Charles Briffa:The Fruits of the Mind – in the writings of Br Louis Camilleri FSC, Servant of God
De La Salle Brothers Publications, 2019

A question lies at the heart of Charles Briffa’s biography of the Lasallian Brother, Louis Camilleri (1923-2011). By what power does a working-class boy from Żurrieq, born 96 years ago, grow up to become a charismatic teacher and spiritual counsellor? Eight years after his death, his presence and influence still mark those who knew him, no matter how far and wide their careers have taken them. The case for his beatification is under way.

He was baptised Anthony and known as Ninu. From a young age, slim and tallish, he gazes out from the book’s photographs with a calm face, faint smile and hooded eyes, looking at some point just over our shoulders. His siblings have similar features. The future man is not reducible to a family manner, of course, but families have a way of giving us not just our public face but also the emotional wiring behind it.

The boy who thought of joining the Drydocks instead joined the Brothers of the Christian Schools, catechists and educational innovators. By the 1930s he’s in France preparing to take his vows. The songs he learned then, he continued to sing in old age. Up until his final days he wrote his daily prayer-meditations in French, in the calligraphic cursive script he learned in his Francophone youth, except for the spideriness that crept in with infirmity.

There was the immersion in the French school of spirituality, then still dominated by a style born in the 17th century. It focused on a personal quest for holiness and total commitment to the person of Jesus Christ. By shunning what was superfluous to one’s selfless union with divine will, it saw everyday experience as the flux of forces of good and evil.

This spirituality was given a particular inflection by St John Baptist De La Salle (1651-1719). The quest became ‘zeal’ for the educational needs of the poor. In his lifetime, De La Salle was known both for a hugely popular book on etiquette, the art of tactful attention, and for ‘zeal’, the energetic attention to the needs of the vulnerable young. Tact and zeal were how, to cite a popular Lasallian prayer, one remembered, and adored, the holy presence of God in each everyday moment.

The struggle between good and evil took a grim turn when World War II broke out and Germany occupied France. Br Louis and three other Maltese Brothers were British subjects, and still novices in France. The Germans went looking for them; the senior French Brother fobbed them off; the four Maltese escaped to other parts of France with false papers, boarding trains full of German soldiers. What a moment in which to remember the holy presence of God.

After the war, Br Louis returns to Malta as a teacher (French, religion and geography are mentioned) and administrator. He was active in many of the major Lasallian projects of post-1945 Malta: the teaching of Dockyard students; the growth of the colleges of De La Salle and Stella Maris; the defence of Church schools against a power-mad government.

He was the moving force in the spiritual formation of the lay branch of the Lasallian Institute, the Signum Fidei, which in Malta took root in the mid-1990s. It is here, in his 70s and 80s, that he emerges as a seminal presence for the lay teachers learning a new way of being a catechist: not by teaching the right answers in formulas, but by being a living sign of the right questions.

Throughout these years he left a deep impression on many who knew him. Briffa collects the testimonials of teaching colleagues, pupils and members of Signum Fidei. All speak of a holy, upright and unwavering presence. They speak of a keen attentiveness and considerateness. They search for words to describe a power born of stillness even in the eye of the storm – whether the storm was a pupil in meltdown, adults in personal turmoil, or an entire country with its educational system on the brink of the abyss. Briffa hasn’t cherry-picked the testimonials. I have myself heard similar things from tough-minded people not easily impressed by piety alone.

Here is a charisma different from the telegenic attractiveness that self-help books try to teach. It’s a charisma whose presence is experienced as gravity and grace, hovering in each moment; a personification of human conscience.

In search of the mind that exuded such charisma, Briffa analyses the rhetoric and theology of the prayers that Br Louis wrote daily, for his eyes only. It’s all useful but the internal evidence of the journals (which I’ve seen) points to these prayers being the conclusion not the heart of contemplation. With very few exceptions, questions and doubts, joys and sorrows, rooted in incident, are unrecorded.

These prayers are the resolutions at the end of longer dialogues, not a picture of the whole mind. The faint smile and hooded eyes, attentive but looking just over our shoulders, remain a mystery.