Elemento Chi Siamo: Our Saints

Marie Frances Therese Martin Guérin was born in Alençon (France) on 2nd January 1873. Her parents were the now Saints Luis Martin and Celia Guerin. She was the last of the nine offspring from this holy marriage from which only five daughters survived: Marie, Pauline, Leonie, Celine and Therese. The first year of her life, she had to be raised in the country by a wet nurse because her mother could not feed her. Initially her life was very happy, but when she was only four years old her mother died of cancer. This affected little Therese very much, who changed from being a vivacious effusive child to being timid, quiet and hyper-sensitive, despite the fact that her father and sisters increased their tenderness towards her.

The family moved to Lisieux, near to her uncle and aunt, the Guérin family. When her sister Pauline entered Carmel in 1882, it was for Therese like losing her mother again. The following year she suffered from a “strange sickness”, with hallucinations and tremors. One day, while her sisters were praying for her, it seemed to her that the nearby simple statue of the Virgin smiled at her and she felt cured.

The following year she made her first communion and it was a cloudless day for her in which she dedicated herself to Jesus. Her soul related to God with spontaneity and love. In spite of this, influenced by the religious tendencies of the time, she spent some time suffering from terrible scruples. Her sister Marie tried to help her with solid teaching.

At Christmas in 1886, a few months after Marie entered Carmel, Therese received what she called the “grace of her conversion” by which she overcame her extreme sensitivity and began to find happiness in forgetting about herself and giving pleasure to others.

The following year, after obtaining her father’s permission to enter Carmel, she made a pilgrimage to Rome where, in an audience with Pope Leo XIII, she asked the Pope’s permission to enter Carmel despite her youth.

On 9th April 1888, Therese entered Carmel and took the name of Therese of the Child Jesus. To this name she later added “and of the Holy Face”, when her father suffered periods of hallucinations and had to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. It was a sickness he bore with great faith, but his daughters suffered much because of it.

In Carmel, Therese went deeply into Sacred Scripture, mainly the Gospels where she saw the imprints of Jesus. Also in the Old Testament writings, she was deeply moved when the Prophet Isaiah speaks of the maternal love of God or of the “Servant of Yahve”. St John of the Cross was her spiritual teacher, and through his writings she entered more deeply into her journey of love.

After her period of formation, she began to train the young sisters, but without the official “title”, since her sister Celine was the mistress of novices. She also wrote to two missionaries. By means of these letters, she established with them a relationship that was not only fraternal, but truly of spiritual direction. In an age when many believers offered themselves as victims for God’s wrath, Therese offered herself to his Merciful Love, understanding that divine justice– like the rest of God’s attributes – is always shot through with mercy. With the years, her experience of God’s gratuitous and unconditional love continued to increase, and she felt herself called to live in the appreciation and trusting abandonment of a child in its mother’s arms. This led her to understand the value of the smallest of works carried out for love (and not for gaining merit), refined in daily love, and the slightest details. She came to understand that love is her vocation in the Church. She was a simple woman, who lived without doing extraordinary things, without ecstasies or miracles, experiencing dryness in prayer and misunderstanding, things which never took away her calm happiness and gave her a peace that continued to fill her heart more and more.

During Easter 1896, Therese coughed up blood, a symptom of tuberculosis. Three days after, began her trial of faith, which lasted until her death. It was a trial which produced in her a state of not being able to believe in eternal life and which she describes in frightening detail. She coped with this by making greater acts of faith and love. She died on 30th September 1897.

Her writings are her Letters, some Poems, tiny theatrical works for community feasts, some Prayers, the Last Conversations– notes her sisters made during her illness, and the Story of a Soul. This last writing, tells her story of salvation, in doing so it revolutionized the spirituality of the Church to the point of her being declared a Doctor of the universal Church. She is also universal Patron of the Missions.

Her feast is celebrated on 1st October.

To approach the person of Edith Stein presupposes that we are meeting with a passionate searcher for the Truth, a trait which defined the whole of her life. She was born in Breslau (now Poland) into a Jewish family on 12th October 1891. Her mother, a strong woman of deep faith, educated her children in an atmosphere of respect and responsible liberty. Edith’s faith was to weaken as she attempted to make her own the beliefs handed on to her; not finding replies to her questions, she abandoned her faith in her adolescence.

She possessed an extraordinary intelligence and intuition, which made her a brilliant pupil in all her studies. Moved by an interior urge to seek the meaning of life, she studied psychology, a subject which disappointed her. She felt attracted to history, philosophy and German studies, which she undertook during the years she attended the university in the city where she was born.

In her process of search she came upon the work, Logical Investigations. Her teacher in this subject was to be her admired philosopher, Edmund Hesserl, the founder of phenomenology, a science which opened new perspectives on the knowledge of the essence of things. In the Gotinga University she devoted herself to deepening her knowledge of this science together with the study of other philosophers such as Scheler, Reinach, the married couple Conrad-Martius who were to become her great friends.

When the First World War broke out, she enlisted as a nurse in the Red Cross, since she became convinced that her life no longer belonged to her and she had to be committed to the “great happening”. She came in contact with the mystery of pain and death in a manner of the highest reality, which led her to accept as her own the sufferings of mankind.

She continued studying and preparing her doctoral thesis, for which she received the highest distinction, “summa cum laude”, on the subject Concerning empathy. She had the intention of receiving a university chair, but it was denied her because she was a woman.

Two happenings moved her deeply and would play a part in her change of faith to Christ: the attitude of serenity which she noted in Reinach’s wife when he died in combat; and her own reading of the Life of Saint Teresa of Jesus in the house of her friend Mrs Conrad-Martius.

From then on she continued her own itinerary of deepening her faith, which was to become a journey of progressive trustful abandonment into the hands of the One who revealed himself to her as the Truth and the source of all wisdom. Her desire for total commitment to the Lord in Carmel was preceded by some intensely busy years in which she continued teaching German in the Dominican sisters in Espira, giving conferences in pedagogical and philosophical institutions, studying and translating authors such as St Thomas Aquinas or Bl. Cardinal Newman, Professor in the Institute of Scientific Pedagogy in Munster . . . The strongly anti-Semitic atmosphere of the time (1933) finally forced her to abandon teaching.

It seemed to her that the time had arrived to begin her life in Carmel and after a painful meeting with her mother, who had never accepted Edith’s conversion, she entered the Cologne Carmel on 14th October 1933, where she was to remain until 31st December 1938, the date when she transferred to the Echt Carmel in Holland, to escape the suffocating persecution against the Jews and Catholics in Germany. She willingly took upon herself the “science of the Cross” to its ultimate consequences. She entered eternal “Life” on 9th August 1942 in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

She was beatified in1987, canonized in 1998, named co-Patron of Europe in 1999, the one who knew how to combine in herself, the search for truth together with confident abandonment into God’s hands.

Joseph Kalinowski, was born in Vilna (Lithuania) on 1st September 1835, the son of Andrew Kalinowski and Josephine Polonska, Catholic nobles.

He studied in the Saint Petersburg military academy and obtained good results, but because of his country’s revolt against Russian occupation, he decided to leave the army. Although, because of his knowledge, he knew that the success of the uprising was impossible, he decided to help his compatriots, by accepting the office of Minister of War and tried, in as far as it was possible, to avoid greater spilling of blood.

In March 1864, he was arrested and condemned to capital punishment, which was commuted to 10 years of forced labour in Siberia. With a crucifix and the Imitation of Christ, he set out for Siberia and after 9 months of the hardest of journeys he reached the shores of Lake Bajkal.

In those particularly hard circumstances, he showed great integrity and charity, putting up with sufferings and inconveniences, sharing what he had with others and asked his relatives if they could help him: «I write it clearly, poverty here is great; to find money in the homeland is always easier than in Siberia. It is inconceivable to be indifferent to me».

With the passing of years, he was set free from forced labour and on 2nd February 1874, he gained his freedom, but was forbidden to return to live in Lithuania. He then accepted the position of tutor to Augustus Czartoryski, a 16 year old, who lived the greater part of the time in Paris.

On 15th July 1877, he entered the Carmelite monastery in Grantz, taking the name of Raphael of Saint Joseph. He made his first vows on 26th November 1878 and travelled to Hungary to study philosophy and theology in the Raab monastery. On 27th November 1881, he made his solemn vows and was sent to the Czerna monastery in Poland, where he was ordained priest on 15th January 1882 and within a year he was given the responsibilities of government.

In Poland he reorganized the Order as well as the Secular Order. He published biographies. In 1906, he took over the running of the college of theology in Wadowice. He became appreciated by all as a spiritual director and confessor. He devoted himself with special interest and great commitment to helping his Discalced Carmelite sisters.

He died on 15th November 1907 in Wadowice. He was beatified in Cracow on 22nd June 1983 by Pope John Paul II and canonized in Rome on 17th November 1991. His feast is celebrated on 19th November.

In his life, what stands out in a special manner are his spirit of charity and his spirit of reconciliation, together with the commitment he showed to formation, particularly for young people.

He taught them to have the courage of persevering in their faith and to have hope in the midst of difficulties; he also taught that it is only in the light of the reconciliation that comes from God is it possible to move towards meeting with others and giving pardon. He added that to be able to pardon, it is necessary to know that you yourself have been pardoned.

He possessed an open character, full of warmth. After his time in Siberia, he returned convinced of the need to focus on the youth, since, at this stage of life, learning forms the person and decides the future. First of all he sought an integral formation of the human being; he was moved by a spiritual and intellectual interest.

His life was lit up by the Gospel and the person of Jesus.

He is invoked as patron of Siberians, educators, railway workers, engineers and the youth.

Juanita Fernández Solar was born on 13th July 1900 in Santiago, Chile. Educated in the faith by her parents from an early age, she had a precocious inclination towards prayer and doing good. In 1907 she became an external student at the school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. On 11th September 1910 she made her first communion. This was a decisive day for her, which caused her to live in an increasingly deeper friendship with Jesus.

From a wealthy family, she treated the employees of the home with unusual affection, worrying about teaching them catechism and the material needs of the poor of their lands. Her father managed his property with little success, losing a large part of his fortune, which created not a little tension in his marriage. In addition, her brother Lucho gave up his faith and Miguel led a rather Bohemian life. In the midst of these family difficulties, she was the angel who watched over all.

When she was 15 years old, she declared that Christ captivated her. Shortly after, she became a boarder in college, something which caused great pain: she ended up saying, “boarding would reduce me to ashes.” She came to the decision to be faithful to her life as a student as a way of surrendering herself to God’s will and she made an effort to be an exemplary pupil. Not long after her entry, as a result of conversation with one of her teachers, she began discerning a possible vocation.

When she was 17, she read Saint Teresa of Jesus, which moved her to live her prayer as friendship and commitment to others. She also got to know the writings of Saint Therese and Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity, with whom she felt a great affinity. She desired also to be God’s house and the praise of his glory. She began writing to Mother Angelica, the prioress of the Carmelite nuns in Los Andes and raised with the prioress her concerns about a vocation.

A year later, when her sister Lucia married, she left boarding school in order to learn household management and to come out in society. She was a happy young sportswoman who loved the outdoors. She also taught catechism and gave classes to the children from disadvantaged families and helped the missions. She had no doubt about her vocation, but she was not sure if she should become a Sister of the Sacred Heart or a Discalced Carmelite. When her mother learned of her vocation, she tried to test it in various ways to dissuade her, but was surprised at the sweetness and equilibrium with which she reacted. On 11th January she met the Carmelite nuns’ community and all her doubts disappeared, as she was captivated by the sisters’ simplicity, familiarity in relating, and spontaneity.

When her family became aware of the news, her brothers tried to dissuade her, but her parents gave their permission. She entered Carmel on 7th May 1919, changing her name to Teresa of Jesus. There she came to know the writings of Saint John of the Cross, which assisted her prayer to mature.

She carried on a real apostolate with her letters to family members and friends, urging them to become friends with God, to be happy and have gratitude. They are letters written with a great deal of affection and understanding. These and her Diaries remain as legacies of her spirituality.

In Holy Week, 1920, she became seriously ill. Confined to bed, she made her religious profession with happiness and emotion. She died on 12th April.

Her life and her spirituality are like a light radiating God in Chile and throughout Latin America. Her sanctuary is a place of pilgrimage where many people are once more united with God and their faith.

Anna Maria Redi was born in Arezzo, Italy, on 15th July 1747. She was the second of thirteen children all of whom, except the firstborn and the fifth who died as children, consecrated themselves to God. She had a very happy childhood and was outstanding for her inclination towards piety, desire for sanctity and compassion for the poor.

When she was nine, she became a boarder in Saint Apolonia’s college of the Benedictine nuns of Florence where she received a meticulous education from 1756 to 1763. After making a few spiritual retreats at age 14, she became a loveable, responsible and affable child.

She felt called to religious life and considered entering the Benedictines. After a chance conversation with a friend who was going to enter Carmel, young Anna felt she had a vocation to be a Carmelite (which she had not considered before). She left college to allow her decision to mature. When she became 17, she made her decision known, much to the surprise of everyone and the displeasure of the nuns of her college.

She entered the Discalced Carmelite Nuns in Florence for a trial period on 1st September 1764. A short while before finishing her postulancy, she had an operation on her knee and left the convent, now knowing if she would be readmitted. She re-entered and took the habit on 10th March 1765, deciding to live in prayer, obedience and silence. She was professed on 12th March 1766 and took the name of Teresa Margaret of the Heart of Jesus.

Naturally high spirited, she learned to be controlled and led a life of admirable fidelity, right from the beginning. After her entry into Carmel, her relationship with her father–of mutual spiritual help–reached greater depth. She was a great friend of one of the sisters in the community. They were contrasting in nature and promised one another to be better religious.

Her knowledge of Latin made it easier for her to understand biblical and liturgical texts, which she enjoyed reciting constantly, seeking to live the Rule of Carmel by meditating “day and night on God’s Word”. She had a particular liking for the writings of Saint Paul, such as, “your life is with Christ, hidden in God”. At times she appeared stunned, as when she was overwhelmed by the marvels of creation, and came to fear that she was melancholic. It was only after her death that the sisters in her community understood the sanctity of this young Carmelite.

Christ crucified was always in her mind, “the captain of love,” who held aloft “the standard of the Cross”. After her 1758 spiritual retreat, she proposed in all her actions not to be motivated other than by love and to unite her will with that of God. She was assiduous in small services to the sisters and would not allow gossip or criticism. She exclaimed constantly, “God is love”. Her life was one of continuous thanksgiving, “which would prove to the person who does not believe in him or not dare to approach him, the goodness and generosity of our most loving God!”

She was exquisite in exercising charity. From the beginning, she offered to take care of the old and sick, in whom she saw Jesus Christ, and she was assistant to the infirmarian. Those who were sick asked for her and she offered to take care of the more difficult ones, including a sister who was suffering from dementia and was aggressive and whom everyone feared, but Teresa Margaret knew how to cope with her with great patience and without complaining.

At the end of her life, she had great aridity in prayer. She experienced disgust, lack of feelings, terrors, temptations and antipathy towards virtue. She redoubled her faith, living in abandonment trusting in God, reciting psalms, biblical phrases or the expression, “Good father!” A lover of reading from childhood, at the end she was able to read only Saint Teresa.

She died from appendicitis on 7th March 1770.

She was born in Madrid on 4th November 1891 into the deeply Catholic family of the Marquesses of Pidal. After a childhood and youth proper to her social status, she left all to enter the Escorial Carmel in 1919.

In 1924, by divine inspiration, she founded the Carmel of Cerro de los Ángeles beside the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

In 1933 she founded a Carmel in Kottayam (India).

From 1936 to 1939, persecution broke out against the Spanish Church, so the Discalced Carmelites in Cerro undertook a risky pilgrimage, which ended up in the Carmelite Desert of Batuecas (Salamanca) and resulted in recovering the monastery for the Order.

In 1939, Mother Maravillas returned to Cerro and begun numerous foundations in the spirit of Saint Teresa of Jesus: 1944 Mancera de Abajo (Salamanca), 1947 Duruelo, 1950 Cabrera (Salamanca), 1954 Arenas de san Pedro (Avila), 1956 San Calixto (Cordova), 1958 Aravaca (Madrid), 1961 La Aldehuela (Madrid) where she lived until her death.

From there, this daughter of Saint Teresa, bold and down to earth, always attentive to the needs of her neighbour, carried out her great social work: for example, building a church, housing complex and college for the poor.

She afterwards made a foundation in Montemar, (Malaga) in 1964.

As well, in 1964 the Archbishop of Madrid-Alcala requested her to restore the Escorial Carmel, where she had lived during her first years in the Order. In 1966, a petition arrived from the Bishop of Avila to save from extinction the Incarnation monastery, where Saint Teresa of Jesus had lived for 30 years.

On 11th December 1974, she fell asleep in the Lord, in her monastery of La Aldehuela, leaving behind her a trail of light and love after putting at the service of God and of the Discalced Carmel all of her gifts and vocation, her whole life. Each year thousands of pilgrims come to her tomb in the monastery church.

In 1974, Fr Finian, the then Discalced Carmelite General, wrote to Pope Paul VI a moving letter containing an eloquent portrait of the Mother, and asking for the prompt introduction of her Cause. The Discalced Carmelite Order carried the Cause ahead and Mother Maravillas was beatified in Rome in 1998 and canonized in Madrid in 2003 by His Holiness, John Paul II, who said of her that she “… lived by a heroic faith, embodied in her response to an austere vocation, putting God as the centre of her existence. She made new foundations for the order of Carmel, presided over by the spirit characteristic of the Teresian reform.”

Elizabeth Catez was born 18th July 1880 near Bourges (France). Her sister Marguerite was born three years after. In 1887, her grandfather and her father both died and the two young children were left in the care of their mother, a very energetic and upright woman.

The young Elizabeth also had a very pronounced character, her childhood tantrums were fearsome. But at the same time, from a very early age, she tried to conquer her temperament. When her father died, the family changed house to near the Discalced Carmelite Nuns in Dijon. The sound of the bells of the convent and the nuns’ garden exercised a great attraction on Elizabeth.

The day of her first communion, 19th April 1891, was an all important one for her: she felt she no longer had hunger as Jesus had fed her. That same afternoon she went to make her first visit to Carmel and the prioress explained to her the significance of her name in Hebrew. Elizabeth means “a house of God”. This made a deep impact on the young girl, who understood the profundity of these words. From then on, she was determined to be in her life God’s dwelling place, by controlling her temperament and forgetting about herself.

Despite her lively intelligence, the young Elizabeth received a poor general education, but she was very gifted in music and obtained a first prize in piano at 13 years. Her soul was sensitive to music and nature, beautiful things which reminded her always of God, and in which she saw reflected the harmony of their creator.

Elizabeth want to be a Carmelite, but her mother forbad it until she reached 21. When reading Saint Teresa, she felt greatly in harmony with her. She understood that contemplation meant to let God act, that mortification had to be interior and that friendship is an attitude of putting other people’s interests before one’s own. She was also greatly helped by reading the Story of a Soul, by which the young Therese of Lisieux, recently deceased, inspired her by her little way of trust in God.

On 2nd August 1901, the postulant entered the Dijon Carmel and was given the name of Elizabeth of the Trinity. Mother Germaine was her prioress, her Mistress of Novices and finally became her admirer and disciple. Elizabeth lived a life that was completely ordinary, a life of faith, without revelations or ecstasies. However, this young girl immediately attracted the attention of the whole community by her faithfulness and commitment. In her turn, she submerged herself in reading and deepening her understanding of Scripture (mainly Saint Paul) and Saint John of the Cross. Under their guidance she found her own interior way and her faith matured.

Reading Saint Paul, she felt a deep call to be the Praise of the Glory of the Triune God, by living every moment of the day in constant thanksgiving. She came to be identified with this ideal, so much so, that at the end of her life she signed some letters with the name: “Laudem Gloriae”.

In Lent 1904, Elizabeth became ill and, after a painful and long sickness, she died on 9th November 1906. Her last words were, “I am going to Light, to Love, to Life”.

Her life and writings became surprisingly widespread. They consist of: her Diaries, her Letters, her Poems (they reflect her soul, but are of poor literary quality) some Prayers among which is her famous Prayer to the Trinity. There are also other writings: Heaven in Faith, which moved her to live heaven here on earth, by adoring God in faith and love, and what she wrote to her sister Marguerite, housewife and mother; The greatness of our Vocation, Last Retreat and Let yourself Love (dedicated to her prioress).

The Blessed Francis Palau, a Spanish Carmelite born in Aytona in 1810 and died in Taragona in 1871, was a typical person of the XIX century. Fr Alejo of the Virgin of Carmel wrote that he could be counted among the great figures of the XIX century, particularly in Catalonia, and among the apostles of the Christian word, alongside the Venerable Claret, Fr Coll and Fr Planas, but that we must add about Fr Palau that he was the “most afflicted, most maligned, and least well known today, than all the others.”

He was a man dissatisfied with the spirit of the century, longing for the world that had been brought tumbling down by revolutionary processes, and always hoping for the resurgence of a new society in which he could see his hopes realized.

His vocation: Palau discovered that his place was in the cloister, and when circumstances expelled him from there, he reaffirmed his vocation as a religious and Carmelite, to which he remained faithful in facing pressure, prohibitions, prison and exile. Now that the “call of love” in him was stronger that all the difficulties that occurred, he resolved “to live in solitude in the deserts, within the shelter of the mountains.”

Love for the Church, his great passion, would eventually reveal itself as a reality far beyond the structure he initially felt. He came to understand it as a communion of love between God and neighbour. When he discovered this mystery at the height of 1860, he also discovered the definitive meaning of his life: a life spent in service to the Church.

Francis Palau, by vocation a hermit, felt himself an apostle, an evangelizer, willing to spend himself in this cause against all those who wished to discard and silence God. He understood evangelizing to be all activity: preaching, teaching, catechesis, charitable work, using journalism in his own style, propaganda and denunciation, which are helpful to make the environment Christian and to continue bringing it closer to religious principles which, for him, are the basis on which the social edifice ought to be built.

But this passion of his not only addressed Christian indoctrination, but also the care of the needy, the sick, and among these the “crazy”, the insane, who sometimes appeared as having fallen out of God’s hand. In fact he, who from his youth felt that solitude and contemplation – Mary’s vocation – was the natural environment for developing his vocation, recommended to his spiritual daughters the vocation of Martha.

This is Fr Palau, a Discalced Carmelite who, on being expelled from his monastery, discovered his vocation as a solitary hermit, enjoying to be among the caves and solitude of the mountains, who knew how to be a reservoir for the people, as a preacher, reformer of customs, teaching the faith, leading the groups and communities who gathered around him.

Apostolic Missionary: he was the founder of what we today know as two congregations, the Teresian Carmelite Missionary Sisters and the Carmelite Missionary Sisters.

He wrote works of an apologetic and devotional nature. But, above and before all, he was a searcher who always went “in pursuit of what was good and beautiful”.