Yves Musset's view
When Alfred Ancel talks about holiness, he can only refer to Antoine Chevrier, who shows how, in the life and ministry of the prophets, the Holy Spirit prepared the Redemption and how he continues to fulfil it in the lives of the saints:
" The lives of the saints are all the same, all inspired by the same Spirit who leads them. They spend their lives in the midst of tribulation, suffering and persecution. Jesus Christ is the first saint, the model for all.
The Spirit of God who speaks in the prophets and saints, whether they are praying or groaning, is the same in all of them, and what the prophets apply to themselves also applies to Jesus Christ with all the more reason, because the saints and prophets retrace, in small part, the life of the Saint and Prophet, persecuted par excellence, Jesus Christ. What they say about them applies all the more to Jesus Christ, of whom they are the small representatives.
There is only one God, one Spirit, one holiness, one goal in the saints. They all have the same struggles, the same persecutions to endure on earth. Only some represent Christ more faithfully, others less so. And as the Holy Spirit dwells more or less perfectly in the souls of the saints, he will speak more or less clearly according to the external and internal circumstances in which they find themselves. In this sense, we easily find the application of the words of the prophets to Jesus Christ, who is the Holy One par excellence and whom the Holy Spirit had in view principally when he spoke through their mouths without themselves thinking about it...
There is only one God, one Spirit who is the same in all the saints and all the prophets. It is he who prays in them, who speaks with them and inspires them to say things that are useful to their neighbours and conducive to the glory of God. Jesus Christ is the Saint par excellence. All the holiness of the saints is contained in the holiness of Jesus Christ, and it can be said that the saints have had only a part of the holiness of Jesus Christ. Everything that happened to the saints happened to Jesus Christ, because the path to holiness is the same for everyone: the glory of God, Creator and Father, the persecutions of the world and the struggle against oneself and the world. The world will always fight against the saints, because there can be no union between God and the world. The one must necessarily kill the other. Only God kills the spirit of the world by persuasion, charity and light. The world kills the body, because it does not want to receive the truth and cannot achieve its goal otherwise.
In the saints and prophets, we must see the Spirit of God dwelling in them and enlightening them, inspiring them with prayers in keeping with the situations in which they find themselves, which are more or less in line with those of Jesus Christ, who is the centre and contains everything. It is the same Spirit who speaks in David, Isaiah, Abraham, Jacob, John the Baptist, Zechariah, the Blessed Virgin and the saints of the New Testament. But he lowers himself for them, bends to their character, takes advantage of interior and exterior circumstances to speak of the Word, to make him known, loved and reproduced. It is the office, the work of the Holy Spirit to produce Jesus Christ in the world, to make him known. He takes advantage of everything"*.
If the Holy Spirit was at work in the ministry of the prophets, as he is also in the lives of the saints, it is because his function, as Fr Chevrier(1) reiterates here, was to "... bring the Holy Spirit to life and to bring him to life". produce Jesus Christ" . The Spirit can " to speak of the Word, to make it known, loved and reproduced" because he is the Spirit who, in the flesh, made the Word exist and speak, and made him go so far as to offer himself totally to the Father for the love of his brothers and sisters in humanity.
* Ms 6/19w, in notebook 6/19t, p. 1. In Yves Musset, Le Christ du Père Chevrier, Desclée, 2000, p.73-14.
(1) Cf. p. 51-54.
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