French novelist and Nobel laureate François Mauriac, who died 9/ 1970, was haunted by the moral failure that allowed his fellow citizens to collaborate in the deportation of the Jews and the capacity of Christians to look away.
Conversation
“Our hidden life with Christ ought to have some bearing on our lives as citizens. We cannot approve ... in the name of Caesar what the Lord condemns... or curses, whether it be failure to honor our word, exploitation of the poor, police torture, or regimes of terror.”
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His last work was a meditation on the life of Jesus, noting that God chose to be incarnate in a poor man, a worker, and a Jew. What would our world look like,he asked, if Christians gave proper credit to these facts?
“All tyrannies are founded upon contempt for man. When this temptation to contempt overcomes us, we must remember that Christ was a man like us and that He loved us. If He was one of us, then every man, no matter how miserable he be, has a capacity for God.”
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