Jean Sangnier, a French World War II resistance hero and son of Sillon founder, Marc Sangnier, has died at the age of 99.

He was buried Wednesday after a funeral at the St Thomas Aquinas Church in Paris’s 7th District.

During World War II, Sangnier together with Emilien Amaury and others founded the so-called Groupe de Lille (or Groupe de Rue de Lille), one of the first organised resistance groups against the German occupation. One of the first tasks of the group was to work with another war hero, later executed by the Germans, Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, who had been given the mission by General de Gaulle to set up the first radio links between occupied France and the free French forces in London.

Jean Sangnier also printed a range of clandestine resistance publications, including Défense de la France, Résistance, the Catholic paper Témoignage chrétien, as well as the communist paper L’Humanité. He also published the speeches of General de Gaulle.

All this from a covert printery located literally metres from the Abwehr, the headquarters of German military intelligence in France.

After surviving the war, Jean Sangnier went on to co-found the daily newspaper Ouest-France and became director of a well-known magazine, Marie-France.

And in 1990, he launched the Institut Marc Sangnier, named for his father, who had founded the Catholic lay movement, Le Sillon, or The Furrow.

St Francis behind the plough in the logo of the Sillon (Furrow) movement

Little known today, even in France, the Sillon, which existed from 1894 until 1910, was later described by the future Cardinal Joseph Cardijn as the “greatest lay initiative since the (French) Revolution”.

And the future Pope John XXIII, who as a young priest had heard Marc Sangnier speak in Rome in 1904, would also write that Sangnier senior’s “personality and his political and social activities are the most vivid memories of my sacerdotal youth”.

Marc Sangnier’s Sillon movement only existed from around 1894 when it began as a student group known as the Crypt at the Stanislas College in Paris, until 1910, when a letter from Pope Pius X to the French demanded that Sangnier and his confreres resign from the leadership of the Sillon and hand control to the diocesan bishops. Sangnier and colleagues did indeed resign but the result was the almost instantaneous collapse of the movement.

Nevertheless, the heritage of the Sillon lived on in many other movements. Cardijn’s see-judge-act methodology, which became the mainstay of later movements such as the Young Christian Workers and Young Christian Students and the MIJARC, was largely borrowed from the Sillon’s own “method of democratic education”.

In fact, the Sillon was the prototype for these later movements which emerged under the papacy of Pope Pius XI. Nor was it an accident that it was Pope John XXIII whose encyclical Mater et Magistra formally adopted the see-judge-act method as a part of Catholic social teaching and practice.

Marc Sangnier never got the credit for the role that the Sillon had played in the emergence of the later movements, although Cardijn certainly recognized it.

“It is the privilege and the reward of the sower of the ideal of life to be unable to limit the field that he seeds or to constrain the range of his fertile gesture. The winds of the air and the birds of the sky carry off this seed and deposit it sometimes far away, in a field where God’s makes it fruitful and multiplies it,” Cardijn told Marc Sangnier in 1921 in an explicit (but unpublished) acknowledgment of his influence.

In any event, Jean Sangnier was very pleased when I published an article in 1997 detailing the role that the Sillon had played in the emergence of the YCW and other lay movements, including the American Catholic Worker.

As with his father, Jean Sangnier’s achievements have often remained in the shadows. All the more reason to offer this small tribute to a man who was in effect the last living link to the Sillon.

- Stefan Gigacz

SOURCE

Last link to the Sillon disappears at 99 (Give us this day)

This month marks the 50^th anniversary of Pope John XXIII's encyclical Mater et Magistra, which in its turn recalled the 70^th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's groundbreaking social encyclical Rerum Novarum on the condition of the workers.

Few today, however, will remember that it was Joseph Cardijn who proposed the writing of this encyclical to Pope John during an audience he had with the Pope in March 1960. At the pope's request, Cardijn prepared a twenty page dossier of ideas and suggestions for the envisaged encyclical.

Fourteen months later on 15 May 1961, even Cardijn was surprised when Pope John published Mater et Magistra which specifically adopted the famous See – Judge – Act method that he had championed throughout his life.

“There are three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice,” Pope John wrote (Paragraph 236) in the encyclical.

“First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgement on it in the light of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done to implement these principles. These are the three stages that are usually expressed in the three terms: look, judge, act.”

Acting upon Cardijn's inspiration, Pope John thus specifically incorporated the “See – Judge - Act” method into Catholic social teaching and practice.

Four years later in an address to the Second Vatican Council, Cardijn, now a Cardinal, would insist on the importance of this legacy.

“I have shown confidence in [young people’s] freedom so as to better educate that freedom”, Cardijn told the Council in an address on religious freedom.

“I helped them to see, judge and act by themselves, by undertaking social and cultural action themselves, freely obeying authorities in order to become adult witnesses of Christ and the Gospel, conscious of being responsible for their sisters and brothers in the whole world,” he said (20 September 1965) in a phrase that recalls the famous definition of democracy adopted by the Sillon (Furrow) movement of Marc Sangnier as the system of “social organisation that tends to maximise the civic consciousness and responsibility of each person”.

Indeed, Cardijn's “see, judge, act” formula neatly summarised the “method of democratic education” in “study circles” that the Sillon had pioneered in France at the turn of the 20^th century.

"Every citizen must know the state of the nation; when the situation is evil, he must seek solutions; and lastly, having found the solutions, he must act,” wrote Marc Sangnier outlining the enquiry method used by the Sillon as early as 1899.

But it was Cardijn who perfected the method and made it the foundation stone of the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement from where it would be adopted later by so many other lay apostolate groups and movements.

“Leaders and members learning to see, judge, and act; to see the problem of their temporal and eternal destiny to judge the present situation, the problems, the contradiction, the demands of an eternal and temporal destiny; to act with a view to the conquest of their temporal and eternal destiny,” as he told delegates to the First International Congress of the YCW in 1935.

Cardijn indeed saw himself as a teacher and educator of young workers. Fifty years after Mater et Magistra, we can see clearly today that he was also a great teacher of the whole Church.

As we celebrate the half century of the “See – Judge – Act encyclical”, we renew the call made in 1998 by former leaders of the International YCW for Cardijn to be recognised as a “Doctor of the Church”.

Cardijn Community International

20 May 2011