The Heart(s) of Blessed Basil Moreau

Today is the feast of Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross. The celebration of a founder of a religious community takes on particular importance because a founder is the person whose life cast forward a vision for the whole future of that community. In a sense, the founder establishes the heart of the entire community–its life and movements and sensitivities all flow out of the founder. It is the same with the Catholic Church. With Jesus Christ as our founder, it is His love–which gives its own life for the life of the world, embodied in the Sacred Heart wounded on the Cross–which makes the Church what it is and makes Christians who we are. 

In Holy Cross, I believe we are blessed to have Fr. Moreau’s heart in our foundation because Moreau lived animated by one continuous, empowering truth: that God wills generously and particularly for our good. Divine Providence, as Fr. Moreau so often called it, was not an esoteric or ethereal concept. Providence for Moreau was as concrete as waking up in the morning. When we encounter Providence, we find it refreshing, restful, or perhaps difficult some days and unwanted on a cold winter morning where we’d rather stay where we are. But God does not leave us where we are. 

Father Moreau’s vision for himself was to travel the world, to be a missionary who spread the Gospel to the world. He just wanted to serve in some small role and then be replaced. Instead, prompted by God’s continual invitation, he found himself a seminary educator and a priest preaching to the local church to try to stir their hearts as his heart had been stirred. And this led him to uniting those priests with a group of teaching brothers and to envision a group of sisters who lived and taught alongside those men in what came to be the Congregation of Holy Cross (as well as three different women’s religious communities). While Moreau only made one major excursion in his life, his community continues to serve as missionaries across the globe.  

“‘Come, Follow me.’ It was the Lord Jesus calling us” (Constitutions of the Congregation of Holy Cross 1:1). These words which open Holy Cross’ rule of life were inspired by the way Moreau understood all of our Christian lives: as a response to the God who first loved us and called to us. Moreau understood what might be the most essential truth for Christian discipleship that we have first received the good news of God’s grace and now, in gratitude, we are to share it.  

From the beginning, Moreau created a symbol which was to represent Holy Cross: an anchor-cross with three hearts on it. The pairing of the cross and anchor draws on an early Christian tradition of an anchor representing hope, for the cross is to be our hope. That is the action of the Father who so loved the world that He gave us His Son and the Son who laid down His life for us, His friends, His loved ones, on the cross–this is to be our hope. Then, the three hearts were meant to represent the hearts of the Holy Family. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is, of course, the model par excellence. The Sacred Heart embodies the entirety of God’s love for humanity in its self-sacrifice, compassion, and mercy. About the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Fr. Moreau taught:

“Let us remember that the heart of Mary was the most tender and most charitable that can be imagined after that of the Savior, for it was the heart of a mother whom God himself was pleased to form as a pattern of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a mother He destined for His Son….While Jesus Christ offered Himself to His Father for our salvation, Mary offered Him also for the same end, and we were then so much the sole object of the thoughts of the Son and the mother that the Savior, turning upon her His dying eyes still filled with love, addressed her a last word, which was not of Himself or of her, but for us…Thus, enfolding us all in the person of St. John, He presented us to Mary, saying, ‘Woman, behold your son’” (Sermon on the Immaculate Heart of Mary). 

Father Moreau also extolled the essential transformational reality of Saint Joseph’s just heart as it rejoiced in the quiet, daily loves of his fatherhood of Jesus. Loving Jesus, Moreau preached, “made St. Joseph worthy to be one of the visible trinity that the house of Nazareth sheltered…These three persons, who represent so visibly the invisible Trinity, represent also the unity of God, for the three of them have morally but one heart” (Sermon on St. Joseph). This too was always Moreau’s will for the life and work of Holy Cross that all of us might participate in the visible life of the love of God in response to God’s Providential love for us. 

Father Moreau valued extremely the role of the heart in the Christian life, not because the Christian life is all ease and romance, but because of his confidence that God cared for each of us in our daily lives, in the movements of our heart. Father Moreau taught that God “does not disdain to avow that He is smitten with even our feeble hearts and loves them to the limit of jealousy...We know that He has promised to show Himself unveiled to the chaste heart, to be prodigal of blessings to the right of heart, to pour out His mercy to hearts that are tender and compassionate, and to pardon the contrite and humble heart” (Sermon on the Immaculate Heart of Mary).  

So, today on the feast of Bl. Basil Moreau, let us reflect on the depth of God’s Providential care for us in a real and practical way. Name the three most recent powerful movements of your heart. Take a moment. Do you have them? Good. Now, what were these movements like? Did you feel feeble? God is jealous for you. Were you faithful to your commitments? God will reveal Himself to you. Did you do what was right? Blessings will come. Were you tender or compassionate? God will fill you with mercy. Did you struggle with temptation or sin? If you can admit that, bring it to God, confess it, repent, God will forgive you. All of the movements of your heart are ultimately meant to be launching points for your response to God. Let us offer God everything we have in us, for everything we have is meant to help us to know, love, and serve God. 

Here is Moreau’s prayer of self-offering. Bl. Basil Moreau, pray with us: 

“If God has given me a mind, it is so that I may know Him. If He has given me a heart free to love, it is so that I may attach myself to Him. If He has given me limbs, health, and strength, it is so that I may use them in His strength and service. If I am all that I am, it is only for Him and I must strive unceasingly towards Him as my own center.”