The Sisters Of the Visitation of Tyringham

Live + Jesus

SAINTS OF THE SACRED HEART

by Visitation Sisters

February 2009

Part I

Saints of the Sacred Heart: St. Claude de la Columbiere and St John Eudes

Dear Friends of the Heart of Christ,

Living in a cloistered monastery does not mean that one does not care about or know what is happening in the rest of the world. No, religious who are trying to listen to what the Lord is saying and who are attentive to what he is doing, are vitally concerned about their fellow human beings. Over the past days and weeks, we have received some heart-rending prayer requests. Some of these are from people who recently lost their jobs and are struggling to support themselves and their families. With the unemployment rate at its highest level in a quarter of a century, with the banking industry wobbling despite the infusion of staggering amounts of bailout money, the future looks very insecure and uncertain. Promises and programs from government leaders amid policies that promote questionable morality leave one wondering how it is all going to work out. Sometimes we seem so helpless, victims of huge machinery that we cannot seem to stop or redirect. Should we place our hope in such systems?

Well, I would like to endorse an unfailing system of hope and rescue... and that is the Sacred Heart of Jesus. One of the great apostles of the Sacred Heart St. Claude la Colombiere has written: "O Lord, all my confidence is my confidence in your Sacred Heart alone. This confidence never deceived anyone. No one, no one ever hoped in you and was disappointed."
Today, we would like to see how some very special men and women dealt with the dilemmas of their days. History should not be a bunch of boring facts that are compiled in dusty books. Our past experiences and the real people who lived through them have something to tell us and something to teach us about life. So we are going to look at the lives of a few very unique friends of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. To do this we will be taking a trip-at least in our mind's eye- to France, to the church of the Visitation Monastery in Paray-le-Monial. In its Chapel of Apparitions one of the greatest friends of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saint Margaret Mary-saw and heard the Lord speak to her of his immense love for all people. Imagine yourself walking into this sacred space. As we enter into its profound silence and are enveloped by the same ambience that electrified the soul of St. Margaret Mary, we are immediately drawn to the huge fresco of the Sacred Heart appearing to our saint. It fills the entire back wall of the sanctuary. The privileged souls who are painted on it have their own stories to tell us. My job in this presentation is to tell you a little bit about two of these: Saint Claude la Columbiere and Saint John Eudes.

St. Claude la Colombiere (1641-1682), known as the spiritual director of Saint Margaret Mary, was born into a rather wealthy, pious family near Lyons, France. Claude had a lot going for him-a good family, financial security, an obvious intelligence and impressive oratorical gifts. He had a very artistic temperament with a great love for music, literature, books and friendships. His call to the Jesuits, however, was not easy for him. In fact, he said he had a "terrible loathing for the life" when he decided to become a religious. Yet, he felt God's hand upon him and wanted to be faithful no matter what. Early on he distinguished himself as a noted preacher and dedicated priest who began to foster a growing attraction to the divine heart of the Lord. Only two months after his solemn profession, Claude was appointed superior of the Jesuit house in Paray-le-Monial. This French town in Burgundy was quite an out-of-the-way place three centuries ago with about 2,000 inhabitants. Such an assignment for a promising young cleric seemed incongruous from an earthly perspective. But the Lord had his reasons. Hidden in the obscure Visitation Monastery there was a shy nun who was receiving messages from the Lord about his tremendous love for souls and his burning desire to be loved in return. Was Margaret Mary imagining these things? It was up to Claude to recognize and authenticate Margaret Mary's visions and to help her make these messages known to the rest of the world. For Claude, St. Margaret Mary's experiences were a direct confirmation from God of his own special devotion to the Sacred Heart and he became one of its greatest advocates.

Claude's brief stay in Paray, a mere 20 months, ended with his new assignment to London where he became the chaplain to Mary of Modena, then Duchess of York and later Queen of England, as wife of James II. In the heart of London, then virulently anti-Catholic, Claude tirelessly worked to communicate Christ's message of love from his Sacred Heart. His actions proved to be those of a very courageous man in the face of fierce anti-Catholic politics. "How many subterfuges daily, he asks, "bring men to yield God's interest to those of the state?" Already in poor health, armed guards broke into Claude's apartments at 2 a.m. on November 24, 1678, arrested him on false charges of complicity in the Titus Oates plot and dragged him off to a damp prison where his health was permanently damaged. A few weeks later he was banished back to France where he spent the last three years of his life largely as an invalid. He died in Paray as predicted by Saint Margaret Mary. The Church beatified him in 1929 and Pope John Paul II canonized him on the Feast of the Visitation in 1992.

Another of the great apostles of the Sacred Heart is Saint John Eudes (1601-1680) who lived and labored in France. John's parents prayed for three years for a child, vowing that if one should be born to them, they would make a special pilgrimage to Our Lady. Their prayer was heard and John came into this world and made it a better place to live in. (John's parents had six children after John.) France at the time had suffered much from terrible wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants. The Catholics of the country were mainly uneducated in their faith and there were many superstitious practices mingled into it. One of John's greatest desires was to re-establish orthodoxy and right thinking in Catholic doctrines. His mission was not to combat the external enemies of the Church but to try to restore the fervor of lukewarm Catholics. He was initially drawn to the Oratorians, a society of priests without formal religious vows who lived in community. After ordination, John stayed with the Oratorians for 20 years, exhausting himself by preaching missions throughout the towns and villages of Normandy. He was an incomparable orator and a compassionate father who spoke not of an abstract God, but a living Christ whose heart was on fire with love. His oratory was effective because he lived the words he spoke such as risking his own life to tend to victims of the Bubonic Plague and caring for mistreated and abandoned people.

In 1643 at age 42, John left the Oratory to found a society of priests (now known as the Eudists) and a congregation of sisters. Through these institutions he fostered devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary and established special feasts in their honor.

As with any inspired work of God, John met with opposition. A terrible period of rumors, accusations and libels, even from a Cistercian abbot who circulated a 127 page pamphlet against him, ensued. In all this, John was to share in the sufferings of Christ's own heart. John Eudes was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1925 as the "Father, doctor and apostle of the liturgical cult of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary."

What do the lives of St. Claude la Colombiere and St. John Eudes teach us today? I think they exhort us to deeper spiritual fervor as we contemplate the love of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary for us sinners. They give us incentive to break out of our mediocrity and tepidity. We are urged to ask ourselves if we have become people with limited horizons who no longer care about the great panoramas and causes of our time but instead just want to live our life with its small pleasures. Such a spirit of mediocrity and tepidity makes us people who are insensible to the ardent fire of love from Christ's heart and the grandeur of the fight to do God's work in a secular society. The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a good way to correct such a spirit. If we have a problem or a temptation, we should pray to the Sacred Heart to restore our fervor. We should remember that the Heart of Christ is an abyss of love and mercy and that it is He alone who revives our spirit and brightens our eyes. He is "the one" who gives us healing, life and blessings.

Part II

SAINTS OF THE SACRED HEART St. Francis de Sales * St. Jane de Chantal *

St. Margaret Mary

During the 16th and 17th centuries in France, the influence of Protestantism had taken hold and wars of religion were being fought. The theology of Cornelius Jansen (1510-76) emphasized predestination, human unworthiness, and the irresistibility of grace. Through all of this, the deep love of God for humankind had been supplanted by fear and rigidity. But through it all, the saints of the Sacred Heart exemplified the great love in the heart of God.

The heart of Christ, a human heart, yet Divine, illustrated and communicated the love, care, and affection coming from God's great abundance. As a young man, St. Francis de Sales himself had been influenced by the prevailing ideas and spent a number of weeks in distracted concern for his own future. It was through deep prayer that he was relieved of these heretical ideas and found the deep, abiding love God had for him and for all. St. Francis grew in humble confidence, teaching and preaching this gentle, deep love of God by teaching us to recognize our faults and failings, then quickly moving on to look to God and his loving grace, leaving behind the negative, the weaknesses, the old ways.

St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), the Gentleman Saint, was born in Savoy, educated in Padua and Paris, and became the Bishop of Geneva. Since this territory was governed by John Calvin and his Huguenots, St. Francis resided in nearby Annecy, France. He was noted for his spiritual direction, writing thousands of letters to his directees. One letter that illustrates his beautiful 'heart' spirituality was to Sister Marie-Aimee de Blonay, a Novice Mistress in a Visitation Monastery:

Do you not want to serve him faithfully? And who gives you this desire and intention
if not he himself in the look of love he casts upon you? You must not examine whether
your heart is pleasing to him but whether his heart pleases you; and looking at his heart
is the same as rejoicing in it, for his heart is so gentle, so sweet, so gracious, so much in
love with his poor, feeble creatures, provided they acknowledge their need, so good to the
needy and the penitent! And who could fail to love this royal heart which mothers us in
such a fatherly way?

In his book, THE INTRODUCTION TO THE DEVOUT LIFE, St. Francis spoke again of the great love the Savior has for us:

It is certain that the Heart of our dear Jesus beheld your heart from the tree of the Cross
and loved it. By the love that He bore it, He obtained for it every good that you shall
ever have . . .

When St. Francis and St. Jane de Chantal had founded their "little institute" of the Visitation, which later became an Order in the Church, St. Francis chose the Heart of Christ as the emblem, the symbol of the community. Writing to St. Jane, he stated:

I have thought, dear Mother, if you agree, we should take as our coat of arms a single heart
pierced by two arrows, the whole enclosed in a crown of thorns, and with the poor heart
serving to hold and support a cross which is to surmount it; and the heart is to be engraved
with the sacred names of Jesus and Mary.
Dear daughter, the next time we meet I shall tell you a great many little thoughts which I
had on the subject; for indeed, our little congregation is the work of the hearts of Jesus
and Mary. Our dying Savior gave birth to us by the wound in his sacred heart; it is
therefore perfectly right that by constant mortification our own heart should always remain
surrounded by the crown of thorns which once rested on our master's head while love held
him pinned to the throne of his mortal sufferings.

St. Jane de Chantal (1572-1641) was well directed by St. Francis. They had met at a Lenten series of talks given by St. Francis three years after St. Jane's husband had been killed in an accident. She wished to deepen her spiritual life and so chose St. Francis as her spiritual director. St. Jane had four children to raise and her father-in-law's chateau to over see, yet she had time to serve the poor and to arrange her own personal spiritual life. By 1610, both had developed an idea for a new institute that would allow widows, women of weakened constitutions and older women to live a vowed religious life. St. Jane had a strong personality and was, at times, impetuous. St. Francis taught her his gentle, loving ways, which she was able to communicate to her new religious sisters. She once said:

The Divine Heart will never fail us, this I tell you for certain, if we do not fail Him. And even
if we did, He would not fail us, because His fidelity is greater than our unfaithfulness.

To another Sister, St. Jane wrote:

God be praised for all His graces, especially for having given you a heart which, in my
opinion, is fashioned after His own most sacred one. . . .Apparently, you have drawn this
love from the inexhaustible love of our divine Savior, for neither human considerations
nor the power of nature could bring about anything like it. It is the most precious gift
imaginable. I believe it was obtained for you from the fatherly heart of God through the
tender love that our blessed Father has for his dear ones.

The institute grew, producing many saintly and devout Visitandines, one of whom is St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, (1647-1690) noted for her communications with Our Lord.
On December 27, 1673, Our Lord spoke to her saying:

My Divine Heart is so passionately in love with men that it can no longer contain within
itself the flames of its ardent charity. It must pour them out by thy means . . .He demanded
my heart . . .and put it into His own Adorable Heart in which He allowed me to see it
as a little atom being consumed in that fiery furnace.

He later requested a feast to be established in honor of the Sacred Heart:

. . .the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special Feast making
reparation to It by a solemn act--in order to make amends for the indignities which It has
received during the time It has been exposed on the altars!

Our Lord asks us to deepen our understanding of his unfathomable love. He has left us Himself in the Eucharist and sent us his Saints as examples of humility and love. We, in turn, can spend time with the Lord in prayer, seeking always to learn to love Our Lord and each other more.

Part III

Friends of the Sacred Heart: Blessed Charles de Foucauld and Father Mateo Crawley-Boevey

Faces can be a gateway to the soul if looked at with spiritual perspicacity. The two real-life faces of Blessed Charles de Foucauld and Father Mateo Crawley-Boevey, SS.CC. found in the Paray-le-Monial mural are a meditation. Charles de Foucauld, a nineteenth century French born aristocrat, died as a hermit in a remote area of the Sahara desert. In the photographic portrait unveiled at his beatification ceremony in Rome in 2005, one sees a beautiful spiritual countenance, a face transformed by the workings of grace. An almost majestic peace radiates from this being, drawing the viewer into an aura of spiritual ‘enchantment.' His white habit prominently features a simple yet bold emblem of a red heart topped with a cross. Count de Foucauld's early life was one of total self-gratification. As playboy, soldier, explorer he did as he pleased and cared little for how his morals were judged. Early photos capture the posture of arrogance and self-centered indulgence that was his way of life, his greatest goals being reached in personal aggrandizement. But at the age of twenty-eight he had a powerful conversion experience and grace broke into his consciousness through the human interventions of spiritually gifted people. His life took on new meaning and direction, so much so, that he wished to embrace the most challenging of religious commitments and joined the Trappist Order. Not finding it austere enough, he moved on to become a contemplative in the sands of the Sahara desert, combining a life of intense prayer with a ministry to the nomadic tribes of the region. He was said to have wanted all who approached him to find in him a ‘universal little brother.' Although he hoped to found a community of like-minded disciples who would share his ideals, none persevered in his rigorous lifestyle.

Not until after his premature death, by the bullet of an assassin in 1916, did the realization of his spiritual dream take hold and bear fruit. Truly, Charles de Foucauld's life of prayer, especially his long hours in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament enabled him to grasp the true meaning of human existence. His prayer of abandonment beautifully captures what St. Margaret Mary valued and taught in her own life:

I abandon myself into your hands;
do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you.
I am ready for all. I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me,
and in all your creatures.
I wish no more than this, O Lord.
Into your hands I commend my soul;
I offer it to you with all the
love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord,
and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands,
without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father.