Foul-mouthed priest who arrives at altar on Harley Davidson

From 2019- Guy Gilbert: "I've become quite turned on spiritually speaking" - the original is too vivid, so toned down

The famous "priest of the hooligans" was in French-speaking Switzerland this weekend. It was a great opportunity to (re)discover that behind the perfecto there is a big heart and a faith that can turn mountains upside down. Meet the man.

Guy Gilbert, the parish priest of Les Loubards, gave a Mass for bikers at the church of Saint Michel in Martigny (VS). Father Gilbert arrived at the church on the Harley Davidson of his friend, magnetist and bonesetter Georges Delaloye.

Every ring has a meaning, the one with the fleur-de-lys was given to him by a Muslim.

What Father Guy Gilbert has found most "spiritually exciting" in his 54 years as a priest is not so much having married Jamel Debouzze, Stromae or Prince Laurent of Belgium (laurent is the black sheep of the Belgium Royal family), or having buried Johnny Halliday, let alone having received his seventh black jacket from his "buddy" Nicolas Sarkozy or his Legion of Honour from Abbé Pierre. No. What the "priest of the hooligans" really enjoyed was sowing seeds in the hearts of countless (very) "bad boys", seeds that sometimes ended up blossoming against all odds.

"One day, one of the youngsters I'd looked after years before asked to see me. I thought to myself, 'Blimey, he's going to want to shoot me a hundred times! Well, he didn't. He had come back so that I could talk to him about God", marvelled the man of the Church, who was in Martigny (VS) for a conference yesterday (Saturday).

He goes to bed at 4am

That very morning, the 83-year-old Frenchman had gone to Bochuz to visit his "human brothers", most of whom were Muslims, and to celebrate Mass for them, all with the same rebellious authenticity as Johnny Cash in San Quentin or Folsom prison. It was so intense that the priest, who like his 'flock' is used to going to bed at 4am and getting up at 11am, had to postpone our appointment for almost two hours, just to get his health back. His life is a novel, and he tells it like no-one else, sitting at a table in the Martigny spa. Throughout his story, a gleam in his eyes tells us that it all boils down to one word. The word that every human being clumsily and sometimes unwillingly tries to put their finger on, most of the time without success: "Love" with a capital A.

His father makes a pact with God

Guy Gilbert was born into a loving working-class family of 15 children. At the age of 8, he almost died of septicaemia. His father entrusted him to God if he was to be saved. He would be, and would only learn of this strange "pact with the Almighty" when he became a priest many years later. Young Guy grew up in France in the 40s and 50s, a country that didn't need to see Notre-Dame go up in smoke for it to be vaguely reminded that it was "the eldest daughter of the Church". At the age of 13, without really knowing why, the young boy decided to become a priest and entered the seminary. The conservative church of the time, which offered masses in Latin, usually without conviction, did not appeal to him.

A mystical experience, then war

Except that behind these overly theoretical litanies there was nevertheless a hint of Truth... Young Guy could feel it in his heart. A mass unlike any other, in the form of a mystical experience, confirmed the fact. "That day, I felt that Christ was really in the host..." he sums up as mysteriously as he does soberly. In 1957, the seminarian was mobilised to Algeria as a nurse. "I had no desire to kill or torture people I didn't know", he sums up. This conviction led him "to the hole" after seeing the blood of an Algerian "who was shouting his race" spurt out on his uniform. "Over there, I discovered the power of love against violence", he insists.

"The first of many large, flashy rings"

After the war, his superiors appointed him curate in Blida. There, he took under his wing the first marginal of a long list. To thank him, the mother of the young man in question gave the priest the large ring that he still wears on his left hand among several others. On it is engraved a fleur-de-lys, the symbol par excellence of Catholic France. Back in France, the priest, who is also a social worker by training, attracts to himself like a magnet all kinds of losers. Drug addicts, alcoholics, violent people. Always neurotic. Sometimes psychotic. He also sometimes goes out looking for them on his motorbike, wearing a black leather jacket emblazoned with badges and pins, symbolising the fact that not much separates him from them.

A sheepfold for the lost

All this might seem like a game. But it's nothing of the sort. The priest is often insulted and sometimes beaten up. One evening in a "sensitive suburb", one of these "youngsters" beat him up badly. "I fought back as best I could, but to no avail. A few days later, he came back to me. Without meaning to, I had won his respect and that of others..." This rite of passage opens the doors of a sort of purgatory for priests, full to bursting with bad boys and girls of bad character, into which they inject as much love as they can without ever becoming proselytisers.

"I soon realised that talking about God to these young people who had never known love and hated themselves was doomed to failure. The best I could do was to incarnate the Gospels in their midst. It was an ambitious goal, despite everything. It led to the legendary "Bergerie du Faucon", where the priest still takes in sheep with wolf-like behaviour and tames them through contact with animals. "It's the best educational project of the last 46 years," he says with no misplaced pride or false modesty. "Éveilleur d'espérance" (Editions Philippe Rey), the book by our Genevan photojournalist colleague Jean-Claude Gadmer, bears witness to this atypical success story.

"True modernist or old reactionary?

Behind his black jacket and his countless outbursts, sometimes a little tiresome, Guy Gilbert is ultimately a priest like any other. In fact, the dictatorship of one-track thinking that has prevailed in recent years would have been quick to confine his opinions to the inevitably limiting label of "reactionary". For him, "a stable, loving family is a haven in our unstructured society", divorce "almost always a tragedy", and celibacy for priests "a magnificent gift, nourishing and considerable if chosen carefully, even if when you're young and beautiful, it's sometimes hard", he confesses from experience...

Same-sex couples? He is happy to bless them, but refuses to marry them. Abortion and euthanasia? He is unashamedly against them, but not in a dogmatic or judgmental way. In short, behind the "whores" and the "piss offs", Guy Gilbert, a "man of the left who even voted communist once", has a line and sticks to it, without playing the annoying "moral father" to those who haven't asked him for anything...

An outsider for Holiness...

In front of us, moreover, he radiates love. His energy is impressive, but we also sense that the end is probably not so far off. We find ourselves "fantasising" aloud about seeing him canonised one day like "our" national Marguerite Bays. The idea amuses him a little. He dodges it. It's true that his outbursts seem to disqualify him from the outset. A Saint who philosophised "Yesterday I don't give a f**k, tomorrow I don't give a f**k" or "That Pope's got balls after all", that would probably put her in a bad light... But at the same time, a priest who has devoted his whole life to the most lost of the lost and who is capable of saying, in a tone of the obvious, "Sometimes I sit at the foot of an old oak tree with my three dogs and we listen to the nightingales singing for us. I can't think of a more beautiful prayer than that", wouldn't that make a pretty good candidate for the "supreme title"?

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