desire to utter in your name and my own the gratitude of those whose age, vocation, and social conditions cause them to benefit by the heroism of others without bearing in it any active part.

When, immediately on my return from Rome, I went to Havre to greet our Belgian, French, and English wounded; when, later, at Malines, at Louvain, at Antwerp, it was given to me to take the hands of those brave men who carried a bullet in their flesh, a wound on their forehead, because they had marched to the attack of the enemy or borne the shock of his onslaught, it was a word of gratitude to them that rose to my lips. "O valiant friends," I said, "it was for us, it was for each one of us, it was for me, that you risked your lives and are now in pain. I am moved to tell you of my respect, of my thankfulness, to assure you that the whole nation knows how much she is in debt to you."

For in truth our soldiers are our saviors.

A first time, at Liege, they saved France; a second time, in Flanders, they arrested the advance of the enemy upon Calais. France and England know it; and Belgium stands before them both, and before the entire world, as a nation of heroes.

Never before in my whole life did I feel so proud to be a Belgian as when, on the platforms of French stations, and halting a while in Paris, and visiting London, I was witness of the enthusiastic admiration our allies feel for the heroism of our army. Our King is, in the esteem of all, at the very summit of the moral scale. He is doubtless the only man who does not recognize that fact, as, simple as the simplest of his soldiers, he stands in the trenches and puts new courage, by the serenity of his face, into the hearts of those of whom he requires that they shall not doubt of their country. The foremost duty of every Belgian citizen at this hour is gratitude to the army.

If any man had rescued you from shipwreck or from a fire, you would assuredly hold yourselves bound to him by a debt of everlasting thankfulness. But it is not one man, it is 250,000 men who fought, who suffered, who fell for you so that you might be free, so that Belgium might keep her independence, her dynasty, her patriotic unity; so that after the vicissitudes of battle she might rise nobler, purer, more erect, and more glorious than before.

Pray daily, my brethren, for these 250,000 and for their leaders to victory; pray for our brothers in arms; pray for the fallen; pray for those who are still engaged; pray for the recruits who are making ready for the fight to come.

In your name I send them the greeting of our fraternal sympathy and our assurance that not only do we pray for the success of their arms and for the eternal welfare of their souls, but that we also accept for their sake all the distress, whether physical or moral, that falls to our own share in the oppression that hourly besets us, and all that the future may have in store for us, in humiliation for a time, in anxiety, and in sorrow. In the day of final victory we shall all be in honor; it is just that today we should all be in grief.

To judge by certain rumors that have reached me, I gather that from districts that have had least to suffer some bitter words have arisen toward our God, words which, if spoken with cold calculation, would not be far from blasphemous.

Oh, all too easily do I understand how natural instinct rebels against the evils that have fallen upon Catholic Belgium. The spontaneous thought of mankind is ever that virtue should have its instantaneous crown and injustice its immediate retribution.

But the ways of God are not our ways, the Scripture tells us. Providence gives free course, for a time measured by Divine wisdom, to human passions and the conflict of desires. God, being eternal, is patient. The last word is the word of mercy, and it belongs to those who believe in love. "Why art thou sad, O my soul? and why dost thou disquiet me? Quare tristis es anima, et quare conturbas me?" Hope in God. Bless Him always. Is He not thy Saviour and thy God? Spera in Deo quoniam adhuc confitebor illi, salutare vultus mei et Deus meus.

When holy Job, whom God presented as an example of constancy to the generations to come, had been stricken, blow upon blow, by Satan, with the loss of his children, of his goods, of his health, his enemies approached him with provocations to discouragement; his wife urged upon him a blasphemy and a curse. "Dost thou still continue in thy simplicity? Curse God, and die." But the man of God was unshaken in his confidence. "And he said to her: Thou hast spoken like one of the foolish women: if we have received good things at the hand of God, why should we not receive evil? Dominus dedit, Dominus abstulit; sicut Domino placuit ita factum est. Sit nomen Domini benedictum." And experience proved that saintly one to be right. It pleased the Lord to recompense, even here below, His faithful servant. "The Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. And for his sake God pardoned his friends."

Better than any other man, perhaps, do I know what our unhappy country has undergone. Nor will any Belgian, I trust, doubt of what I suffer in my soul, as a citizen and as a Bishop, in sympathy with all this sorrow. These last four months have seemed to me age long. By thousands have our brave ones been mowed down. Wives, mothers are weeping for those they shall not see again; hearths are desolate; dire poverty spreads, anguish increases.

At Malines, at Antwerp the people of two great cities have been given over, the one for six hours, the other for thirty-four hours, to a continuous bombardment, to the throes of death.

I have traversed the greater part of the districts most terribly devastated in my diocese, and the ruins I beheld, and the ashes, were more dreadful than I, prepared by the saddest of forebodings, could have imagined.

Other parts of my diocese, which I have not had time to visit, have in like manner been laid waste. Churches, schools, asylums, hospitals, convents in great numbers are in ruins. Entire villages have all but disappeared. At Werchter-Wackerzeel, for instance, out of 380 homes 130 remain. At Tremeloo two-thirds of the village are overthrown. At Bueken, out of 100 houses 20 are standing. At Schaffen, 189 houses out of 200 are destroyed; 11 still stand. At Louvain the third part of the buildings are down; 1,074 dwellings have disappeared. On the town land and in the suburbs 1,823 houses have been burned.

In this dear City of Louvain, perpetually in my thoughts, the magnificent Church of St. Peter will never recover its former splendor. The ancient College of St. Ives, the art schools, the consular and commercial schools of the university, the old markets, our rich library with its collections, its unique and unpublished manuscripts, its archives, its gallery of great portraits of illustrious rectors, chancellors, professors, dating from the time of its foundation, which preserved for masters and students alike a noble tradition, and were an incitement in their studies, all this accumulation of intellectual, of historic, and of artistic riches, the fruit of the labors of five centuries--all is in the dust.

Many a parish lost its pastor. There is now sounding in my ears the sorrowful voice of an old man, of whom I asked whether he had had mass on Sunday in his battered church. "It is two months," he said, "since we had a church." The parish priest and the curate had been interned in a concentration camp.

Thousands of Belgian citizens have in like manner been deported to the prisons of Germany, to Munsterlagen, to Celle, to Magdeburg. At Munsterlagen alone, 3,100 civil prisoners were numbered. History will tell of the physical and moral torments of their long martyrdom.

Hundreds of innocent men were shot. I possess no complete necrology; but I know that there were ninety-one shot at Aerschot and that there, under pain of death, their fellow-citizens were compelled to dig their graves. In the Louvain group of communes 176 persons, men and women, old men and sucklings, rich and poor, in health and sickness, were shot or burned.

In my diocese alone I know that thirteen priests or religious were put to death.

One of these, the parish priest of Gelrode, suffered, I believe, a veritable martyrdom. I made a pilgrimage to his grave, and amid the little flock which so lately he had been feeding with the zeal of an apostle, there did I pray to him that from the height of Heaven he would guard his parish, his diocese, his country.