Nick Ripatrazone explores the jaunty, theologically-rich ride of Sonnez Les Matines, a verse play by JC Scharl.
At the start of Lent in 1983, Pope Benedict XVI – then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – gave a retreat in the Vatican for Pope John Paul II and the Roman Curia. “The central mystery of our vocation,” he affirmed, “is the same as that to which Lent is leading; the death and the Resurrection of the Lord.”
That same year, in Cologne, Germany, Ratzinger spoke at the 50th anniversary of the ordination of Cardinal Joseph Höffner, articulating a meditation on the priesthood. “We ought to find the courage again,” he said, “to return to the sacral, the courage to look in Christian reality, not to set limits but to transform, to be truly dynamic.” He then quoted a rather surprising source: the playwright Eugène Ionesco.
Ratzinger cites a 1975 interview between Ionesco and Père Jacques Lendger, in which they speak of the state of the Church. “The Church does not want to lose her clients, she wants to acquire new members,” Ionesco said, in a translated account. “This produces a kind of secularisation which is truly deplorable.” Ionesco laments “mediocre” and lax priests, and fears that before long, “there will be a bar with bread and wine for Communion; and sandwiches and Beaujolais will be handed round”.
Ionesco was firm: “We need the eternal; because what is religion? What is the Holy? We are left with nothing; with no stability everything is fluid. And yet what we need is a rock.”
It is clear why such sentiments appealed to Ratzinger’s vision of the priesthood. Ionesco, whom Ratzinger correctly identifies as “founder of the theater of the absurd”, is best known for farces like The Bald Soprano and Rhinoceros. Yet in a truly absurd world, farce and satire are impossible; without a centre, artistic deviation and subversion are worthless. Ionesco was a trickster, to be certain, but a trickster who knew the truth.
Sonnez Les Matines, a 2023 verse play by the American poet JC Scharl, channels Ionesco, whose absurd plays were curiously anchored by a certain orthodoxy. Scharl’s play, set on Shrove Tuesday in Paris in the 1520s, imagines a frenetic conversation – in the aftermath of a murder – between Jean Cauvin, Ignatius of Loyola, and François Rabelais. Well-timed for Lent, it is a curious, entertaining and thought-provoking farce.
Scharl’s poetic strengths come through in the play medium. One of her standalone poems, “Penelope”, voiced in the titular Homeric persona, captures her poetic talent for syntax: “Envy, mistrust, loneliness, / all fierce passions tangle in the knot / of marriage – mine was no exception. I say / mine, for it was mine. Is mine. Remains / mine.”
Her ability to pivot and play within stanzas translates well to the heightened speech of theatre. The first scene begins at the chapel of the Collège de Montaigu, Paris. The three characters nearly collide with each other. Rabelais’s clothes are stained with blood. On the precipice of Lent, it is already a night in disarray, but clearly something else is amiss. Scharl delivers epigrammatic theologies through her characters. Cauvin: “I don’t disbelieve, but I confess / sometimes I wonder just / what is meant by the body, / and what signifies the blood.” Ignatius responds: “The Body means nothing / other than itself … My friend, / as I’ve said before, / you complicate too much / what is a simple mystery.”
Scharl has the most fun with Rabelais, a rowdy, bawdy character that reflects his true, and infamous, identity. “You mean my stained clothes? What of it?” he says. “A stained hood is one slip from a sainthood! / Oh, come now, that was a little good. / If a man’s farce can’t be his dignity, / what hope has he?” At the end of scene one, amidst the “foul” street, they discover a corpse.
Cauvin, a philosophy student, despairs: “My soul is weary beyond thought, beyond decision, beyond action.” He loathes the rhetoric of Ignatius and Rabelais: “One makes action seem so simple; the other, guilt so trivial.” He worries that “we are already damned, all, saved only by the dread whimsies of God”.
Rabelais seems less interested in discovering the identity of the deceased and more inclined toward tricks. When he says “I’m like God that way, or a magician – / I don’t reveal my secrets,” Cauvin labels it blasphemy. Rabelais counters: “How is that blasphemy? We do partake / in certain attributes of God, and to make / a mystery where before there was none / is one of them! I do not speak in fun; / I mean it, and I say nothing He’s not / said Himself, or hinted, or said not.”
Cauvin, though, has had enough of games. He calls their unholy trinity “my little hell,” and feels guilty. The other characters are confused, and he clarifies: “But when that broken body I beheld, / my spirit reeled, for once again I heard / that cry for help and once again I turned / away.” In fact, Cauvin wants to confess, but “not that one”– not the corpse in front of them. Instead, “mine own / and others I have sought to kill, / and that body there I might have saved / but by my wretchedness. No grace / but in atonement, and no atone- / ment without I confess.” When the identity of the body is revealed, it spawns a final turn in the play, leading to poetic contemplation of Ignatius, and finally, a robust concluding monologue by Rabelais, alone on the stage.
One can imagine talented comedic performers creating a knockout of a live performance. Scharl’s play is a jaunty, theologically-rich ride – a nice pairing for the “central mystery of our vocation” during Lent.
This article originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click here.
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