A Home Missionary

The Bishop immediately accepted his services as a home missionary and sent him to Montbernage, a suburb of Poitiers that was notorious for its moral decay. There, de Montfort began in earnest his extraordinary career of apostolic activity. His methods were so modern in their approach that they alarmed and bewildered the more conventional clerics. Sometimes it would be the realistic portrayal, in dramatic form, of the truths of the Faith or the struggle of a soul to find salvation. Or it might be the burning of dangerous literature on a great pyre, surmounted by an effigy of the Devil as a society-woman! (The literature was not gathered by witch-hunts, but was brought voluntarily to the missionary by the repentant townspeople.)

What a scene this would make in the twentieth century—a pile of the latest fashionable obscenities burnt outside the Cathedral with the effigy of a satanic society-woman on top of the pyre! It would immediately gain widespread publicity for the campaign for Christian literature by all the mass media of communication and would be worth a hundred sermons—exactly the effect intended by de Montfort. But it takes rare courage to make such a gesture in any century.