February 20, 1888

As a generation of intellectuals struggled to assess  the horror of a second world war, one light in their thinking was the writing of Georges Bernanos (February 20,  1888 to July 5 1948 ). Bernanos,  unsituatable on a political spectrum,  blamed a spiritual rot for the quick collapse of France in 1940. The author of Diary of a Country Priest (1936) wrote there:

Comforting truths...[are really] condolences.The Word of God is a red-hot iron...you daren't get hold of it with both hands...the priest who descends from a pulpit of Truth, with a mouth like a hen's vent, a little hot but pleased with himself, he's not been preaching; at best he's been purring like a tabby-cat. Mind you, that can happen to us all, we're all half-asleep...And mind you, many a fellow who waves his arms and sweats like a furniture-remover isn't necessarily more awakened than the rest....I simply mean that when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.

In his book Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, quotes our subject to the effect there are:

millions of saints in the world known only to God,...and who resemble real saints much as an alley cat resembles a Persian or a Siamese that has won first prize in contests....

Von Balthasar points out these alley cats are the favorite saints of Bernanos, and that Charles Pequy is in this category. Here are careful words, which I believe are those of Bernanos:

I don't exactly hold Péguy for a saint, but he's a man who, although dead, remains within speaking range, and even closer....