"I never got tired of repeating those 'Hail Marys'"

In 1976, the great French writer and communist convert André Frossard published a book entitled Il y a un autre monde (There is another world).

Avoiding all conformism, mocking neither priests, nor devotions, nor pious images, Frossard contemplates the Virgin Mary in her dazzling purity. He writes: "The 'Hail Mary' is sometimes challenged even by preachers who would sooner believe in little green men from Mars than in angels.... How many times have we been warned against the excesses of a devotion whose emollient effects we like to describe and whose manifestations we like to mock, as if our century were prone to mystical excesses, and as if it were a clever thing to mock the miseries and sufferings of simple people, who only have these beads of hope to clutch in their hands...".

This ardent convert, illuminated by grace, also wrote: "In the afternoons, while I was waxing the wooden floors (when he was in the army), I would say my rosary, and it seemed so short to me. I didn't tire of repeating those 'Hail Marys' - which become wonderfully exploratory when you let them go to their destination, instead of holding them back with your rosary beads as if on a leash."

Josse ALZIN, in "La voix de Beauraing." Sept. 11, 1976.