Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl

Madeleine Delbrêl (24 October 1904 – 13 October 1964) was a French Catholic author, poet, and mystic. She came to the Catholic faith after a youth spent as an atheist. Delbrêl died unexpectedly from a brain hemorrhage in 1964 and now has an open cause for canonization. Pope Francis declared her Venerable in 2018. Madeleine Delbrêl was born in Mussidan, Dordogne, France, on 24 October 1905. Her father and her paternal grandfather were railroad workers. Her father also had an artistic disposition and Delbrêl inherited his interest in and talent for writing. She gained notice for her poetry and was a gifted pianist. She lived in several different places in the course of her childhood and was never able to feel at home or make first friends. Her parents were not religious, so Delbrêl was an atheist by age of fifteen, experiencing life as absurd. At seventeen Delbrêl wrote a tract titled "God is dead--long live!", which expressed her view that death is the only certainty in life. Consequently, she lived life without any regard to middle-class values, writing and illustrating poetry, studying philosophy and art at the Sorbonne in Paris, designing her own fashions, and being one of the first women of her set to cut her hair short. When her fiancé suddenly decided to join the Dominican Order and her father went blind, her life fell apart. At the same time she began to notice that life did not seem absurd to her Christian friends, who still enjoyed life as much as she did. Suddenly, God's existence did not seem a complete impossibility anymore. Delbrêl decided to kneel and pray, and also remembered Teresa of Ávila's recommendation to think silently of God for five minutes each day. Delbrêl called the year 1924 the year of her conversion. For in praying she found God or, as she felt, He found her. To her God was someone to love, just like any other person.