Ten years ago, I encountered Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl through quotations from her writings found in Magnificat. I wanted to read more. At the time, only one of her books, We, the Ordinary People of the Street, was available in English, and only as an eBook. It was costly for my modest budget, but it proved well worth it. In Delbrêl’s writings, I found a new friend. Her words set me on a path of mysticism uniquely suited to our own time: a vision of holiness rooted in attentive, faithful presence. Today, that book, and many more of Delbrêl’s works, are being translated into English.
Born in France in 1904, Delbrêl was intellectually gifted and culturally engaged. She studied literature, philosophy, and art at the Sorbonne and lived with an independence unusual for her time. By the age of fifteen, she had declared herself an atheist, convinced that life was ultimately absurd. “God is dead,” she wrote, “long live death.” Personal losses and disappointments followed—her father’s blindness, her parents’ separation, and her fiancé’s entrance into the Dominican religious order. These events plunged her into a long depression. She began to pray. Later she would simply say: God found me.
This encounter transformed her. God was a living presence—someone to love. Delbrêl discovered that her vocation was among “the ordinary people of the street.” She trained as a social worker and took a government job coordinating social programs. In 1933 she founded a house of hospitality in Ivry-sur-Seine, a working-class suburb of Paris dominated by communist ideology. There she and two other women companions, lived a life of chastity, simplicity, and radical availability amid poverty, unemployment, and ideological hostility to faith.
Delbrêl said they were “missionaries without a boat,” not called to leave their surroundings with its challenges but to inhabit it fully, believing that every place could become holy ground. She engaged with Marxist thought and wrote penetrating analyses of atheism and secular culture. In 1957 she wrote, The Marxist City as Mission Territory, followed by The Contemporary Forms of Atheism in 1962. Yet her deepest contribution lies in her vision of prayer as a way of life.
What makes Madeleine Delbrêl distinctive as a spiritual guide is that she lived the integral Catholic vision of “pray always” (see 1 Thess 5:17) by living attentively to God’s presence amid ordinary circumstances and daily demands. This vision resonates with the teaching of Vatican II in Lumen gentium, which proclaimed the universal call to holiness: all the baptized are called to sanctity not by withdrawing from the world but by living faithfully within it (see LG, no. 39–41).
Delbrêl has been compared to St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Dorothy Day. Like Thérèse, she embraced the little way, discovering her vocation as love at the heart of the Church and learning to contemplate God in small, hidden actions. Like Day, she lived her vocation in the Church among workers, the poor, and the vulnerable—where faith became visible through concrete works of justice and mercy (see Jas 2:17).
Yet Delbrêl’s voice remains unmistakably her own. A former atheist, a poet, and a keen philosopher of urban life, she encountered modern unbelief by her unflinching realization that faith meeting the human struggle begets holiness. In this, she anticipated the Church’s later teaching that lay holiness is achieved through the sanctification of ordinary life: by offering daily work, relationships, and responsibilities to God in union with Christ (see Gaudium et Spes, no. 34; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 901).
Prayer was not only a pause in her day during a set time, but it was also a continual surrender through daily tasks—waiting in lines, riding subways, washing dishes, listening patiently. Silence, she said, is the raw material of prayer: the silence of those who love. In that silence, the soul becomes available to God and to others. Like St. Therese’s Little Way, every irritation, interruption, and small sacrifice became, for her, “the passion of patience.” “It is not what we do that counts,” she said, “but our stillness in which God’s movement lies, our silence that allows his word: our nothingness that allows his being… What’s important is to surrender ourselves to love.”
Holiness unfolds through Eucharistic living. Nourished by the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, Delbrêl recognized each moment as a place of communion and self-gift. By surrendering self-interest, refusing to categorize others, and recognizing that all one possesses is entrusted for the good of others, her life became more conformed to Christ. Her holiness emerged not through extraordinary deeds but through faithful presence, obedient love, and daily conversion—where Christ continues to take flesh in the streets of the world.
She believed that all Christians are called to be mystics. Holiness, she taught, is not about what we do, but about allowing ourselves to be moved by love. Rooted in the Eucharist and the communal prayer of the Church, her life expressed a profound conviction: to become Christ is to become bread for others. Only insofar as we truly enter communion with Jesus can we become the bread of life. This prayer, she asserts, frees us from all forms of selfishness or from everything that distorts our love of others because it is always universal and always complete for all the real needs of people.
Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl offers a spirituality for our time—a path of prayer that transforms the world from within. In her witness, the streets themselves become a place of contemplation, and everyday life becomes the setting for sanctity.
A Eucharistic life, Delbrêl believed, does not ask, “What category does this person belong to?” It asks instead, “How do I become bread for this person, even here, even now?” In prayer before the Eucharist, she learned a life of intimacy with the world because “if our heart is surrendered to the Eucharist, it is present to all human hearts.”
Sr. Margaret Kerry has been a Daughter of St. Paul since the 1970s. Living as a religious for over fifty years she has experienced what it means to live an era of change. She enjoys teaching on the life and mission of the laity for a new evangelization, deepening an understanding of the universal call to holiness and expressing this in art as well as in writing.
Photo by Tushar Arora on Unsplash
