French School of Spirituality - Disciples of Berulle

Disciples of Berulle

One of Berulle's disciples, Jean-Jacques Olier went on to found the Sulpician Order to run seminaries and train future priests in France, Canada and the United States, thus spreading the French school's influence to North America where it would dominate for the next three centuries. Olier's particular strain of the French school's thinking at its most pessimistic is captured in this quote:

"It is necessary for the soul to be in fear and distrust of self; it must testify to this distrust by avoiding occasions and encounters in which it may satisfy the heart by love and delight in some creature. It should make its pleasure and joy depend on sacrificing to Jesus all joy and pleasure which it may have apart from himself. And when taking part in those things in which by Providence it is obliged to be occupied, such as eating, drinking, and conversation with creatures, it must be sparing in all, must discard what is superfluous, and must renounce, in the use of them, the joy and pleasure to be found therein, uniting and giving itself to Jesus as often as it feels itself tempted to enjoy something apart from him and not himself." (Olier, Journée chrétienne, Part 1, as cited in David A. Fleming, The Fire and the Cloud: An Anthology of Catholic Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 272-73)

Another disciple of Berulle's was Jeanne Chezard de Matel who went on to found the Order of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament in Avignon, France. The express purpose of these cloistered women was to give adoration to Christ incarnate, making liturgy a matter of worshiping God in awe and mystery and through their presence make "an extension of the admirable Incarnation." John M. Lozano, Jeanne Chezard de Matel and the Sisters of the Incarnate Word, trans. Joseph Daries (Chicago: Claret Center for Resources in Spirituality, 1983), p. 72.