The Magnificat Magazine: It would seem that nothing had destined René Schwob to the thirty long years of self-denial that were to lead him to the threshold of the priesthood. Born in Paris in 1895 into a Jewish family of Alsatian origin, his youth was that of a rich young man, obliged to follow certain formalistic practices that more or less epitomized his family’s religious spirit. At the age of thirteen, however, René rejected these practices, saying, “My soul could find no sustenance in them.” When his mother, who was not a very staunch Jew herself, called upon him to fast on Yom Kippur, he replied, “I don’t have faith, so I won’t fast.” The life of an esthete and pleasure-seeker was opening up before young René. Story is here
