April 16, 2014

Andre Frossard and the Time a Series of Miracles Unfolded

Andre Frossard was a committed atheist. His father was one of the founders of the French Communist Party and had been elected its first general secretary. When Andre was 20 years old, on July 8, 1935, he happened into a Catholic church, looking for a friend. In a book he wrote years later, God Exists, I Have Met Him, he explained what took place next:

“My gaze passed from the shadows to the light…from the faithful gathered there, to the nuns, to the altar…and came to rest above the second candle burning to the left of the Cross (unaware that I was standing in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament). And at that point, suddenly a series of miracles unfolded whose indescribable force shattered in an instant the absurd being that I was, to bring to birth the amazed child that I had never been … At first the hint of these words, ‘Spiritual Life’ came to me … as if they had been pronounced in a whisper next to me … then came a great light … a world, another world of a radiance and a destiny that in one stroke cast our world among the fragile shadows of unfulfilled dreams … of which I felt all the sweetness … a sweetness that was active and upsetting beyond every form of violence, capable of breaking the hardest stone and that which is even harder than stone – the human heart. Its overflowing eruption, so complete, was accompanied by a joy which is the exultation of the saved, the joy of the shipwrecked who is picked up just in time. These sensations, which I find difficult to translate into a language which cannot capture these ideas and images, were all simultaneous … Everything is dominated by the Presence … of Him of Whom I would never be able to write His name without fear of harming its tenderness, of Him before Whom I have had the good fortune to be a forgiven child who takes up to discover that everything is a gift … God existed and was present… one thing only surprised me: The Eucharist! Not that it seemed incredible, but it amazed me that Divine Charity would have come upon this silent way to communicate Himself, and above all that He would choose to become bread, which is the staple of the poor, and the food preferred by children… O Divine Love, eternity will be too short to speak of You.”

Frossard would later become a columnist for the French newspaper, L’Aurore, work at the BBC and author a number of books. During all of these years and until his death in 1995, Frossard remained devout in his faith. That one experience in 1935 changed him for life.

Sources: “The Eucharistic Miracles of the World,” a Vatican international exhibition, as reported by The Real Presence Eucharistic Adoration Association, http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/english_pdf/Frossard.pdf, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Frossard.

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