Blood in the Snow, Part 1
Blessed Maurice Tornay, martyr of Tibet
As my screensaver, I have a grainy black and white photograph of a man who ought to be instantly recognisable, but is not. You would say he was young, or youngish. He wears a knitted beanie-style hat, round Lennon glasses with thick frames. His beard is short and, under the hat, his hair is close-cropped. But it is the expression on his face that is arresting – arresting though hard to describe. He has something of the air of an academic; he looks self-contained, a little abstracted perhaps, but also imperturbable. You couldn’t imagine him easily getting in a flap. Equally, you could not say from his eyes that he looks obviously empathetic. A reader of souls, perhaps, but without sentiment. A man in the world for sure, but not, one senses, entirely of it.
Does he look like a saint? If your idea of a saint is someone who would somehow enfold you in their love of God, a gentle soul who would accompany you on your journey through life with the deepest understanding and acceptance, then you would not think this man was a saint. If, though, your idea of a saint is someone who will suffer endlessly for the love of Christ – physically, mentally, spiritually – in pursuit of your salvation then, probably, yes. There is something steely and unbending in his eyes, something suggestive of an inflexible determination.
And as it turns out, this is indeed the face of a saint. It is the face of the Blessed Maurice Tornay, martyr of Tibet, the face of a man who suffered much for his faith – in life as well as in his untimely death.
Born in a then-remote corner of French-speaking Switzerland in 1910, Maurice Tornay was the seventh of eight children of a devout family of small farmers. His was the sort of family of whom Péguy wrote so movingly: hard-working, life-loving, hardship-enduring, God-fearing. A meal in the Tornay household is described by an early biographer as comprising ‘sparkling wine from their ancestral vineyard; rye bread as hard and delicious as nuts; ham; smoked sausage; and a square of homemade cheese. A liqueur … made from grape skins mixed with some bunches of Alpine wormwood… adds its spicy flavour…’ How we long to sup at that table!
In common with many families of this type, there were plentiful aunts, uncles and cousins who found vocations in the church as priests and monks and nuns. One of his sisters was to take the veil.
As a boy, Maurice was somewhat irascible, often coming to blows with his elder siblings. A child who stood his corner – despite being rather sickly. As in all such pastoral families, he started to help in the fields at a young age. Apart from growing grapes and grain, there were sheep, some goats and a small herd of cattle to tend. Once, when he was ten years old, he had been sent to look after the cows when a calf fell over a cliff. He ought to have been keeping an eye on it! Running home at once to confess his crime – he was immediately forgiven seeing that the lesson had been learned. A lesson that was doubtless taught far and wide and for many years.
‘Just you keep your eyes open. Don’t go day-dreaming like that Tornay boy if you know what’s good for you!’
For that is what he was. A thinker. Quick to defend himself and with a quick temper, intellectually, he was extremely able. Curious too – ‘what would a goat be like kept in a stable?’ he once asked. At school, he took all the class prizes, if none on the sports field.
It is clear that, from early on, God was calling him – hence the abstraction, hence too the overwhelming of his senses on a pilgrimage to Lourdes when he was twenty. So greatly affected was he by what he sees – the pain, the suffering – he finds he "can't speak. I can't even cry with my eyes of flesh. My heart and soul are only sobs and prayers!"
We are not much surprised to read that this pious young scholar decided early on to become a priest. What does surprise us, until we know him better, is that spite of this academic bent, in spite of this lack of sporting prowess, the young Maurice set his heart early on joining the monks of the nearby Hospice of Grand Saint Bernard. These were the Transalpine Redemptorists whose especial vocation was to offer refuge – and sometimes rescue – to travellers over the Grand St Bernard pass in the lee of which the hospice stood. The Canons Regular (as members of the order are known) and their dogs, the famous St Bernards, bred especially for their keen noses and powers of endurance, but also for their instinct to protect. Until quite recently, as a much a danger as the weather were the depredations of the bandits – mostly Saracens during the early years - who notoriously preyed upon those crossing the pass alone.
Maurice succeeded in entering the order only at the second attempt, in 1933. They were worried that he was too frail, but an operation for a stomach ulcer (doubtless the result of some bacterial infection) was successful and he grew to hardiness after a long convalescence – a hardiness to complement the steeliness of character that he developed during his years in seminary. A confrere recalled how Maurice Tornay was ‘the one who, of all the novices, changed himself most, who disciplined himself best, and climbed furthest toward perfection’.
This, then was the context for the future saint, a great lover of mountains.
A call for missionaries to spread the gospel in Tibet proved irresistible. ‘I want to burn myself out in the service of God.’ he wrote. And, when accepted, ‘I am not coming back.’
Nor did he.