“In its most discrete actions, the life of a Catholic is a canticle.”

Reverend Father Clérissac (1864-1914)
Dominican

“Even from his first meeting with Father Clérissac, (…) Psichari was somewhat awed by the nobility and authentic grandeur that emanated from the Dominican’s face, whose features attested to the vigor of his soul. That very evening Psichari wrote in his journal, “This man has a magnificent face, eyes of fire and a hard-drawn mouth – a face of suffering and of faith. You can tell he is an ardent man, with a solid mind and a great heart, an enemy to weakness and to bigotry, but full of an interior fire that radiates from him… a man of mature reflection and study, and of a refined culture…” Such a beautiful servant of God! By what was under the Dominican hood, which lightly covered his short cut of thick white hair, you were first taken by his eyes, his splendid eyes, which gleamed with an unbearably beautiful light. Yes, from the very beginning you felt a sort of fear under his extraordinary gaze, a gaze which shone out from under his jet-black brows and which, because it was so penetrating, gave his face, Roman and antique in its lines — the hard-set chin, strong square jaw, and large chiseled nose — “an almost formidable aspect.” But then, quite quickly, you no longer saw anything but the purity of such a force, and what remained was the striking impression of what could be added to the beauty of a face by the influence of an intelligence which contemplates truth alone, and which lives for truth alone. (…) He was no doubt nostalgically thinking of the grandeur of the Middle Ages — those fine Middle Ages which conceived of the Church as a glorious city, and which upheld “the relation between all things and the Church, and between the Church and all things,” as Bossuet would say. Father Clérissac was too proud a son of the Church not to suffer from all that offended Her. Such a sadness, though it remained silent, deepened the honorable intransigence of this son of St. Dominic whose intelligence shone with the Evangelical light. Such was the priest into whose hands Jacques Maritain commended Psichari…”

Henri Massis (1886-1970)
Literary critic, political essayist, and literary historian