Palautian Spirituality

The defining element of the Palautian spirituality is the unique experience of Blessed Francisco Palau of the Church as his Beloved. His life was marked by an intense search for the Beloved which eluded him for 50 years (My Relations with the Church, 7, 14). He experienced the Church as a living reality, as one body where Christ is the head and the neighbor forming one body with Christ. The Church is a mystery of Communion; God and man united in one body. This is his spirituality, the inspiration that fired up not only his life but the lives of generation and generation of his followers.

Blessed Francisco Palau was fired up with love but at the beginning he does not know whom to really love. He spent the best years of his life in search for the beloved. He narrated in his diary about this experience: “God wrote this law with his own finger in the stratums of my heart: You must love with all your strength…And this efficacious voice created an immense passion in it, which made itself felt from my infancy and developed in my youth. I, when I was young, loved with all my strength, because the law of nature impelled me with irresistible impact. What did I love? Who was the beloved object? …Apart from the world, withdrawn into the convent, I enquired about the beloved object, I searched for her. And, who would think of such a thing! I search for her in the austerities of religious life, in fasting, in silence, in poverty; I searched for her and I found her..! I saw my loved one, and I united myself to her in faith, in hope and love! Her presence satisfied my passion, and with her I was happy, her beauty was sufficient for me. God and my neighbor, or rather the Catholic Church seemed to me as beautiful as a divinity. She was covered under the veil of mystery…I found my happiness and blissfulness in her; I was happy” (My Relations with the Church, Fragments I 2, 3).

His mission naturally flowed from that experience. It was the passion that fired up his preaching and his teaching. He wrote: “My mission is to announce to the people that you are infinitely beautiful and loveable, and to tell them to love you. Love of God and of neighbor: this is the object of my mission. And you are my neighbors forming in God only one thing” (My Relations with the Church, 12, 2).

The Church as mystery of communion, where Christ is the Head and the people forming one body with Christ, God and neighbor united as one body, is the focal point of Blessed Francisco Palau’s life and mission. It was the inspiration, the fire, the madness that energized everything he did in his lifetime.