To the Godless Poor

NUDES! NUDES! THE NUDEST SHOW IN

PARIS! THE MOST SUGGESTIVE NUDES ON

EARTH! flashes a neon sign on a certain street corner at Place Pigalle. On the sidewalk, streetwalkers nudge potential customers, and if business is slow or feet begin to hurt, they drop into a tiny cremerie for a cognac or an ice cream or a payoff to a pimp. Behind the bar is Odette.

All the prostitutes know Odette. When she is not working in the cremerie (from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m.), she visits the cafes they frequent, politely ending conversation when a customer approaches, gently repelling the men who mistake the reason for her own presence. In Pigalle, they call Odette "La petite missionnaire." For that is what she is.

When the Hands Harden. Odette is a member of the Institut Seculaire de Tra-vailleuses Missionnaires de Marie Immaculee, and there are 24 young women like her. After five years in apprenticeship and study, they don white robes and gold rings as "Brides of Jesus." They do not take vows but merely pledge themselves to poverty, chastity and obedience (vows are not possible until the Roman Catholic church recognizes the Institut as a religious order). Then they exchange their robes for ordinary clothes, and for the rest of their working lives, they live and labor among the poor.

Twenty-eight-year-old Odette has made her tiny, seventh-floor hotel room in Montmartre a haven for the sad, overpainted tarts who climb the spiral stairs for a chat, a prayer or a good cry. Sometimes, too, they ask for help in finding a decent job, and help is always forthcoming. In a dilapidated garret in the suburb of Aubervilliers live Andree, Juliette and Colette--each 24, each working in a factory. Colette-- and Juliette work in the nearby Tungsram plant, Andree in the Citroen factory 'in Asnieres. Despite her training years in factory work, Andree's hands are red and swollen from the steel particles thrown off by the cutting tools in the big machine shop where she works with 300 other women.

"In factories God is only a bad word," she says. "Very few go to church or think of religion. Some of them weren't even baptized, many aren't baptizing their own children. Yet they need God so badly!" Andree has worked only a fortnight at Citroen, yet she is already getting to be known as a missionary worker. "Last week a fellow worker noticed my ring and asked about my family. I invited her to our garret, and when she arrived, I told her the whole story. We're close friends already. By the time my hands harden up the whole plant will know. Already other girls are beginning to come around and wish me luck."

When the Reds Lose. Founder of Odette's and Andree's order is a jolly, beet-cheeked priest named Marcel Roussel, 45. Son of a prosperous village baker in the Jura mountains, a parish priest in Besangon when World War II broke out, Abbe Roussel served in the French artillery, then left his parish at war's end to reach out to the Godless poor in France.

Inspired by such groups as the Peasant Brothers and the Little Sisters and Little Brothers of Abbe Foucauld, Abbe Roussel got church permission in 1947 to found his Institut Seculaire de Travail leuses. Since then, he has lived in the buckle of Paris' red belt--the dingy factory suburb named for St. Denis, when only 2,000 of 25,000 people ever go to church. Here, in a tiny, fourth-floor walk up with a cold-water tap in the back court and one toilet to 16 families, he directs the work of his 25 missionar> women in the Paris factory districts, at Lille, in the port cities Le Havre anc Toulon -- as well as a 30-bed rest home for working girls in Mont d'Halluin.

The worker missionaries have avoided many of the pitfalls that helped wreck the worker priest movement, e.g., Communist inroads, marriage by some priests. For one thing, the sisters are kept under tight discipline, report frequently to their superior; for another, working mostly with women, they do not face so tough a political opposition. Abbe Roussel, who reports directly to Cardinal Feltin of Paris, looks forward to seeing his secular movement turn eventually into a full-fledged religious order.

Meanwhile, he takes pride in such signs of success as the recent elections at the big Someca auto-parts plants where two of his missionaries worked for a year: for the first time the Communist C.G.T. lost to the Christian Workers Union.

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