Who was Georges Chevrot?
by James Hanna
April 7, 2025
Beyond the holy assembly of canonized saints, the list of fervent souls birthed to the Church by French mothers seems equally endless. Among the legions we find four born within a few years of each other in the late nineteenth century. Three were cradle Catholics, one converted at age twenty-four. Two became priests, two remained laymen. In the twentieth century each in his own way made significant contributions to the Church. Three are well known: Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Less known is Georges Chevrot. While Maritain contributed to philosophy, Gilson to the history of philosophy, and Teilhard to speculative science, it was Chevrot, ordained in 1903, who became the preacher extraordinaire.
Among the many admirers he gained in his half-century of priesthood was Henri de Lubac. De Lubac, the influential French theologian named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, praised Chevrot saying he “was all his life carried by the great breath that had animated his adolescence: the breath of intellectual, apostolic, and social renewal that marked, at the very end of the last century, the pontificate of Leo XIII. He loved the Church of which he was a minister, because he knew it to be the Church of Jesus Christ, the herald of his Gospel, anxious to spread everywhere the Life entrusted to it.”
And spread the Gospel he did. Evidence abounds. It was Chevrot whose Lenten sermons drew crowds of more than 8,000 into the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the 1930s. It was Chevrot whose dynamic preaching on Radio Paris ignited the Parisian custom of inviting friends and relatives into their home to listen to his Sunday sermons.
Chevrot’s vocation as a preacher brings to mind two distinct points in the history of the Church—the fourth-century thought of St. John Chrysostom, and a decree promulgated by Second Vatican Council.
Chrysostom, in his treatise On the Priesthood, compared the priest’s work to that of the physician. The physician has a variety of medicines and treatments available, but “there is only one means and only one method of treatment available (to the priest), and that is teaching by word of mouth. That is the best instrument, the best diet, and the best climate. It takes the place of medicine and cautery and surgery. When we need to cauterize or cut, we must use this. Without it all else is useless.”
Teaching by word of mouth is what Chevrot did well. Throughout his life he animated the primary duty of the priest later articulated by Vatican II in Presbyterorum Oridnis:
The People of God are joined together primarily by the word of the living God. And rightfully they expect this from their priests. Since no one can be saved who does not first believe, priests, as co-workers with their bishops, have the primary duty of proclaiming the Gospel of God to all. In this way they fulfill the command of the Lord: “Going therefore into the whole world preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mk 16:15), and they establish and build up the People of God. Through the saving word the spark of faith is lit in the hearts of unbelievers and fed in the hearts of the faithful. This is the way that the congregation of faithful is started and grows, just as the Apostle describes: “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17).
“Chevrot is known primarily as an orator,” said de Lubac, addressing the Academy of Moral Sciences and Politics of the French Institute in 1959. “Director of young people, vicar, priest, traveler, lecturer at Notre Dame, and from 1948 lecturer on Radio Luxembourg, he never stopped preaching.”
He never stopped preaching, and we are beneficiaries—heirs to a rich inheritance of spiritual insight that Chevrot has bequeathed—his homilies in print for strengthening one’s faith and living a life of virtue. With pen in hand, he authored several books recording and expanding upon several of his popular sermons. For an orator, publishing can be rife with risk, but Chevrot’s straightforward compositions read as by voice—his tone and delivery, clear, falling on reader’s eyes as they would on the ears.
Chevrot’s sermons reflected his straightforward approach: “Repent. Be converted. Begin again. These are the three stages of spiritual life.” His preaching on the Gospels often challenges readers to place themselves in the biblical scene. To illustrate, from the opening of his sermon on the parable of the Prodigal Son: “A man had two sons. One was unable to look after his soul; the other was unable to give his heart. They are strange sons indeed. Both saddened their father, both treated him harshly, both did not recognize how good he was to them—one through disobeying and the other despite obeying. Which of the two would you wish to be like?”
He follows by illustrating repentance and conversion before pivoting to practical advice to help us begin anew. “The prodigal never thought how happy he was going to make his father. And we too forget that God is happy when he sees us coming toward him. It’s unbelievable, I grant you. We could never have known the truth if the Son of God had not come down from Heaven to tell us so. But what he has told us: ‘My father loves you.’ When you make the Sign of the Cross in the morning, when you kneel down at night, when you lift up your thoughts to him in the midst of the day’s occupations, when you make a detour to go into a church and pray for a while … every time you do these things, you are making him happy. His child is not lost, his child is not dead, his child is with him. I leave you with this overwhelming truth, unbelievable as it seems: we have the power to make God happy.”
But who was Georges Chevrot?
Before hearing more from de Lubac and Chevrot in his own words, a brief glance at the history of France will be helpful.
The Church, as she is called to, has always navigated cultural turbulence and did in a particular way in France for a millennium following the days of Pope Leo III and Charlemagne in the ninth century. Throughout the many years the region produced great thinkers and writers that helped the Church weather every ecclesiastical and theological storm. It is a tapestry-like history woven of many experiences, including Gallicanism, the Revolution of 1789, and confrontations with various heretical movements—a complex historical narrative that has been widely researched, recorded, and reported.
And while the Revolution disturbed France’s long ties to Catholicism, some ambivalence over the relationship remained when Chevrot was born in Paris on January 8, 1879. As the close of the century approached, opposing groups—radicals, socialists, and moderates, forged a coalition that gave France a period of political stability. The closing decade saw the republic hurtle to a complete separation of Church and State, sweeping away any vestiges of the old order, with the impact as severe as Catholics feared it would be—but the Church gained something significant from the separation: the state could no longer interfere in her affairs, hence a greater liberty of action—and a gain in the quality of priesthood. Seminaries were no longer entirely French institutions oriented by French nationalism, and seminarians no longer sought ordination as a road to nobility but rather discerned a higher calling. Among those who recognized a truer vocation we find Georges Chevrot.
Chevrot’s secondary education took place in Saint-Michel and when he passed the baccalaureate, he entered the seminary Saint-Sulpice in Issy-les-Molineaux. In addition to his theological training, he was able to devote two years to preparing for a degree in literature. On July 4, 1903, at the age of twenty-four, he was ordained a priest.
While Chevrot was rising through adolescence and discerning his vocation, a new threat to religion was growing. It was a dogmatic and materialistic doctrine known as positivism that began taking root in the 1850s but arrived at full force during Chevrot’s formative years. Following the teachings of Auguste Comte, positivism viewed human history as a movement upward toward some utopia, and labeled theology and metaphysics as mere superstition, turning instead to a “positive” approach through empirical science alone. It gave rise to modernism, “that heresy,” in the words of historian James M. Connolly, “so sweeping and inclusive as to be vague in its full dimensions.” Modernism in France was pioneered by Abbe Alfred Loisy, who tried to reconcile Catholic dogma with modern science and philosophy.
Chevrot did not yield to either positivism or modernism; rather he was an enthusiastic Sillonist—a advocate of Le Sillon, “The Furrow” or “The Path,” the movement founded by Marc Sangnier which existed from 1894 to 1910. It aimed to bring Catholicism into a greater conformity with French Republican ideals to provide an alternative to the threats of modernism.
He also embraced the thought of John Henry Newman, then little-known in France, and that of philosopher Maurice Blondel. Thus fortified, according to de Lubac, “he found himself protected, from the start, both against the pitfalls that were soon to commonly designate the word ‘modernism’ and against a sterile and paralyzing rigidity.”
In 1909, he was appointed vicar at Saint-Charles de Monceau. Three years later, “his apostolic flame and his talents as an orator,” in the words of de Lubac, brought him to the attention of Father Emmanuel Martin de Gibergues, future Bishop of Valence, who was seeking to assemble for the first time a team of diocesan missionaries, and Chevrot joined them in 1912.
When the First World War broke out Chevrot was among the many Catholic clergy mobilized in 1914. He served throughout the war, first as an ambulance medic and then as a chaplain in the Infantry. The decorations of the War Cross with five citations, and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, attest to his courage and charity during the conflict.
Following the Great War, he served as vicar at several parishes until February 1930, when Cardinal Verdier, Archbishop of Paris, entrusted him with the parish of Saint-François-Xavier in Paris, where he stayed until his death twenty-eight years later.
In 1938 Cardinal Verdier added to his parish duties by calling him to the pulpit of the cathedral, Notre Dame. There he often attracted faithful by the thousands, and his sermons were carried on radio. The following year Pope Pius XII conferred the Domestic Prelature on Monsignor Chevrot. He continued to preach at NotrevDame until 1940, when, according to de Lubac, “he gave it up, rather than have to subject the Gospel to undue censorship” during the German occupation.
During this time Chevrot made no attempt to conceal his hostility toward the Nazis. The Tablet of Brooklyn, New York, reported that his popularity saved him from arrest but there were several attempts on his life.
In 1947, Chevrot was elected a member of the prestigious Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the French Institute. When in died in 1958, de Lubac was chosen in his place. One year later he addressed the Institute eulogizing his predecessor.
“For several years, sensing the coming catastrophe, he had been anxious,” de Lubac told the gathering. “What joy, on the other hand, when, on August 25, 1944, in front of his church, surrounded by his parishioners, he was able to greet General Leclerc entering Paris! The Resistance medal soon came to recognize his role, often heroic, during the occupation. His growing reputation led to his being called, successively, for series of preachings and conferences, to Canada, New England, Belgium, Denmark.”
Before the war, the threat of atheistic Communism that prompted the encyclical of Pius XI Divini Redemptoris had been gaining ground in France, attracting not only workers in the suburbs surrounding Paris, but also, because of new propaganda, the intellectuals. Following the war the trend was different, and Chevrot, speaking at Laval University in Quebec in 1946, expressed confidence that France would never fall into atheistic Communism. “More than ever before, Catholicism is impregnating intellectual life in France. The country’s leading philosophers are Catholic; the Catholic press is wielding tremendous influence; there is an increasing interest in Catholic books, and Catholic labor unions are showing a marked increase.”
Chevrot gave his Canadian audience a brief historical review of tumult within his home country. “Occasional waves of anticlericalism which spot modern French history are a holdover from the French Revolution, which broke violently with France's earlier culture and philosophy. Unbelievers of the times exploited the confusion in the popular mind and linked the French clergy with the abuses of monarchy and privilege. However, when World War I broke out and the French people saw their exiled clergy hasten home to defend their motherland, a new era began for the Church in France.”
In that new era Chevrot was a leading voice, a voice that, in the opinion of de Lubac, articulated fidelity to the Gospel. “He knew that firmness in faith is not comparable to rigidity in principles; that the object of this faith is not some ideology, but a mystery, the inexhaustible mystery of a personal Being; that its deposit is not a box to be buried in a field, but this very field, this fertile field, to be made to bear fruit unceasingly. For him, fidelity was not the attachment to a past that was a little more dead every day, but the gift of oneself renewed each day to an ever-new Presence. He loved the Church of which he was the minister, because he knew it to be the Church of Jesus Christ, the herald of his Gospel, anxious to spread everywhere the Life entrusted to it.”
Of his vocation Chevrot said, “The priest, on the day of his priestly ordination, has nothing more to expect. To be a priest is everything: it is to communicate to men the doctrine, the life, the very person of Jesus Christ.”
Such is the legacy of Monsignor Georges Chevrot.
Chevrot’s gift is available in the six books translated into English by Scepter Publishers. They include The Prodigal Son: Insights into Divine Compassion and Human Behavior, The Well of Life (the episode of the Samaritan woman), The Beatitudes: How God Saves Us, Simon Peter: Lessons from the First Pope, The Easter Impact: How the Resurrection Restores and Strengthens Our Faith, and Our Days are Numbered: Getting Ready for Eternity.
