GENIUS, LIKE HOLINESS, WILL ALWAYS BE FOUND ON THE BEATEN BARREN PATHS

22 year-old, Scholastic Brother Charles Baret, was brilliant person. Yvon Beaudoin wrote about him: “A musician and poet with a great gift for languages, he then learned English and Italian from his Irish and Italian confreres, not to mention Hebrew and Greek. Nonetheless, during his three years of theology, he struggled with the monotony of the regimented life of pious exercises. He subsequently wrote …“classes in the morning, classes at night, always class matter to learn, texts to recite by heart. This fixed and unchanging systemic uniformity stultifies and disgusts one’s imagination…” 

He taught philosophy to his fellow-Oblate scholastics, and was chided by Father Tempier ” in which he urges professor Baret to follow the manual written by Bouvier and to not to disparage it before his students, the first year scholastic brothers: “It is a main blunder,” he explained,” I have seen many professors make with regard to an author they were using. It seems as if they thought that by criticizing the author, they enhanced their own personal worth by making themselves disdainful and stupid critics of a work the tenth of which they themselves could never have authored.” (https://www.omiworld.org/lemma/baret-charles/)

Eugene supported the advice of Fr Tempier:

Limit yourself, my dear child, to what Father Tempier has just told you in my name. Do not work for your own personal satisfaction. but do everything for the Lord who will hold you to account for it; I bless you and embrace you tenderly.

Letter to Scholastic Charles Baret, 16 October 1847, EO X n 947

REFLECTION

Experience had taught Eugene that focus on “doing everything for the Lord” was the key to missionary success – not personal interest. The young Charles was frustrated because he believed that his talents and abilities were not being properly used. In 1861 he was capable of writing: ” Great lives were always made up of a monotonous existence. Genius, like holiness, will always be found on the beaten barren paths…”