the blunt candor of the founders of monachism

[...] I merely wonder at the enormous consumption of such signs that the public makes. I see people reassured by the spectacular identity of a morphology and of a vocation; in no doubt about the latter because it recognizes the former; having no more access to the real experience of the apostolate than by its bric-a-brac, and growing quite used to acquiring a clear conscience by merely looking in the shopwindows of sanctity; and I'm troubled that a society which so greedily consumes the posters of charity forgets to ask itself questions about its consequences, its uses, and its limits. And I begin to wonder if the lovely and touching iconography of the Abbé Pierre is not the alibi by which a sizable part of the nation authorizes itself, once again, to substitute the signs of charity for the reality of justice.