Marre, Father Victor

1900, May 5

Date of Birth:  1847, April 15

Cauterets
July 26, 1900

Fathers and Very Dear in Our Lord:

It was after apparently being worn down to almost skin and bones for the better part of four months that Father Marre gave his soul to God on last May 5th at the seminary of Toulouse. God willed, it seems, to accomplish the sanctification of our dear confrere to give him the opportunity and the grace to crown his work by undergoing, with a great spirit of faith and admirable resignation, the drawn-out agonies of so slow a death, a trial all the harder in that it accomplished in the sufferer the utter destruction of what was left of a quite strong, quite active, and quite outgoing nature.

Father Victor Henri Marc Marre was born on April 15, 1847, at Cadour, near Ville-franche-de Rouergue.  This parish remains to the present day one of the best in the region and, from a religious point of view, counts itself among the best still extant in France.  Since thirty years ago priests coming from Cadour found themselves numerous enough to bind together, in the parish of their origin, for the encouragement of the recruitment and cultivating of priestly vocations.  They work at these purposes by the union of their prayers and by financial support.  Father Marre was one of the most zealous promoters of this association, and never absented himself, for as long as he could be there, from attendance at the annual meetings.

His own vocation developed in an environment full of faith.  After some time at the parish school, he was sent to the minor seminary of St. Pierre, near Rodez, and spent five years there.  All those who knew him there have retained a pleasant memory of him.  His nature, open and frank, might have had its lighter moments, but of the type of which St. Francis de Sales has said: “Happy feelings are not the worst.”  Joyful student that he was, he never ceased giving proof of irreproachable virtue, of sincere piety, of serious application to work.  Moreover, his vocation never seemed troublesome either to him or anyone else; and when the time came for him to enter the seminary for Philosophy, his was the attitude of a young man resolved to give himself entirely to his duty. 

During his years at the major seminary, by various signs he found his way (which did not seem to be that of parochial ministry), dreaming sometimes of missionary work in the diocese, sometimes of teaching.  Providence willed that a little after his diaconate he encountered in Paris Father Icard, and with him came to a decision to come to St. Sulpice to do his last year of seminary work.  As a matter of fact, he entered there in December, 1872, and was ordained priest at Rodez the following Trinity (Saturday), but with the intention of returning in October to begin his novitiate at the Solitude; for in the course of the year he had spent in Paris, the attraction of our work roused and strengthened itself in him in such a way as to settle his previous uncertainty. 

On leaving the Solitude, Father Marre was sent to Sommervieu as Professor of Philosophy, and he stayed there four years, from 1874 to 1878.  He went from there to the seminary of Le Fuy, where for ten years he taught in turn Dogma, Moral, Canon Law, Holy Scripture, Preaching.  In the spirit of zeal and detachment he offered himself for work in our American establishments – in whose interests Father Icard was appealing to the generosity of the confreres. 

The offer of Father Marre was accepted, and at the beginning of the 1888 school year he was appointed as Professor of Moral Theology at the Grand Seminary of Montreal.  The following year he was asked to go to Notre Dame parish to fill there, to whatever extent was possible, the gap which Father Giban’s sickness was already making and which was soon going to be total by reason of his death.  (Father Giban was an excellent worker who exercised there for years a very laborious and very fruitful ministry.) 

The opening of the New York seminary in 1896 was the occasion of a new change for Father Marre.  He went there to fill for two years the Chair of Moral Theology; but his health, already affected, began there a rapid decline.  When he came back to France for the vacation period of 1898, it was decided to keep him here before a serious illness might occur to make his staying here an absolute necessity.  He spent the following winter recuperating at Hyères, and he would have returned there last winter if the death of Father Césaire Sire had not created, on the verge of its reopening, an unexpected gap in the personnel of Toulouse.  When that happened, I offered to Father Marre the major seminary’s treasurership; I knew that he would be assisted in it to whatever extent was necessary.  He accepted with his habitual generosity, docility, and readiness; but at the end of a weeks a serious relapse afflicted him, and we should have needed no more than that to see death on the way. 

In all the positions he held, Father Marre did well through the sympathetic qualities of his character and heart.  Moreover, endowed with solid principles of piety, reliability, attachment to duty, and the Sulpician spirit, he passed them on by the grace of the good will he inspired.  Naturally frank, open, expansive, he dispelled the clouds around him, caused friendliness to prevail, inspired in young men and priests a love of our houses – all by a certain way, happy and all-encompassing, of dealing with everyone.  If he was very much given to mixing with others, no one would dare to say that he rushed this propensity to excess; for he always knew how to turn it to good use.