Magnien, Father Alphonse

1902, December 21

Date of Birth:  1837, June 9

Paris
February 23, 1903

Fathers and Very Dear in Our Lord:

Some days after the death of Father Colin, that of Father Magnien came to burden us with another great sorrow, but without causing us any great surprise.  For six months the doctors of each of them had foretold that their patients would not last out the year’s end; and in both cases that prognosis was realized with sad accuracy.  Father Magnien, after a life spent in entire dedication to carrying out our work in the United States, with great calm saw the approach of his slowly advancing death.  He was ready for it in the sentiments of the lively faith which sparked his whole life, but which never seemed more edifying than in the last days when his confreres witnessed his patience and his serenity.

Father Alphonse Magnien was born on June 9, 1837, at Le Bleymard in the Diocese of Mende.  In his home he breathed in the atmosphere of faith that characterizes that section of France, always rich in priestly vocations; and his own began very early to manifest itself by a lively piety and a great sweetness of character united to very promising abilities.  At Saint-Chely-d’Apcher – main center in an important district – where his father had to go as underofficer of police, the boy was the best student in the Christian Brothers’ school; and his parents soon consented, on the advice of their revered pastor, to place him in the minor seminary of Chirac.  In there he was not always in the first rank, it was because he had to contest it with two remarkable rivals who still hold high positions in the clergy of Mende and in the Society of Jesus.

At the time Alphonse Magnien brilliantly finished his classical studies, Bishop Dupanloup had for some time been Bishop of Orleans and was striving to fill up the numerous gaps which he found in the ranks of his diocesan clergy.  The Diocese of Mende offered him a bounteous overflow of excellent candidates, and he copiously drew on that overflow.  On a visit to Chirac in 1857, he addressed to the senior students an ardent appeal to which the young Magnien was among the first to respond.

So it was that in the following October he entered the major seminary of Orleans where he was to spend five years.  There he was a model of piety, regularity, and application to study.  The likeable and outgoing character which he joined to fine talents gave him a remarkable leadership over his fellow students, with excellent results.  A penetrating and solid theologian, he was – by liveliness as well as by the sharpness of his mind – a redoutable adversary in debate; and we recall one quite serious debate which he won over a revered adversary by switching (without attracting attention) from the defense to a very pressing offense.

At the close of his seminary days he revealed to his director his desire to become a Sulpician.  “That is what I wish for you,” the venerable Father Benech replied to him, “but I didn’t want to say anything so that all might come from Heaven.”

Ordained priest on June 15, 1862, Father Magnien did not, however, soon obtain the freedom to follow his bent.  Bishop Dupanloup insisted that first he give some service to the diocese, assigned him during the months of vacation as an assistant at St. Mark’s, then for two years as teacher in the two lowest grades of the minor seminary of the Chapelle Saint Mesmin.  Before entering the Solitude, Father Magnien was again sent as an auxiliary to the seminary of Philosophy at Nantes where he conducted the Science course during the year 1864-1865.  In the following October he finally came to the novitiate.  His outgoing nature and the habitual activity which he already treasured made that year of testing trying enough, but he generously went through it, showing to his fellow-Solitaires only a happy and friendly spirit.

At the Seminary of Rodez, to which he had been assigned, he taught in 1866-67 the Philosophy course, and joined to it, during the two following years, the course of Holy Scripture; he put into each course a clarity and an interest which spontaneously sprang out of the innate qualities of his mind.  One of his boyhood schoolfellows recently depicted him in these terms which are applicable to all the periods of his life:  “Right from the beginning he clearly and precisely saw into the most difficult questions, and conveyed his thoughts with ease and marvelous logic.  He put forth everything from the first throw, and he put it forth well.”

At the time when Father Magnien was finishing his studies at the major seminary of Orleans, that house was host to Father Dubreul, then Superior of Baltimore.  Father Dubreul gave some interesting spiritual readings on the work of St. Sulpice in the United States; these talks were the beginning of Father Magnien’s American vocation.  In September 1869, two months after Father Jenkins’ death (he was the founder of St. Charles), he went to Baltimore to join Father Dubreul whom nine years later he was to succeed for the long period of twenty-five years.  As at Rodez, he began with the Philosophy course to which he added the following year the course of Liturgy, and at the end of a second year, the course of Holy Scripture.  He taught these three courses from 1871 to 1875; then from 1875 to 1878 he taught Holy Scripture and Dogma.  Father Dubreul died in 1878, and Father Magnien was chosen to succeed him.  He continued the Scripture course up to 1880, and then took over the training of the deacons and the treasurership up to 1886.  Later, unfortunately, he let himself be caught up too much in external affairs; and although he kept from then on only the superiorship, he had enough to do in that into the last years of his life.

Everything was all right in France when he left for America; he had to make the sacrifice of family ties, ties to which he was always sensitive.  But the apostolic spirit had spoken loudly enough in his soul so that he placed himself with no reservations at the disposal of his superiors, and they were well-advised to accept his dutifulness.  He always had the missionary’s lively faith, the high aspirations, the zealous glow, which he evidenced all through life.  In the resources of his rich make-up, Divine Providence had, moreover, brought together all the means of carrying out a wide influence in the country to which he had been sent: an open and large mind, quick-as-a-flash prompt, sure and practical; a heart generous, outgoing, and affectionate.  He quickly gained the sympathy of the Americans and gave them his own.  Although at his age he was not as flexible perhaps as in early youth, he adapted very rapidly to the customs, ideas, even the language of the country of his adoption.  His maturity and the experience acquired in the seminaries of France were from then on only all the more a force and a light to guide him in his work.  The considerable development which the Baltimore seminary underwent during Father Magnien’s administration was not only the result of circumstances but the result of his influence and of his personal prestige; and the same must be said as well of the burgeoning of the work of St. Sulpice in the United States.

When Father Magnien came to Baltimore in 1869, Father Dubreul was exactly in the middle of his career as Superior, which had begun in 1860.  He had already rendered eminent service to the diocese and to the seminary; and the Society could not, moreover, forget that it had received from his hands the first four American confreres to work in the major seminaries of their country.  All the time, in the period in question, he had not yet lost a certain rigidity of manner which affected the young men with some apprehension and some holding back.

Father Magnien, without failing from the start to show himself firm and strong, early introduced into the community’s life a more expansive element.  He later said that to gain the esteem and confidence of American seminarians it was important that a director make himself known as capable and practical in teaching, and on the other hand, sympathetic to the spirit and institutions of the country.  In so speaking he was without doubt influenced more than he realized by his own experience as well as by his non-personal reflections simultaneously.  Whenever he went back to the classroom as Professor of Philosophy, he was found to be clear, interesting, and practical.  As for his sympathy for America, it was the spontaneous fruit of the large and generous dispositions of his mind and heart; of the apostolic spirit whose rule is to do everything for everybody; and of the view under which the situation of the Church presented itself to him in the midst of his adopted country.

In 1869, although the horizon had been darkening for the Catholics of France for the previous ten years, it was glowing with a new light for those in the United States.  There, priests and religious had won admiration by their dedication on the battlefields of the Civil War just over.  Since Protestant sects, broken by that war into hostile fragments, remained divided between North and South, the Catholic Church had kept its peacetime unity and showed it with flair by holding, as soon as peace was reestablished, the Second National Council of Baltimore.  The general public was struck by this vigor, this impressiveness; and little by little it was stripping itself of its prejudices against the faith.  The Church became an object of respect and esteem to a great number of Americans and was enabled to develop freely without arousing resentment.  This happy state of affairs, in itself and in contrast to what was going on in Europe, was bound to inspire in Father Magnien a kind of enthusiasm which he was not the man to hide.  From then on, between the Americans – always proud of their country – and our confrere – filled with sincere admiration for it – inevitably was born a growing sympathy which was always to be one of Father Magnien’s great motivations.  No doubt it could happen that it was sometimes exploited as a weakness by the malicious wiles of some of the young men.  It can also be mentioned that when certain differences of opinions and trends created some malaise in the American Church, the very well-known loyalty of Father Magnien to those with whom he first sided caused him some temporary embarrassment.  If ever he was the diplomat, it was not at all by the skill of deception nor even of keeping his mouth shut or lying low.  With him, frankness of speech was a principle; it was at bottom a practice and a habit which he never cared to back down from.

The slight embarrassments which ensued did not nullify the fact that he, more than anyone else, contributed in giving the Baltimore seminary a unique position in the American Church and in evincing from the American bishops signs of a quite valuable trust in their recognition of the Society.

When, on Father Dubreul’s death in 1878, Father Magnien was named his successor, Archbishop Gibbons had just taken possession of the See of Baltimore.  A former student of St. Charles and St. Mary’s, nearly as young as the new Superior, he showed himself immediately to have an affection and a trust in Father Magnien which for twenty-five years has never known a lessening.  “I have lost my right arm,” wrote the Cardinal on Father Magnien’s death.  “I had absolute confidence in his judgement, his ability, and his dedication.”  So close a relationship between the Superior and the chief shepherd of the diocese and the head of the American hierarchy had to have added even more to the prestige which Father Magnien enjoyed in the eyes of the seminary community.

But his mind, his heart, and his preaching were nonetheless to remain as the great means by which he exercised a saving influence on the young men, an influence truly powerful during the fine years of his administration.  His spiritual readings especially in those years were remarkable for power and interest.

With a marvelous abundance and variety of explanations he taught them the fundamental principles of the Christian and spiritual life.  He excoriated, too, the abuses against which he especially sought to forewarn the young clerics, and he was adept at picturing those abuses by examples from real life.