18 How the Church Has Changed the World kimono from Japan, slippers from Turkey. It was his love. When she grew older she saw that other people loved her father, too, because they sensed in him a companion in their suffering. In the days of Louis Pasteur, she wrote, doctors would smother a rabies-afflicted child between two mattresses, to spare him the terrible suffering. But it was not they who made progress in science. It was the one “who could not accept the thought of giving up, when confronted with sickness, suffering, and death.” Pasteur was a God-fearing man, a hero; had his treatment of the boy with rabies failed, he might have gone to prison. His enemies would certainly have stripped him of his right to practice medicine. He would have died in disgrace. What explains such heroism? Perhaps the saying of Saint Vincent de Paul, which Lejeune often quoted. What shall we do for our neighbor? “More,” said Saint Vincent, “always more!” Jérôme Lejeune died in 1994, on Easter Sunday, thirty-three days after Pope John Paul II had named him head of the new Pontifical Academy for Life. He is called a Servant of God; and may the day soon come when we can publicly invoke his intercession along with all the other saints of the Church. For God is not a God of death, but of life.
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