To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best The priest-novelist Jean Sulivan may not be as well known as François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, but he deserves a place among the great French Catholic writers of the twentieth century. Born into a Breton farming family in 1913, he lost his father in the trenches of the First World War and then had to endure the remarriage of his pious mother, to whom he was extremely devoted. It may have been the strong, simple faith of his mother that prompted Sulivan’s vocation to the priesthood: he was ordained in 1938. While working in Rennes, he became very involved in cultural activities, but w