Père Josef

Père Josef is a Greek Catholic priest whose pastoral care is repeatedly tested at the boundary between religious principle and human need. He is at once a man bound by the rules of his office, a gentle presence sought by people in distress, and a figure whose prayers acquire an extraordinary consequence in Adèle’s account of her pregnancy.

Pastoral Care and Religious Boundaries

When Stefania tells her grandfather that Père Josef has asked to see her, she presents the visit as an errand to the chapel, lowering her head and making the sign of the cross. The encounter ends not in the confession she seeks but in a painful impasse: Père Josef explains that he cannot perform the sacrament outside a church, while Stefania cannot enter because the church is inside a prison. Her question—that a sinner, a priest, and God are already present—sets the immediacy of human need against the institutional conditions governing the rite. The separation is not a rejection of Stefania; it is a limit he cannot simply disregard. Her renewed collapse into tears makes the cost of that limit visible.

His pastoral attention also reaches a child whose identity becomes the focus of public speculation. When Adèle refuses to let him take the boy, Père Josef first proposes placing the child with the Basilian sisters on Kazimierzowska Street, then considers asking the Protestant pastor Zekler to receive him at the Bethleem orphanage on Sapieżyńska Street. Bystanders argue over whether the child belongs with the Jewish kahal or the Armenians, claiming his face discloses his ancestry. The narrator cannot see what they find improper in the child’s appearance. Père Josef, by contrast, blesses the boy by touching his light curls and tells Adèle calmly that the parents must be looking for him: the child should not be deprived of his family. His tenderness does not prevent disagreement; Adèle holds the boy more tightly and insists that nobody is looking for him.

Service, Love, and Practical Faith

Père Josef gives Stefania a religious answer to her fear that the work she knows how to do is too humble to count as service to God. She describes washing floors and windows, polishing silver, and preparing food, asking how such ordinary labor could amount to service. After watching her silently, he replies that love must be shown not in words and speeches but in deeds and truth. He then invokes Paul’s teaching: eloquence, prophecy, knowledge, faith, generosity, and even self-sacrifice are worth nothing without charity.

The exchange reframes Stefania’s domestic work without pretending that her uncertainty has vanished. What she regards as trivial labor becomes legible as a possible form of service when joined to love in action. Père Josef’s counsel connects religious devotion to acts done for other people, rather than to exceptional gifts or public declarations. In a household where care is expressed through practical work, the teaching supplies a spiritual language for the value of those acts.

Reliance on Bishop Andrey

Père Josef’s own spiritual dependence comes into view in his conversation about Bishop Andrey. Among neatly ordered books and service books, a leather-bound Bible, papers, and the bishop’s letters, he lights a candle before the icons and tells Stefania that they are taking their bishop away. Bishop Andrey has been summoned to the papal nuncio in Vienna; after the New Year he is to become a metropolitan and leave for Lviv.

Stefania tries to console him by saying that Lviv is not far. Père Josef answers that distance is not the point: he will no longer be able to see the bishop whenever he needs him. The bishop’s mere look, he says, sometimes helps more than words; he had guided Père Josef as one guides a blind man. His fear that he may not know how to go forward without him complicates his role as a source of spiritual guidance. The priest who helps others find direction confesses his own reliance on a guide, and the carefully ordered room cannot conceal the uncertainty created by that coming separation.

Prayer, Adèle, and the Claim of a Miracle

When Père Josef arrives at the house, Adèle runs from a phaeton, waves her umbrella, and calls out that seeing him is the joy she wanted most. He says that he has come to see her and needs to speak with her, leaving Stefania unable to understand why Adèle is the object of the visit. The meeting’s importance becomes clear only later, when Stefania accuses Adèle of lying about having seen her embraced by Père Josef. Adèle dismisses the accusation as stupidity: she says she had been thanking him for his prayers, had asked his help, and had prayed alongside him. She then reports that Doctor Vodnetsky says she is pregnant.

The revelation transforms the meaning of the earlier embrace in Stefania’s eyes. What she had read as passionate intimacy, Adèle explains as shared prayer and gratitude; the report of pregnancy turns that prayer into a claim of divine response. Stefania refuses to accept it as truth and calls it a miracle. Père Josef’s place in the episode is therefore neither that of an identified lover nor that of an independent witness to the pregnancy: the available account establishes only that he prayed with Adèle and that she presents the pregnancy as the answer to their prayer. The gap between Stefania’s suspicion and Adèle’s explanation keeps faith, bodily possibility, and the limits of what the narrator can believe in unresolved tension.