The day André Frossard met Christ in Paris

André Frossard (1915-1995), son of the first Secretary-General of the French Communist Party, was raised as an atheist, in a milieu "where the question of the existence of God was never even brought up". At the age of 20, on July 8, 1935, he entered the chapel of the Daughters of Adoration in Paris. Before the Blessed Sacrament, he experienced an encounter with Christ that led to a profound conversion to Catholicism in a matter of moments. He explained his conversion in his 1969 bestseller Dieu existe, je l'ai rencontré (God Exists, I Met Him).

Unsplash/Daniele Colucci

Reasons to believe:

André Frossard's academic, intellectual and professional career did not prepare him for any kind of spiritual quest.

Frossard's conversion was not gradual, but sudden, radical, total and definitive. Without a divine intervention, how could he have converted in this way, and have changed in every aspect of his life - religious, psychological, cultural and social - in the space of a few minutes?

This conversion was not the fruit of an illusion or hallucination. Like that of Saint Paul and all the great converts, André Frossard's conversion was brought about by an encounter with the light of God, which led to the dazzling teaching and inexplicable understanding of the whole of Christian doctrine and gave rise to a new worldview and self-image.

The fruits of his conversion were numerous, lasting and inexplicable: Frossard's mother and sister were also converted; he himself remained an exemplary Christian until his death; his commitment to human rights, religious freedom and the defence of the most vulnerable also bore witness to a moral code inspired by the Gospel.

Many people, starting with Saint John Paul II, have testified to the sincerity and totality of his conversion.

André Frossard's writings are a long defense of Christianity.

In sharing the story of his conversion, Frossard had nothing to gain, and everything to lose.

Summary:

"If God exists, I must say so; if Christ is the Son of God, I must shout so; if there is eternal life, I must preach it": these words by André Frossard (1915-1995) would never have been uttered by their author before 5:10pm on July 8, 1935, the moment he entered the chapel of the Daughters of Adoration in Paris.

The young journalist, who had just graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (The School of Decorative Arts), had no religious beliefs. Raised as an atheist, he had never really met a Christian or learned anything about the Catholic faith. His paternal grandmother, Stephanie Schwob, was of Jewish descent (her Alsatian village, she said, was the only one in France to have no church, only a synagogue); his mother, Rose Pétrequin, was Lutheran and his father, Louis-Oscar Frossard (1889-1946), himself the son of an anti-clerical craftsman, was an anti-clerical politician, an ultra-liberal schoolteacher and a Freemason, who was dismissed from the teaching profession for his revolutionary activities. Louis-Oscar became Secretary-General of the SFIO, Secretary-General of the French section of the Communist International, member of the French Parliament and then minister under seven successive governments.

At home, the young André received a good, intellectually satisfying education but devoid of any religious component. At school and at home, the only time he heard of religion was as a reactionary power. In short, before July 8, 1935, there wasn't in his mind and life the slightest indication that he was even remotely interested in God or religion.

The story of André Frossard's conversion is now famous, as he wrote and lectured extensively about it, especially the totally unexpected exposure to supernatural realities, of which he was absolutely unaware. It was 5:10pm on July 8, 1935, on his way to meet a friend on Rue d'Ulm for dinner, when he went through the wrong door by mistake and entered the chapel of the Sisters of Reparatory Adoration. "When I pushed the metal fence of the convent, I was a skeptic and an atheist, but even more so, I was indifferent and preoccupied with many things other than a God I was no longer even bothering to deny." When he emerged from the building ten minutes later, he was a convinced Catholic. What had happened?

The chapel he had just entered was a totally foreign place to him: “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)." There, he was astonished by the presence of "a kind of sun shining at the back of the building: I didn't know it was the Blessed Sacrament", he said, revealing his ignorance at the time. Suddenly, the natural light emanating from the host in the monstrance was transformed into a " light " infinitely more beautiful, gentler and more penetrating than that of the sun: " a spiritual light ", " another world of such splendour and richness that it sent our own back among the fragile shadows of dreams..."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 … What I saw was an indestructible crystal of infinite transparency [from which radiated] a paleblue light of almost unbearable intensity (one degree higher and I would have died). It was a world; another world of a radiance and brightness that in one stroke cast our world among the fragile shadows of unfulfilled dreams. The invisible becomes obvious. From the dark shore upon which I stood, I gazed on this new reality and truth and saw the order of the universe. At its summit was the Self-Evident Nature of God who was both Presence and Person. A moment earlier I had denied Its existence. Christians call this Presence ‘Our Father.’ I felt all Its tender goodness and sweetness... a sweetness unlike any other, capable of breaking the hardest stone and that which is even harder than stone—the human heart.“

During Frossard’s extraordinary encounter with God, he experienced “a Love never before felt—a Love that enables us to love and breathe. That day I learned that we were not alone. I learned that permeating, embracing, and awaiting us was an unseen Person, and that there existed, beyond the world of the senses and the imagination, another world. Compared to that world, our material world, which is so beautiful and so compelling, is nothing more than a shadowy phantom and thus but the faintest reflection of the Beauty that created it. For there is another world. And I speak of it not on the basis of hypotheses, logical reasoning, or hearsay, but on that of personal experience. "Everything is dominated by the presence of the One whose name I can never again write without fear of wounding his tenderness ", he wrote thirty-four years later, while his testimony is identical, to the letter, to what it was in 1935. Like Saint Paul, bewildered by the vision of the Lord on the road to Damascus, André Frossard has just passed from this world to that of Christ.

Although he did not hear the voice of Jesus as Paul did, André Frossard perceived the same light that comes from beyond all earthly realities. And as the apostle to the Gentiles testifies, this sublime clarity is not a physical phenomenon, but the manifestation of God's presence.

Indeed, the young journalist's experience, far from being merely visual, was above all mystical: he saw and understood at the same time. The light, as he puts it, is "the teacher", it is the incandescence of truth". In a split second, he learned that this truth is not an abstract concept but a person, that of Jesus Christ: "I met God like you meet a plane tree!" When asked about his faith, the "Lone rider" (his nickname at LeFigaro newspaper) replied: "I don't 'believe' in God: I met him."

On the subject of the 2000-year-old Christian tradition, which he inexplicably discovered and memorised in a flash, he gave an astonishing account. After asking to be baptised, he met a priest who was responsible for instructing him as a catechumen: "What the priest told me about Catholicism, I expected and welcomed with joy: the teaching of the Catholic Church is true right up to the end of time. The Catholic Church is true to the last comma."

This conversion, like all true conversions (Saint Paul, Camille Claudel, Saint Charles de Foucauld or Alphonse de Ratisbonne - Frossard likened his experience to that of the latter) is a turning of the being in the direction of God, and, at the same time, a distancing from material values: "It [his conversion]definitively reversed the natural order of things. Since I met him, I could almost say that, for me, God alone exists, and the rest is mere hypothesis." A few days after his conversion at Rue d'Ulm, the former atheist felt a certain apprehension about leaning against a wall, so inconsistent did this world seem to him compared to the supernatural order, "the only solid reality".

The fruits of his conversion were many, lasting and inexplicable: his mother and sister converted in their turn; he himself remained a model Christian until his death; and his commitment to human rights, religious freedom and the defence of the most vulnerable bore witness to a moral code inspired by the Gospel.

A celebrated journalist who was elected to the Académie Française in 1987, André Frossard, like his friend Saint John Paul II, experienced and shared many of the 20th-century struggles. As a member of the French Resistance, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned for eight months in the "Jewish barracks" of Montluc prison in Lyon, where he narrowly escaped a great massacre. During the Algerian war, he denounced acts of torture committed by officers, not hesitating to quit the newspaper he worked for, which he believed defended the OAS (The Secret Army Organization was a far-right French dissident paramilitary and terrorist organisation during the Algerian War). He testified at the trial of Klaus Barbie (German SS officer, head of the Gestapo in Lyon and convicted war criminal) and fought anti-Semitism with all his might, knowing since July 8, 1935, that the people of Israel were the elders of the Church, to which they belonged for eternity.

When he left the Rue d'Ulm chapel at around 5:15pm, his friend asked him: "What's thematter with you? " and Frossard replied, "I'm Catholic."

Patrick Sbalchiero