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Title: Quartet in Heaven
Date of first publication: 1952
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
  London: Cassell, 1952 (First Edition) 
Author: Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1956)
Date first posted: 1 July 2007
Date last updated: 1 July 2007
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #10

This ebook was produced by: Andrew Templeton




                          QUARTET IN HEAVEN

                                  By

                          SHEILA KAYE-SMITH






CONTENTS

Foreword

THE MATRONS

Caterina Fiesca Adorna

Cornelia Connelly


THE MAIDENS

Isabella Rosa de Santa Maria de Flores

Thrse Martin

Some Notes on the Nature of Sanctity




                                Foreword

These studies in sanctity do not profess to make any special
contribution to the life histories of their subjects. St. Catherine of
Genoa has been dealt with exhaustively by Baron Friedrich von Hgel in
his great work _The Mystical Element of Religion_, Cornelia Connelly's
life has been fully written by a religious of her order, while on St.
Rose of Lima the hagiographers have worked for centuries, and a new book
on St. Thrse of Lisieux must appear almost every month.

My object is psychological rather than biographical. I want to see these
four women as human beings before I attempt to examine them as saints.
The tendency of religious biographers has so often been to enlarge on
the spiritual side of their subjects, while smoothing away or even
rubbing out the marks of our common humanity, that the supernatural has
been deprived of its sacramental base in the natural, and appears in
consequence tenuous and uninspiring. Jacob Boehme asks: "How can I,
being in nature, attain the supersensual ground without forsaking
nature?" I believe that the saints have found the answer to this
question, but that the hagiographers have in many instances deprived
their answer of half its meaning.

In some ways my quartet is more like a _pas de quatre_, for there is
among them a constant movement and change of partners. Two of them, St.
Catherine of Genoa and St. Rose of Lima, belong to history, while St.
Thrse of Lisieux and Cornelia Connelly belong to modern times. A fresh
combination is that of Cornelia Connelly and St. Rose of Lima, who both
spring from the New World, from North and South America respectively,
while St. Catherine and St. Thrse were born and bred in Europe. St.
Catherine combines with Cornelia Connelly in the married state, while
St. Thrse and St. Rose are both unmarried, though only the first is a
nun. Finally all return to their original partners, for St. Catherine
and St. Rose are saints in the grand manner, complete with visions,
ecstasies, miracles and almost inhuman penances, while Cornelia Connelly
unites with St. Thrse in the more ordinary ways of prayer and work and
suffering.

The word saint, of course, has different meanings on different levels.
On one, which is the sense in which St. Paul uses it in his
correspondence with the young churches, it belongs to all the
baptised--"the saints who are in Corinth"--in Ephesus, in Philippi. On
another level it is applied to those whose goodness is impressively
above the average; but on the highest level and in the technical and
formal sense, it depends on the rite of canonisation. Cornelia Connelly
is the only member of my quartet who has not been canonised, and if I
should use the noun and its attendant adjective in connection with her,
I wish to make it clear that I use them in the second sense only and
that I accept unreservedly the judgment of the Apostolic See, which
alone has the authority to pronounce to whom belongs the character and
title of Saint.




_The author is indebted to Messrs. Longmans, Green for permission to
reprint extracts from letters published in_ The Life of Cornelia
Connelly.





                             THE MATRONS




_Caterina Fiesca Adorna_



                                   1

The plague was in Genoa. That was nothing new or even unusual. The city
lay open on all sides to its visitations. There was probably always some
infection at the docks, and the traffic of the roads, pouring in to meet
the traffic of the sea, brought the disease from Naples, Rome, Venice,
Pisa or wherever it happened to be raging. The weather and seasons
seemed to make no difference to the place's vulnerability. Those who
were fleeing or fighting the pest in this stifling summer of 1524 could
remember or had heard their parents tell how one of its worst
visitations had been just after the abnormally cold winter of 1493, when
the harbour basin was frozen over and the roads were blocked by the
strange and terrifying snow.

The usual history repeated itself. Those who could go, went, the
merchants, the bankers, all the rich--their families if not
themselves--clutching their posies and their pomanders in the frail
belief that it is not so easy to breathe death from a perfumed air. Only
the poor remained, as always, and those who helped to nurse the
poor--the Lombard doctors, the priests, the Franciscan tertiaries. And
many of these were afraid.

Ettore Vernazza was afraid, though he had nursed the plague-stricken
before. In the epidemic of '93 he had worked in the open-air hospital at
the back of the city, in the canvas street which the Lady Caterina had
caused to be erected, under the conviction that fresh air would not only
reduce the danger of infection but would benefit her patients. He had
been a very young man then, twenty-three years younger than the Lady
Caterina, but their friendship had ripened into a very nearly perfect
thing, which had further enlarged itself to include not only himself,
but, after his marriage, his wife and three daughters. They were all her
friends, her disciples, treasuring her goodness and her wisdom, and
though she had been dead fourteen years he could feel her with him now.
Indeed it was she, the thought of her, that had brought him to Genoa to
nurse the plague-stricken poor in the lazaretto which he himself had
built and endowed.

His wife had died some years ago, but his daughter Battista was a nun in
the city. He decided to go to her and ask her advice on a matter he was
unable to decide for himself.

"What do you think I had better do? I am determined not to forsake the
poor. But do you think I had better go about on horseback or on foot? In
which way am I most likely to avoid infection?"

This touching fear of disease and death in the midst of all his heroism
had kept him both practical and humble. He must for others' sake, for
the sake of the poor themselves, take no avoidable risks, and he must
also envisage the consequences of such risks as were unavoidable and
provide for his work having to go on without him. He was a lawyer, and
his careful, elaborate, fully-thought-out will--a true lawyer's
will--had been drawn up to ensure that his lazaretto should survive the
death it might inflict upon him.

At the same time he was humble, for he felt that his fears were unworthy
of the friend who used to work beside him, for she herself had had none.
As he asked his daughter that very innocent question there may have been
in his heart a reproachful prick of memory. Had he not once seen the
Lady Caterina stoop and kiss the mouth of a plague-stricken woman in the
Hospital of Pammatone? The woman, dying, had tried to utter the name of
Jesus, "and Caterina when she saw the mouth filled as it were with Jesus
could not refrain from kissing it with great and tender affection". She
had in consequence caught the plague, but had not died of it. Perhaps if
he caught it he would not die. . . .

His daughter was speaking.

"Oh, Father, we are drawing near to the feast of St. John the Baptist,
and are at the worst of the heat. Yet you are determined to go among the
plague-stricken."

But by this reference to the Baptist she had unwittingly destroyed the
force of her pleading, or rather had diverted it to other ends. For it
was Vernazza himself who had founded the Society of St. John the Baptist
for work in the prisons of Naples, Rome, Genoa and other cities, with
those condemned to die. He had shared with many their last night on
earth, bringing them comfort and courage to meet their end. Could he
possibly use his patron's Nativity as an excuse for himself evading
death?

So he answered--

"Must I hear such things from _you_? How truly happy I should be if I
were to die for the poor."

Then she could only say--

"Father, go."

He went, but his sacrifice did not preserve him. He caught the plague
and died of it in a few days. During those last days in the Lazar House
I think he must have lost the last of his fear. We can picture him lying
there, withdrawn from the heat and smells and turmoil of the ward,
wrapped closely in the love of God--the love which his friend Caterina
had taught him was equally the light of heaven and the fire of hell. Now
that death was close and accepted there was nothing to terrify the man
who died a martyr to the plague-stricken poor. He belonged to an age
when hell-fire threatened and frightened even the devout. But La Fiesca
had taught him that only the willed rejection of God's love could turn
it from creating light to searing flame. It is true that its fire burned
also in purgatory, but there it burned not the man but his sins. It was
a consummation that the soul itself asked for, longing above all things
for its own purification as it plunged--that had been her exact
word--from the awful purity of the sight of God to cleanse itself at
whatever cost.

On the Eve of St. John the Baptist he received his viaticum: "and in
three days," writes his daughter, "he fell quietly asleep in the Lord."



                                   2

Caterina Fiesca Adorna. It is a lovely name--it sings. Yet it proclaims
a tragedy similar, though in reverse, to that of Romeo and Juliet. Those
lovers were separated by the strife of their families, but though the
warfare between the Fieschi and the Adorni had been as bitter as that
between Montague and Capulet--the Fieschi were Guelphs and the Adorni
Ghibellines--it was not their strife but their reconciliation which
brought wretchedness to two young lives.

Caterina Fiesca and Giuliano Adorno were temperamentally unsuited to
each other: he was reckless, extravagant, dissipated, selfish and
bad-tempered, she was shy, silent, thoughtful and devout. Yet they were
married in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo early in 1463, when Catherine
was only sixteen and her husband a few years older. It was purely a
marriage of social and political convenience and bound, one would say,
to turn out badly even in times when in marriage much less was expected
and much more accepted than is the case today.

It might perhaps be thought that Catherine was not only temperamentally
unsuited to Giuliano but to marriage itself. She was of a solitary,
introverted nature, and when no older than thirteen had begged in vain
to be allowed to follow her elder sister Limbuana into the convent of
Augustinian canonesses which at the time stood next to the Church of
Santa Maria in Passione. This desire cannot be regarded as the proof of
a religious vocation. If it had been so, surely she would later have
taken advantage of her long widowhood to enter either that convent or
some other. This would have been considered a very right and proper
thing for a widow to do, but there is no evidence of her having made the
smallest attempt to do it, nor did she so much as join a Third Order,
though tertiaries were in fashion.

It seems possible that her desire for convent life was unconsciously a
desire to escape marriage, to which in those days the cloister was the
only alternative. Certain of her biographers have read in it the signs
of an exceptional early piety, but in view of what follows it is
difficult to believe that this was so. Catherine was undoubtedly good
and devout. She lived in times when you were not likely to be one
without the other. There was only one religion and no high-minded
infidelity. But if her girlhood had been one of outstanding holiness and
she had really been given to the practice of interior prayer, as some
have suggested, it is difficult to account for her behaviour during the
years that immediately followed her marriage.

Those years, there is no doubt whatever, were terribly unhappy. There
were no children, and Giuliano neglected and humiliated her from the
first, leaving her alone for months on end, either at her mother's house
(her father died before her marriage) or at one or another of his own
palaces. She seems during this period to have been without any resources
of prayer and comfort. Either she moped by herself or tried in vain to
find distraction in blameless but boring social activities.

So she drifted on until she came very naturally to the edge of a nervous
breakdown. She was in a state of utter misery, unable to bear either the
slight human contacts she had established or her own sad company. To the
growing sickness of her mind physical illness would have been a relief,
and on the eve of the feast of St. Benedict in 1473 she uttered this
strange prayer: "St. Benedict, ask God to make me stay three months ill
in bed."

Two days later she went to see her sister Limbuana at the convent, and
to her she either confided or betrayed her miserable condition, for the
good nun, as any nun would do in such a case, advised her to go to
confession. But Catherine did not want to go to confession, her
reluctance no doubt being due to the natural reticence of an introvert
as well as the disordered state of her mind. She could not bear to speak
even to a priest of her sorrows and her sins; but she agreed to go into
the convent chapel and ask the chaplain's blessing. It was not going
nearly as far as her sister wanted, but it was far enough for God's hand
to reach her and snatch her out of all her miseries.

As she knelt before the priest she suddenly saw herself in the light of
the love of God. It was a light like fire, not only revealing but
consuming. It consumed all her hopelessness and wretchedness, and in the
heart where they had been only love remained, crying out "No more world!
No more sin!" She need no longer fear either of them--or loneliness or
neglect or resentment or Giuliano or herself. "No more world! No more
sin!" She was a free woman, walking out of the prison where she had been
locked up for ten years. She was saved.

"No more world! No more sin!" That cry was forced from her by the sudden
overflow of eternity into the few seconds ticked out by the clock as she
knelt before the convent chaplain. In those few seconds she had lived
through one of the most startling and exciting experiences possible to a
human soul.

Conversion, of course, is not an exclusively religious phenomenon, and
even in cases where its causes and effects are supernatural, its
mechanisms belong to nature rather than to grace. Normally--for as a
process of change and adaptation it is normal--it works peacefully at
the level of consciousness. We all of us frequently change our opinions
and even our habits--not to do so would indicate a mind afflicted by
paralysis if not by rigor mortis--but such changes can as a rule be
observed in all their stages and seldom cause any disturbance in the
depths beneath. It is only when the process involves the deeper,
unconscious springs of our will that the earthquake happens.

The earthquake in Catherine's case was not the same as that which had
shaken St. Paul and St. Augustine, though some of its manifestations
were not unlike. Her conversion did not involve, as did theirs, a
complete change of direction--to truth from error, to good from evil. It
was rather a sinking of goodness and truth into a deeper layer of the
personality than that on which they had operated hitherto.

In her case there could be no question of turning from error. She rose
from her knees in the convent chapel believing what she had always
believed--the full Catholic creed. Nor was there any running away from
vice to virtue. Her disposition had always been melancholy (and her life
had done nothing to make it otherwise), but it had never been bad, and
though her sins were to exact from her some years of penance they were
not such as the world at large would take much notice of, nor she
herself, perhaps, but for this new sudden light of love.

She had gone through an experience by which the religion that had
hitherto been superficial and external became vital and fundamental.
Superficial does not in this case mean insincere but pertaining to that
shallow surface cradle where too many of us nurse too much of our lives.
Religion to be fully operative must possess the whole being, penetrating
all levels of consciousness and finally obtaining dominion over the dark
territories of the unconscious self. "For, lo! thou requirest truth in
the inward parts and shalt make me to understand wisdom secretly." But
with many good and pious people it never seems to leave that poor little
surface cradle, though for many also there is at one time or another a
rebirth in what Baron von Hgel calls the Second Consciousness. This
rebirth can be painful and even dangerous, though only exceptionally
does it produce such an upheaval as that experienced by Catherine.



                                   3

Curiously enough, parallel cases to hers are more easily to be found in
the annals of Protestantism than of Catholicism, the reason probably
being that certain Protestant sects have required their adherents to
pass through the ordeal of conversion in much the same way as the
adherents of the old mystery religions had to pass through the ordeal of
initiation. These adherents in the majority of cases are respectable,
good-living men and women already attending the chapel or meeting-house,
but not admitted to full membership, even in some cults to baptism, for
want of a personal experience in which they obtain an individual
assurance of salvation. This experience, especially when it is expected
or even required of its subjects, can be entirely subjective. On the
other hand, it is often real enough, and in such classic instances as
have been reported, it is not at all unlike what happened to Catherine.

John Bunyan's conversion, as described by him in _Grace Abounding_,
shows the same preliminary state of wretchedness, releasing itself
suddenly into an experience of joy and safety in the love of God. The
wretchedness in his case was deeply coloured (if such a word can be used
in such a dismal connection) by Calvinism. Like many good men of his
period he feared that his soul was lost and that all his longings and
strivings after God would end in hell among the reprobate. Calvin did
not work on virgin soil but on a persisting travesty of the Augustinian
teaching on predestination. Nevertheless we may be sure that Catherine's
fear and melancholy were due to other causes than John Bunyan's, as the
sins for which she afterwards did penance must have been of a different
order from the innocent game of tip-cat for which he reproached himself
to the end of his life. But though causes were different, states were
remarkably alike. Bunyan's initial stage of misery followed a course
very similar to Catherine's, for in his case as in hers there was no
gradual lightening of the sky, nor even a quick break of tropic dawn.
The dark night of his soul broke without sunrise into a full and
blinding day.

Again, the change in his character, though of a different quality, was
of the same nature as the change in hers. He was not a bad man suddenly
turned to God. He had never been a bad man; he had always been decent,
kindly, well-disposed, though for a long time spiritually unawakened. It
was the inspiration rather than the direction of his life that had
changed. He lived in a new intensity for God and the things of God as he
understood them. He could have echoed Catherine's silent cry of release
and exultation, though in his heart the words might have been
changed--"No more hell! No more tip-cat!"

Another, less widely-known, example of this type of conversation is that
of James Weller, a travelling preacher on the Kent and Sussex borders in
the early years of the last century. His account of it may be read in an
odd little book called _The Wonders of Free Grace_, printed at Battle,
Sussex, in 1834. Weller was born at Smarden in Kent, a wretched poor-law
child, prenticed out on a farm and from his boyhood alternately urged
and baffled by the religious demands of his nature, which he failed to
satisfy in what he calls "the steeples of the crown of England". As he
grew up and attempted, in spite of poor health and a confused intellect,
to earn his living in the starvation years following the Napoleonic
Wars, his life became a muddle of religion and shiftless poverty, the
former sinking ever deeper and deeper into the shadows of Calvinism and
the fear of hell.

Though nominally' a member of the Church of England he had come at an
early age under Nonconformist influences and on growing up joined one of
those many small sects which misery, starvation and spiritual neglect
caused to spring up among the struggling farm-workers of the Weald. He
could not however feel sure that he was saved. On the contrary, as time
passed, he felt an ever-increasing conviction of his eternal loss.
Monstrously coupled with this conviction was the growing intensity of
his love for God, until in the end all thoughts of himself, body or
soul, were lost in one of the most profound surrenders man surely ever
made. Convinced that God's will, even if it took the form of his own
eternity in hell, must be good and right and just, "I said Amen to my
own damnation".

It is hardly surprising that on this peak of self-abnegation the light
should shine at last--in this case verily a snow-light, he calls it "a
silver light", which bathed him and blessed him as he knelt at prayer in
his poor little room, where privacy could be obtained (since he was
married) only by wrapping himself in the bed-curtains. Like Bunyan, like
Catherine, he had found release, though it took a form more like
Bunyan's than like Catherine's, since like Bunyan's it was primarily a
release from the fear of hell. The thought of sin seems to have troubled
him less than it troubled either Bunyan or Catherine. It was not for his
sins that he was to suffer eternally but for a sort of general
appeasement of the Divine Justice. Throughout the book he accuses
himself of no worse failing than a tendency to run into debt--a tendency
hardly surprising if one considers the hard facts of his existence.
Indeed he regards his debts less an as offence than an infliction and
they are as insistent at the end of the book as at the beginning. The
final scene and crowning triumph of his evangelistic life--the opening
of the Calvinist chapel at Salehurst--is spoilt for him by the dreary
consciousness that it will only lead him more deeply into debt . . . But
James Weller is too tempting a subject for digression.

There is something truly touching in these two stories of uncovenanted
mercies, these wonders of free grace abounding so far from their
accustomed springs. But both Bunyan and Weller show the limitations of
their own systems, especially when we come to compare their
post-conversion lives with Catherine's. The preliminaries are very much
alike and the crises almost the same, but later on we find neither the
same depths nor the same heights. Weller, particularly, is not very
different after his conversion from what he was before it. Both he and
Bunyan devoted the rest of their lives to preaching and writing, and
Bunyan was great enough to endure the loss of freedom for his faith. But
it is obvious that in both the main release was a release from the fears
engendered by their own particular brand of religion, a release which
enabled them to go forward in the ways of God without the hobbling,
crippling, paralysing thought that even these might lead to hell.



                                   4

For Catherine, too, free grace abounded, but her release was mainly from
herself. Also in her case the positive side of conversion heavily
outweighed the negative. "Oh, Love," she prayed, stumbling from her
knees with a murmured apology to the priest who was only dimly aware of
her deliverance, "Oh, Love, can it be that thou hast called me with so
much love and revealed to me at one view what no tongue can describe?"

With the compression of a dream the thing had happened and with some of
the confusion of a dream. Yet as an experience it was not complete. Two
days later, in a room of the Adorna palace, she had a vision of Love
himself. She saw "in spirit" Our Lord with his cross upon his shoulder,
dripping with blood, and at the sight was so filled with self-reproach
that the life-long defences of her nature broke down and she cried: "Oh,
Love, if it be necessary I am ready to confess my sins in public."

This vision is described by her first biographers, who were not inclined
to reduce the marvellous aspect of their subject, expressly as being "in
the spirit". Of course no "vision" physically affects the optic nerve,
but quite often it is definitely "seen", as were the visions of St. Rose
of Lima, St. Bernadette of Lourdes and many others. Catherine's vision,
however, though objective in the sense that her mind and faculties were
entirely passive in its perception, was plainly not "seen", for the
description of it in the _Vita et Dottrina_ adds that "the entire house
seemed full of streams of that Blood which she saw to have been shed
because of love alone". It is actually the only objective vision
recorded in her life, except one or two doubtful experiences in her last
illness, and it is her only contemplation of the Passion, a subject with
which none of her later intuitions were concerned.

Being thus in a double sense unique, it made almost as deep an
impression as her conversion itself. As before, the revelation of God's
love had been accompanied by the revelation of her own sinfulness.
Throughout her life she was to see Love as light, and in that light her
sins were black indeed. We have seen that she had never been a sinner in
the conventional sense of the word, but she could not look back on the
last ten years, or rather see them suddenly exposed in that blazing
flash of reality, without acknowledging her own failure to respond to
Love's demands. She saw all the unfaithfulness of those ten unhappy
years, she saw herself refusing to accept and will her sufferings as
Love intended, thus throwing herself as an obstacle across the divine
purpose. She could have cried with the prophet Job: "I have heard thee
with the hearing of my ears but now my eye seeth thee. Therefore I abhor
myself and repent in dust and ashes." Catherine repented indeed in the
dust; "Oh, Love," she had cried in the first flash of vision, "I am
ready if it be necessary to confess my sins in public." It was not
necessary to do that, but the shyness and reticence of her sensitive
nature must have been nearly as deeply mortified by the general
confession that she made four days later.

Catherine's attitude to confession is a special and unusual
characteristic of her sanctity. In most lives of the saints the
confessor is of great importance and sometimes almost of as much
interest as his penitent. St. Teresa of Avila had a famous director in
St. John of the Cross, St. Margaret Mary consulted St. John Eudes, St.
Rose of Lima had no less than eleven confessors. But it was not till
Catherine was an old woman that she had anyone who could be called a
director, and then it might be said that she directed him as much as he
directed her. Don Cattaneo Marabotto, as we shall see later, had an
almost uncritical reverence for his penitent, and was apparently unable
to discriminate between the genuinely supernatural and the merely
neurotic manifestations of her psycho-physical state, though she herself
was never to confuse them.

During the earlier part of her life she had gone regularly to
confession, though she does not seem to have found in it the comfort and
psychological release that it brings to many or she would have been more
ready to avail herself of it at the crisis of her life. After her vision
of the Passion she at once made a general confession, and she frequented
the sacrament at regular intervals for three or four years afterwards.
Then she appears to have dropped it entirely for a very long time.

This, to put it mildly, is most unusual and no doubt excited comment,
especially as during this period she had, as we shall see, aroused it in
another way by becoming a daily communicant. The Church's law does not
require confession oftener than once a year if there is no grave sin;
and it is practically certain that Catherine made this annual confession
or at least conformed to the ruling of St. Thomas Aquinas that "he that
has not committed any mortal sins is not bound to confess venial sins,
but it is sufficient for the fulfilling of the Church's precept for him
to present himself to the priest and declare himself free from the
consciousness of mortal sin." But from, roughly, 1476 to 1499 "she was
guided and taught interiorly by her tender Love alone". It is her
director, Don Marabotto himself, who writes this account of her and
fully understands the idiosyncracy--for one must call it that--of his
penitent. "If she attempted to lean upon anyone, Love immediately caused
her such great mental suffering that she was forced to desist, saying,
'Oh, Love, I understand thee.' And when she was told that it would be
safer if she put herself under obedience to another and while she
hesitated as to what to do her Lord spoke to her within her mind: 'Trust
in me and do not doubt.'"

Conversion had not changed Catherine's nature but had made of it a rare
vessel of grace. A shy, silent introverted saint may not be so
attractive to humanity in general as a lively, gracious, expansive one.
But there is a place and a function even for silence and reticence in
the kingdom of God, and though within its walls the lion may lie down
with the lamb the leopard is not always asked to change his spots.
Catherine was not required to mortify her natural reticence beyond the
penitential period that immediately followed her conversion. For her the
sacrament of penance was penance indeed and we have seen that she made a
general confession almost at once. This was followed by the regular use
of the sacrament for four years. She dropped it only when she dropped
the many other penitential practices of this period.

She indeed did penance during those four years. And here we have one
more interesting contrast between her and those two other converts we
have studied. For both John Bunyan and James Weller the main release had
not been from sin but from hell, and when the fear of the latter was
removed the former went with it. Though Bunyan was more conscious of
himself as a sinner than was the little man of Smarden, neither of them
would have dreamed of doing penance for sins which they believed to have
been utterly and everlastingly blotted out. As they were safe from hell,
so were they safe from sin and clothed for ever in imputed
righteousness.

But not so Catherine. "She saw the Offended One to be supremely good and
the offender just the opposite. Therefore she could not bear to see any
part of herself that was not subject to Divine justice, with a view to
being thoroughly chastised." Hence "she did not hesitate to pronounce
this sentence: 'I would not have grace and mercy but justice and
vengeance shown me.'" This is very like James Weller saying amen to his
own damnation, though with Catherine it is amen to purgatory instead of
hell. Love had first shone as light, revealing her sins, and now as fire
it must consume them. She was anticipating her own doctrine of purgatory
and voluntarily plunging into it after that vision of the Offended One.

We are told furthermore by the compilers of her Life that she refused
ever to try to gain a plenary indulgence. "Not that she did not hold
them in great reverence and devotion. . . . but that she would have
wished that her own self-seeking should be chastised and punished as it
deserved than . . . . by means of such satisfaction set free in the
sight of God." She also abstained from asking the prayers of others, "so
as ever to be subject to every punishment and condemned as she
deserved".

To our modern careless and good-natured attitude towards sin in general
and our own in particular all this sounds highly exaggerated and
extreme. Poor Catherine, we might say--as had we been in her place we
should have said Poor Me--she was more sinned against than sinning. All
said and done, her sins cannot have amounted to much. She never did
anyone any harm. Accidie? . . . . Well, who shall blame her, considering
the way she was treated?

But to argue thus would be to forget that she had had a simultaneous
vision of God and her own soul, an experience similar to that of
Cardinal Newman's _Gerontius_ who, on being brought after death in to
the presence of the Offended One, could only cry--

            "Take me away, and in the lowest deep
                         There let me be."

Being both realistic and virile in her reactions, she determined to seek
her purgatory here and now, so that when at last Love called her to his
house there should be no further delay. Apart from such unusual heroisms
as we have mentioned, she followed most of the penitential practices of
her time-she wore a hair shirt, she renounced both meat and fruit, she
put thorns in her bed, she spent six hours a day in prayer and went
about with her eyes fixed on the ground. And all the time she felt a
fire burning in her heart, a fire that was partly spiritual, consuming
her guilt, and partly physical, consuming her body with dryness. To
those around it seemed to consume the very food she ate, for she
digested it so quickly "that it looked as if she could have digested
iron".

But her acts during this period were not all penitential. Side by side
with her works of reparation went a practice of a very different nature
and one that was at that period exceedingly rare--the practice of daily
communion. Shortly after her conversion "her Lord gave her the desire
for Holy Communion, a desire which never failed her throughout the whole
course of her remaining life. And he arranged things so that communion
was given her." During her ten years of brooding, her attitude towards
the Blessed Sacrament had no doubt been lukewarm, as there is nothing
more destructive of spiritual hunger than self-preoccupation. But from,
at latest, the May of 1474, she went daily to the altar.

This must have demanded great courage, as well as great devotion, as it
would daily have called attention to her shrinking, diffident self, and
in times when even nuns in enclosed convents were not allowed to
communicate oftener than twice or thrice a week, it might easily have
been thought presumptuous. Indeed, it is plain that she was aware of
this and suffered in her shyness, for she once acknowledged that she was
envious of priests because they could say Mass and communicate daily
without arousing comment. She even suspended her communions for a time
when a Franciscan friar of whose opinion she thought highly suggested
that there might be something wrong in such very great frequency. But
she suffered such distress in consequence that when the friar
(afterwards beatified as Blessed Angelo of Chiavasso) heard of it he
sent her a message that he had spoken only to test the purity of her
intention and that she was to return to her daily practice--which she
did at once.



                                   5

We are so used to seeing the saints standing alone in their
stained-glass windows that we forget that they too had their families
and perhaps more than a usual share of all the usual family
complications. For those of them who did not join religious orders the
way to heaven must have been jostling with fathers, mothers, brothers,
sisters, husbands, wives--above all husbands and wives.

A saint's husband. Much could be written about a saint's husband--about
the husbands of St. Frances of Rome, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St.
Margaret of Scotland, and a great many more who are described in the
Missal as widows. Here we have St. Catherine of Genoa's husband and we
should like to know very much more about him than we are actually told.

We can only guess from his treatment of her that he had been as
reluctant to marry her as she to marry him, and was in his contrasting
way as unsuited to marriage. No doubt he blamed her for all the
unhappiness of their married life. He would have told his friends that
she was melancholy, awkward, frigid--that she had driven him to find his
pleasures elsewhere and to spend his money on those with greater
appreciation of the things it would buy. So when in the summer of 1473
he comes home humble and penitent, we are almost as much surprised as
his neglected wife.

True, it is a broken, battered, bankrupt Giuliano who comes home. But
those were not the days when an erring, spendthrift husband might return
to live on the charity of a rich wife. Giuliano had as much legal right
to Catherine's money as his own and had no doubt spent it with his own.
It was his free, unforced choice to return to her and live with her in
poverty to the end of his life.

What memories had the prodigal carried of her into the "far country"?
Was she beautiful? We do not know, for no contemporary portrait of her
exists, and we who have seen how the authenticity of even the photograph
of a modern saint can be destroyed by "touching up", would not expect a
truthful likeness in those painted at the time of her canonisation, two
hundred years after she was dead. But certainly he took away enough of
her to bring him back again.

He must have found her changed, but then he himself was changed. His
troubles had shaken him and set his feet on a way that was not unlike
her own. A conversion brought about by troubles we have brought upon
ourselves is not likely to be of the best or most enduring quality, and
the fact that Giuliano's endured until his death can be mainly
attributed to Catherine, and to the kindness and generosity with which
she received him and invited him to share her new life.

Giuliano was fortunate to be a saint's husband, as none but a saint
would have welcomed him so kindly, so utterly without reproach, after he
had neglected her for ten years in the course of which he had wasted
their joint inheritance. There was yet another circumstance, which must
have given at least as much pain to the childless wife as his
extravagance and his neglect. Giuliano was the father of a little girl.

This child had not been casually begotten, as seems clear from his
giving her his mother's name, Thobia, and from his making regular
provision for her throughout his life from his own exiguous funds; and
Catherine showed the true gold of her heart by the readiness with which
she swept aside all regrets and jealousies and became herself the kind
friend and protector of the poor little girl. All her life she took an
affectionate interest in her welfare, and when Giuliano died and she was
left as the executrix of his will, she administered not only his bequest
to his daughter but another to an unnamed woman who was almost certainly
that daughter's mother. In her own will there is a touching bequest to
the now grown-up Thobia of Catherine's best silk gown.

Giuliano's first concern on coming home was to save what he could out of
the wreck of his fortune. No doubt Catherine helped him, for in striking
contrast to her mysticism goes throughout her convert life what can be
described only as a good head for business. This is shown again and
again by her organisation of the charitable works she engaged in--we are
told that her accounts were never wrong by a single farthing--and by the
number of wills she made in succession, all of which display her grasp
of complicated finance and a clear judgment of commercial values. No
character is easier to see in the flat than the mystic, who is commonly
labelled an unpractical dreamer and dismissed to the other world he
inhabits while still living in this. But it is a fact that many of the
best-known "mystical" saints were great administrators and in money
matters more than a little tough. To find examples one has only to think
of St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa of Avila.

Catherine was no exception. Indeed, ever since her conversion there is
something essentially virile and manlike in her character which feeds
the mystical element and is fed by it. She had been unable to prevent
Giuliano leaving her when she was an unawakened girl, but now she is
awake in two worlds as it were, so she immediately takes charge of the
new Adorna household. It may have been Giuliano's plan to sell his
palaces--the winter palace in Genoa and the summer palace out at
Pra--but Catherine is the more likely urger of the next step which was a
move not simply to a smaller house, but to a house in a slum.

The Hospital of the Pammatone was in one of the very poorest parts of
the city, and to a little house quite close to it Catherine and Giuliano
removed in the autumn of 1473. It would, however, be a mistake to think
of them as driven by poverty into these surroundings. Enough had been
saved of Giuliano's fortune to provide a much better house and more than
the one servant they took with them. Their choice of a home was due to a
voluntary decision to live on as little as possible, so that they could
devote what remained of their estate to the good of others.

Giuhano had become a Franciscan tertiary and had agreed with his wife to
a life of perpetual continence. The change in him is almost as startling
as the change in her, who no doubt had helped by her generous
forgiveness and fine example to deepen its reality and to make of the
proud, spoilt, spendthrift, self-indulgent aristocrat the humble servant
of the unfortunate. To be a tertiary was in those days to be more openly
a religious than it is now. Giuliano would almost certainly have worn
the habit as he worked with other tertiaries and the friars of the
Franciscan order in the hospital which was under their control. The maid
Benedetta also was a tertiary. But Catherine, the saint of that little
household, felt no desire or call to join the order. She went her lone
way of prayer and penance to which she had now added the pursuit of good
works.



                                   6

These centred round the hospital, which was a big, flourishing
institution, founded some sixty years earlier by one of Genoa's merchant
princes, Bartolomeo Bosco. In Catherine's time it contained a hundred
and thirty beds, and attached to it was an orphanage for a hundred
girls, who learned to weave and work the silks for which the city was
famous. The whole undertaking was in the hands of the Observant Friars
of the Franciscan order, but most of the nurses were lay-folk, some of
them, like Catherine and Giuliano, among the highest in the land.

For in those days it was considered a noble work to nurse the sick. We
have come to stress so heavily the cruelty and darkness of the later
Middle Ages that it is easy to forget the other side of the picture--the
flourishing state of institutions that in these days of enlightenment
have either to bribe a staff and beg for subscriptions or else be taken
over by the state. All that the state does in modern times for the
relief of suffering was done in Catherine's time by Christian
compassion, by men and women who did not merely provide money and sit on
committees, but personally waited on the sick and destitute with their
own hands.

Of course these people were what Mr. Arnold Lunn calls "divinitarians".
They helped humanity not so much because they loved humanity as because
they loved God. Moreover, unlike the humanitarians, they did not concern
themselves with the causes of the suffering they relieved. It is typical
of them that they would risk their lives nursing those who had the
plague, but never think of destroying the harbour rats; and in the same
way they ignored social injustices and economic evils. But their
ministrations must have had about them a savour and a sweetness that it
would be difficult to find in social services today. Nor was there any
nonsense then about the "deserving poor". The poor were to be relieved
because they needed it, not because they deserved it--or rather they
were all deserving, since every one of them wore the halo of the Son of
Man--"ye have done it unto Me".

Besides the care of the poor in hospital there was the care of them in
their own homes. The ladies of Genoa had formed themselves into a guild
for visiting all the poorer quarters of the city--somewhat after the
manner of district visitors, except that their visits were not so much
of supervision and inquiry as of personal service, often of the most
menial kind. Catherine became one of these Ladies of Compassion, and as
such visited homes in the very foulest slums, sweeping and scrubbing and
cleaning, even taking away the filthy verminous garments of the
inhabitants to wash and repair in her own home. This must have been an
act of real heroism on her part, for she had always been fastidious and
hated all that was dirty and ugly.

Thus penance and works of mercy went side by side for some years, but
already she was approaching the end of the Purgative Way and entering on
a new stage of her spiritual life. She had not been working in the
hospital more than a year when she started the practice of daily
communion, and two years later there was another change and the
beginning of another practice of a yet more unusual and infinitely more
startling nature.

We are told in the _Vita et Dottrina_ that "her Love said he wanted her
to keep the Forty Days of Lent in his company in the desert. And then
she began to be unable to eat." It was then Lady Day, 1476, and Lent was
nearly over, but after a break of three days at Easter she resumed her
fasting and ate nothing till the forty days had been observed. Similarly
she fasted throughout Advent, which was then observed much more
rigorously than it is now. She continued these fasts for more than
twenty years, long after she had abandoned her other penitential
practices. Indeed she did not regard them as a part of penance, for she
was literally unable to eat, and if she attempted to do so the food
immediately made her sick. Moreover, during her fasts she was always in
better health, stronger and more active, than at other times.

There is no need to regard these accounts as exaggerated. Human beings
have repeatedly shown themselves capable of going without food for much
longer periods than is commonly thought possible. It is merely a
question of the mind or soul getting firmly into the saddle of that body
which St. Francis of Assisi so expressively calls Brother Ass. Besides,
in Catherine's case, the fast was not absolute. She received Holy
Communion daily--and that alone is known to have kept a man alive for
over six weeks--and probably after it she drank the glass of wine which
in Genoa was taken as a sort of ablution by the faithful. Further, she
drank from time to time a glass of vinegar and water with pounded rock
salt. This beverage corresponds to the potion of bitter herbs drunk
during her fasts by St. Rose of Lima and may have been chosen for the
same unconscious reason--the production of an alkaline reaction, thus
avoiding the acute acidity which blows out an empty stomach into a
mockery of good cheer. Similarly in modern times the regular drinking of
orange juice has formed part of those "fasting cures" which were
fashionable before the war.

But though there is no reason to call Catherine's fasts miraculous they
were undoubtedly supernatural. Not only was she more active and vigorous
than when eating normally, but her own attitude towards them was
entirely spiritual in its wisdom and its humility. Indeed her natural
diffidence made them at first the cause of scruples. Could they possibly
be a snare of the devil-provoking her to pride or eccentricity? She
would sometimes force herself to eat, "considering that Nature required
it", and her characteristic shrinking from anything that made her appear
conspicuous would urge her to eat when at table with others. But her
fasting came from deeper springs than her own will and if she took food
she was unable to retain it. As she explained to her friends, "This
inability to eat is the work of God, with which my own will has nothing
to do. So I cannot glory in it." Then perhaps in gentle rebuke of their
religious sensationalism she added: "There is no need to marvel at it,
since in the eyes of God this is a mere nothing."

Catherine never failed to distinguish the significant from the
insignificant, the interior from the exterior, in her spiritual life. In
this she was wiser than her friends, who were inclined to be equally
impressed by her religious ecstacies and the neurotic psycho-physical
states which intruded later. She had now passed out of the penitential
stage of her life and had entered on its longest, richest phase. One by
one she had dropped her penances (for we have seen that she did not
regard her fasts as being in the nature of penance) and had entered into
more or less normal relations with those around her. During the four
penitential years she had fled human company except that of her husband
and of the poor and destitute, but once they were left behind her she
began to gather round herself a little group of friends and disciples,
and it is to these good people and their successors that we owe our
knowledge of her life and doctrine, for she herself left not a single
written word.



                                   7

The most important and interesting of Catherine's friends, the one who
was also most like herself and therefore the one most likely to
understand her, was a young man, young enough to be her son, called
Ettore Vernazza. They met in dramatic circumstances. The plague had
broken out in Genoa--by no means for the first or last time, but this
was one of its worst visitations. Everyone who could do so fled from the
city, but Catherine had recently been appointed Matron at the hospital,
and even if she had not we cannot believe that she would have deserted
her post.

The causes of the epidemic were still unknown to the medical science of
that day, and no doubt its treatment was primitive and confused, hence
the very high death-rate of four-fifths of the population. But
Catherine, with a practical intuition ahead of her times set to work to
organise open-air ambulances and semi-open-air wards, covering the great
space at the back of the hospital with tents made of sailcloth and
relying on fresh air at least to check the spread of infection if it
could not actually work a cure. Medicine was still a superstition rather
than a science, but there was no limit to the devotion of those who
worked with and under Catherine--the self-sacrificing religious, the
heroic doctors and nurses, who remained in a city they might have fled
from, to nurse the plague-stricken poor at the risk of their own lives.

Among these "divinitarians" was young Ettore Vernazza, the son of a
Genoese lawyer, who himself was just setting up his practice of the law.
He came of a good family and circumstances and might easily have left
the town, but he chose instead to devote himself to those who were
forced to stay behind and suffer the consequences. He had great faith in
a decoction of cassia root, with which, since this was a medical
free-for-all, he is said to have achieved some quite remarkable cures.

We do not know exactly how or when he met Catherine. I like to
think--though this is only conjecture--that it was when she herself had
the plague, having kissed the mouth, or rather the Word in the mouth, of
a plague-stricken woman. This poor creature was on the verge of death
and struggling with her dimming senses and failing powers to utter the
name of Jesus. Catherine had urged her repeatedly to call upon him, but
her dry tongue was like a log in her mouth and incapable of speech. Then
at last her lips moved, as if the name that her tongue could not speak
had filled the mouth behind them and forced them to part. When Catherine
saw this happen her love overflowed and she forgot the plague, she
forgot infection, she forgot her own danger; she could think of nothing
but the Word incarnate as it were in this poor dying mouth. So she
stooped and kissed them both.

It was an act of utter holiness and utter madness, and the former was
not to exempt Catherine from the consequences of the latter. She was
struck by the plague as surely as if she had caught the infection by
accident and against her will. She was to know at first hand the horrors
she had done so much to relieve. But she did not die--and here is
another pleasing, if unsubstantial, conjecture: perhaps she owed her
recovery to Ettore Vernazza's cassia preparation. It is certain that
recovery was rare in those days when epidemics swept the majority of
their victims into the grave.

But no matter when or how they met, their meeting was the prelude to one
of those rich, creative friendships which are found so often in the
lives of the saints. As St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clare, as St.
Francis de Sales and St. Jane Chantale, as St. Vincent de Paul and St.
Louise de Marillac, St. Catherine of Genoa and Ettore Vernazza were
henceforward to work together for God. It is true that, unlike the
others, they both lived in the world. Neither of them founded or even
joined a religious order, and not long after meeting Catherine, Vernazza
married and became the father of three daughters. As for Catherine, she
was the friend not only of Ettore but of Bartolomea, Tommasina, Catetta
and Ginevrina. To the eldest girl, Tommasina (afterwards Sister Battista
of the Augustinian canonesses), she stood as godmother, and she seems
always to have been regarded as the friend and general counsellor of the
family.

But her friendship with Ettore was of another, higher nature. The
difference in their ages made them more like mother and son--perhaps
Catherine had always wanted a son; while the difference in their
spiritual stature seemed to demand the relations of master and disciple.
Catherine at last had found a soul who could in some degree understand
hers, but her attitude towards him, in spite of her natural diffidence,
was always that of guide and instructress. She was, moreover, wise
enough to recognise a spirituality quite different from her own. Ettore
belonged definitely to the active rather than the contemplative side of
humanity and Catherine seems to have made no attempt to train him in
mysticism, but to have been always ready with encouragement and advice
when he sought to break new ground in active good works.

These were to make him in the end only a little less beloved than
Catherine. Shortly after he had finished nursing the plague-stricken it
occurred to him that there were many poor people who had "seen better
days" and therefore might be too proud and sensitive to ask for charity.
He devised a scheme for visiting and relieving these privately in their
homes, and with a tact and delicacy which suggest Catherine's
inspiration--since she always hated to be noticed when she did good--he
arranged that the visitors should be anonymous. Each one was to be
disguised by a little veil or mask, hence the foundation was known as
the Institute of the Mandiletto. He also founded the Society of St. John
the Baptist for work among those condemned to death. Each member had to
hold himself in readiness to sit with a condemned man in his cell during
the night before his execution, and Ettore himself spent with many a
wretched criminal his last night on earth.

In return for Catherine's active interest in all that he did and loved,
Ettore became her amanuensis and historian. But for him we might not
know as much as we do about her life and teaching, for it was not till
some years later that he was joined by Don Marabotto and his own
daughter, Sister Battista, in the compilation of that rather confused
work, _The Life and Doctrine of St. Catherine of Genoa_.

Catherine herself was probably too busy to write--too busy in the
hospital and in her own soul. Besides, we must remember that in those
days writing was not a likely fruit of experience. Printing had only
just been invented and was in an early, cumbrous stage, so it is most
improbable that she ever thought of her teaching being conveyed to
others through the medium of the printed word. We may regret that she
wrote nothing, for we should like at least a few glimpses of her that
are not through the eyes of others. There is no reason to think that
Vernazza and Marabotto did not faithfully and accurately record her
doctrine, but in the matter of her spiritual life, of her contemplative
states and ecstacies, they were both, especially Marabotto, too deeply
lost in admiration of their subject to be able to discriminate between
what in her was truly supernatural and what was not. It is only by
reading between the lines that we can see that such discrimination
--marvellous in an age when as little was known about the human mind
as about the human body--existed clearly in the mind of Catherine
herself.



                                   8

Her spiritual life had now possession of her whole being, unconscious as
well as conscious, hence the "given-ness" of certain practices, also of
her doctrine, which came to her usually in the form of locutions. "Her
Love said. . . ." "Her Love spoke in her mind. . . ." such are the
beginnings of many revelations; and it is notable that though she always
speaks of God and Christ as Love she never uses the imagery of human
passion nor even the language of the Song of Songs. Nor was she one of
those saints who have passed through the mystical experience known as
the spiritual marriage. There is an impressive dignity and austerity
about her Love, who moreover is always light and never fire except in
hell.

Nor did she seek for spiritual consolations; indeed she fled from them,
fearing that she might rest in them and not in the Reality they both
manifested and hid. Nevertheless, and as it were in spite of herself,
she tasted abundantly of spiritual joy. She had continual ecstasies,
which lasted sometimes for hours, and when recovering from them would
try, often in vain, to tell those around her of all she had experienced
of joy and knowledge. Sometimes even when she was at work her hands
would suddenly fall to her sides, and she would pass into a sort of
trance, from which, however, she could always be roused by the call of
any duty, which she would then perform with the face of an angel.

Her attitude to these experiences is one of the deepest, most touching
humility. She insisted that to be able to enjoy them only two things
were necessary--on one side God's grace, on the other an entirely-given
human will. This belief brought her into conflict with those who had
entered religion, and insisted that the monk or the nun was better
fitted for the mystical life than anyone living in the world. On one
occasion a famous preacher who was also a Franciscan friar challenged
her, insisting that because he had taken religious vows of poverty,
chastity and obedience he was more free to love God than a woman who,
though she lived in poverty and chastity, was very much her own in the
matter of obedience. At this Catherine cried out: "If I thought your
habit could gain me just one more spark of love, I should tear it off
you," and continued to refute him in ever-growing distress and
excitement until in the end her hair came loose and tumbled on her
shoulders. "Oh, Love," she cried, with her flushed face and tumbling
hair, "who shall stop me loving thee? Even if I were not only in the
world but in a camp of soldiers I could not be prevented from loving
thee."

Her trances and ecstasies continued to the end of her life, and are
truly a part of her conversion, since there is no record of her having
had any abnormal experiences before then. In this she is different from
many saints, and many who are not saints, for her psycho-physical type
generally manifests its chief characteristics in early youth. We cannot
accept her trances as being in themselves a proof of holiness. Many who
are far from holy can go into trances; indeed some earn their living
that way, and it would be as idle to proclaim that all trance conditions
are fraudulent as to proclaim that they are all supernatural. The
supernatural element in Catherine's trances is not to be found in their
external symptoms, which are pathological, but in the spiritual
revelations which form their content.

The Holy See itself has proclaimed that she could have been canonised on
the strength of her doctrine alone, and nearly all this doctrine was the
fruit of trance states or near-trance states. There is, however, this
very important difference between her and the purely "natural" medium.
The latter is normally quite unconscious and unable to remember what she
(or, as she would put it, her "control") has said while in a trance
state. But Catherine's difficulty when she came back into this world was
not to remember what her Love had said but to make others understand
him. She must indeed have been sometimes in the position of trying to
translate "words which it is not lawful for man to utter", and even if
she had written down her own experiences we probably should never have
known the full content of that revelation made in the deeps of her mind.

Such revelations as have come to us through the writings of her friends
are intellectual rather than emotional, doctrinal rather than practical.
She was not one of those saints to whom later Christians were to owe new
pious practices, such as those associated with the "First Fridays", the
Miraculas Medal and the gaining of the Sabbatine Indulgence. Her
teaching mainly concerns the relations of the soul and body and the
hidden worlds of heaven, purgatory and hell. The Treatise on Purgatory
(which was not of course written by herself but by her disciples from
her spoken and remembered word) embodies the most famous and original
part of her doctrine. In it we find the doctrine of the Plunge--the
action by which the soul brought at the moment of death into the most
pure sight of God, as it were judges itself and hurls itself voluntarily
into the place of expiation, desiring nothing but to cleanse itself and
offer its atonement to the Divine Justice.

"The soul which does not find within itself the purity in which it was
created, seeing the stain and realising that this stain cannot be
cleansed except in Purgatory, quickly and of its own accord casts itself
in."

The whole of her teaching on the Hidden Worlds is indeed a
spiritualisation of the rather solid imagery in which those worlds had
been clad by medieval speculation. Her hell is remarkably unlike
Dante's--"The goodness of God's mercy shines even in Hell, since his
justice might have given the souls therein a far greater punishment than
he has . . . . even in Hell the soul does not suffer as much as it
deserves. . . . If we leave this life in a state of sin, God will take
away his goodness from us and leave us to ourselves, and yet not
altogether, since . . . if a creature could exist that did not
participate in some degree in the divine goodness, that creature would
be as evil as God is good."

As for heaven, she could hardly speak of it, though it was with her no
future state. She dwelt there already, but was unable to express the
wonders of her dwelling-place. "Oh, if only," she cried to her friends,
"I could tell you what my heart feels," and when they begged--"Oh,
Mother, tell us something," she answered, "I cannot find words. All I
say is that if only one drop of what my heart feels were to fall into
Hell, Hell itself would be transformed into Eternal Life."



                                   9

The year 1496 is marked by certain changes in Catherine's life, both
exterior and interior. She was now nearly fifty and her health began to
fail, which is hardly surprising, for she had worked hard nursing the
sick for nearly twenty years, and had been once herself at death's door
with the plague. As her strength declined it was only natural that she
should come to depend more on others. Up till then she had always kept
aloof, or at least her complete, self-sufficing independence must have
made her appear to do so, in spite of her overflowing kindness. Her
friendship with Ettore Vernazza was certainly not one of equality--he
looked up to her and depended on her spiritually as her disciple. As for
Giuliano, though a reformed character, he can never have been any help
or support to his wife. All the evidence points to the contrary, to his
leaning on her and being guided by her.

Nevertheless it must have been a shock and grief to her when he died. He
became seriously ill at the beginning of 1497 and died in the autumn of
that year. His illness had a curious effect on Catherine's normal habits
of prayer, or perhaps one should say that it made a normal act out of a
curious abstention. Ever since her conversion she had abstained from
prayer for others. It was one of the strangenesses of her very
individual and independent type of religion. She neither prayed for
others nor asked them for their prayers. She said that she knew God held
them as well as herself in his love and knowledge, and she was content
to leave them there.

But poor Giuliano had always been a bad-tempered man, and now in his
last illness, suffering constant pain, he became so impatient and
irascible that she feared he might lose his soul. So, breaking the
custom of twenty years, she prayed to her Love, saying: "Love, I demand
this soul of thee"--and from that hour she found Giuliano resigned to
the will of God.

There is only one other instance of her having used intercessory prayer,
and it is very similar to the first, since it was for the dying husband
of Argentina del Sale, a humble little woman who for years was her
servant. This poor man was dying of cancer of the face, and like
Giuliano complained bitterly of his sufferings. His wife begged
Catherine for her prayers, and once more they were given and with the
same result. It is hard to believe that either of these poor suffering
creatures would have gone to hell for their impatience, but Catherine
obviously feared for them, since for their sakes alone she broke her
established custom, and certainly in each case the result was a happy
death. It is notable that for neither did she ask for recovery or even a
mitigation of pain. She prayed only for their souls.

She was now quite alone, for though Argentina del Sale was later to make
her home with her, that could not be till after the death of her
(Argentina's) husband. Moreover, Giuliano's daughter Thobia, in whom
Catherine had always interested herself, did not live to inherit that
best silk gown but died soon after her father. Catherine was now unable,
through failing health, to continue her work as matron, and was for the
same reason obliged to take food after communion, so her extraordinary
fasts in Lent and Advent were brought to an end. At this time she made
another change in her spiritual life, equally drastic and more
far-reaching--she sought the help of a director.

For twenty-five years she had gone her own way, sailing her spiritual
craft without help from anyone, but now, as her powers declined, "the
Lord gave her a priest"--Don Cattaneo Marabotto, a very holy,
simple-minded man who had been appointed Rector of the hospital.



                                  10

It is perhaps surprising that when Catherine decided to lean on another
human being she did not choose a man who was in any way her intellectual
or spiritual equal. Don Marabotto was almost naive in his simplicity,
and he had not in his spiritual make-up the smallest degree of
mysticism. He was practical, sensible, kindly, and helped her in matters
of health and finance as well as of the soul. Some of her love of
solitude must have remained interiorly in her choice of these two
men--first Vernazza and then Marabotto--to share the wonders and graces
of her soul's life. We can only guess her need of reinforcement from
natures complementary to rather than identical with her own. Marabotto
was to fill a position quite different from Vernazza's. If the latter
was spiritually her son, the former was her father. His mere presence
was enough to strengthen and reassure her, giving her the comfort and
support her human frailty needed in these latter years.

As for his direction, it seems mainly to have amounted to receiving,
admiring and recording her spiritual confidences. He certainly neither
taught her nor led her. But he comforted her. Having abstained from
regular confession for so long, she found her first confession to Don
Marabotto something of an ordeal. She told him frankly that she did not
know where she was either in her soul or in her body, and though she
wanted to confess she could not remember any sins. When she actually did
confess he found her soul "like that of a small boy who might have
committed some trifling offence in ignorance". Till the end of her life
she was always to find difficulty in producing matter for absolution,
though she was never without a humble sense of her own weakness and
proneness to evil.

Her exterior life was still lived much as usual in the precincts of the
hospital. It was quiet and simple, but not austere--in the sense that
the wills she made at intervals during the last years of her life
(will-making was fashionable at that time in Genoa, and was not her best
friend a lawyer?) mention beautiful objects in silk and damask and
silver and she had never thought it unbecoming to holiness to wear a
silk gown. Her nursing activities had ceased; she was no longer equal to
them--she was wearing out.

Ever since her conversion the relations between her soul and body had
been, humanly speaking, abnormal. Perhaps they should be called
supernatural, but the tragedy of our fallen nature is that the
supernatural has become the abnormal, and a relation between soul and
body which God may possibly have intended to be normal for mankind has
been turned by sin into something too difficult for "the body of our
humiliation" to sustain. Catherine's soul was still firmly in the saddle
of Brother Ass, but Brother Ass in old age was no longer equal to being
so strongly ridden and had begun to go lame. The illnesses which
afflicted Catherine at this time seem definitely to be of a
psycho-physical origin--indeed some of her symptoms are a translation
into terms of the body of what had formerly been purely spiritual
states. The burnings of Divine Love which in her spiritual hey-day had
given her so much strength and joy became transmuted into physical heat
and distress. She felt consumed, dried up. She also had feelings of
intense cold, her whole body shuddering and trembling. At times she
would suffer from vomitings and spasms of the throat that made her
speechless, also discolorations of the skin and curious symptoms such as
the pitting of her flesh, "as if it had been dough," and so great a
sensitiveness that it was impossible to touch her. Then suddenly she
would be well again, in robust health, these states alternating and
lasting several days.

They were accompanied by similar changes in her spiritual equilibrium.
Though the fine point of her soul never wavered from its true North, she
would have horrible moments of confusion and desolation. Once she cried
out that her mind was like a mill, another time she compared herself to
a soul taken from paradise and finding the world nothing but hell.

None of this need surprise us. It is only in the stained-glass windows
that the saints never grow old. In real life they grow old, grow tired,
grow sick like the rest of us, but love God and are loved by him no less
for that. Catherine accepted her infirmities in the spirit of perfect
conformity with the divine will. No false pride made her struggle to
keep up the practices of her mental and physical health. She dropped her
fasts, her activities in the hospital, and she turned very simply and
humbly to the support of her fellow creatures.

Don Marabotto was the chief of her comforters, though she must sometimes
have been wearied by his stolid insistence on seeing the supernatural if
not the miraculous in her extraordinary physical states. Black spots,
discolorations, morbid hungers and thirsts, vomitings (which he politely
called "accidents"), shiverings and burnings were all to him, equally
with her trances and ecstasies, marks of divine favour. Von Hgel finds
Don Marabotto "slightly comical", whereas I find him slightly pathetic.
No doubt the two must be combined in any really human character, as most
of our best comedians have realised. To Catherine he was a true friend
and comforter--in her desolations she would turn to him as naturally as
a child to its father, and "God gave him grace", so that like a father
he could soothe the pain away. She also trusted him as much as she loved
him, and when her old clarity and business acumen failed, she made over
to him the entire management of her worldly affairs.



                                  11

Catherine felt herself to be dying; but when--and it was more than
once--she asked Don Marabotto for extreme unction he always refused her.
No doubt he was right, since her illness was of psychological rather
than physical origin and probably at this time entirely functional. Yet
a functional illness if unchecked may become organic. It would be
interesting to know how many of our physical illnesses are of mental
origin and modern medicine is working on those lines, but in Catherine's
day, and indeed much later, her condition was a puzzle to the doctors,
or rather it would have been if they had been called in.

As it happened, they were not summoned till within six months of her
death, by which time her sickness had taken sufficient organic hold to
be no longer susceptible to Don Marabotto's comforting. By then all the
portents were that Catherine was suffering from some form of kidney
disease--the burning fever, the dry yellow skin, the vomiting and
failing sight are all symptoms that would be clearly recognised today.
But even the physicians were inclined to regard them as of supernatural
origin. They declared that they could find no sign of bodily illness and
were therefore unable to provide a remedy.

Catherine longed to die, not with the morbid longing of bitterness and
impatience, nor even with the pathological longing of exhaustion, but
with a deep spiritual longing to be with her Love, free of the obstacles
put up by a sick body. For many years her body had been her servant and
had offered no resistance to her soul, but now it was definitely in her
way and she longed to be without it. She had always reverenced death,
which must have become familiar to her in the course of her work among
the sick and plague-stricken in hospital. There is a record of this
prayer of hers: "Oh, Love, I wish for nothing but thee, but if it
pleases thee, let me go and see others die and be buried, so that I may
see in others that great good which it does not please thee should yet
be mine."

But that good was not to be denied her long, though before it came there
is an interlude which shows Catherine's fundamental sanity and common
sense, in contrast to the folly and spiritual vulgarity of those who
surrounded her. It also puts the sixteenth-century practice of medicine
in a better light. At about this time, the summer of 1510, there
returned to Genoa an illustrious doctor, Maestro Giovan Battista Boerio,
who for many years had been court physician to King Henry the Seventh of
England. A year ago the king had died of an illness which in its course
and symptoms was not unlike Catherine's, so on Boerio's return to the
city it seemed only natural that he should be called in for
consultation.

His attitude to her sickness was very different from that of the other
doctors. He immediately advised a treatment and suggested remedies,
though what they were we are not told. What we are told, however, is
that Catherine was filled with joy at the prospect of a cure and gladly
promised to obey all his instructions. It is true that she reproached
herself later for having rejoiced in her human self alone, without first
trying to find out the will of her Love in this matter. But certainly
for a while her soul was ready to mount again on Brother Ass, if only he
could be cured of his stumbling.

The remedies failed, and after a few weeks' trial of them she was no
better. But Maestro Boerio evidently did not blame her for any lack of
co-operation, for to the end of her life he continued to visit her and
to hold her in the highest esteem, calling her Mother as if he too were
her disciple.

As for Catherine, the knowledge that she now most certainly must die
filled her with an overflowing joy. On one occasion, though in great
pain, she passed into something like one of her old ecstasies, and lay
for about an hour, not speaking, but laughing joyfully. Another time her
laughter was so gay that those around her asked what she was thinking of
and she replied that she had seen such beautiful, joyful, merry faces
that she could not stop herself from laughing. Her pains grew worse, she
was so weak that she could hardly make the sign of the cross, yet every
day she was well enough to receive Holy Communion, and spoke such
heavenly words to the Blessed Sacrament that those around her were moved
to tears.

The little circle round her during those last months included not only
an illustrious doctor, a famous lawyer, the Rector of the Hospital and
the son of a former Viceroy, but her two little servant maids, Mariola
and Argentina, both of whom she dearly loved, especially Argentina, who
lived with her now as her daughter. Catherine sought her friends for
spiritual values only; hence, by earthly standards, their mixed company.
They all loved her and reverenced her, but none of them really
understood her, and the two who understood her best were both absent on
the day she died.

Ettore Vernazza was far away. He had gone out of the city on one of his
errands of mercy. By so doing no doubt he was pleasing Catherine best
and showing himself most faithful to her teaching. The absence of Don
Marabotto is more difficult to account for, as he was certainly in Genoa
at the time. It may have been due at least partly to the fact that he
was no longer Rector of the hospital, but had lately been succeeded by a
certain Don Carenzio who possibly considered it his right to attend her
last moments. Don Marabotto may have agreed to withdraw, seeing that
Catherine was no longer conscious or aware of who was at her side. He
was certainly with her two days before her death and heard what must
have been her last confession.

He was also there on that earlier occasion when, feeling the end was
near and perhaps knowing that before it came her mind and senses would
be clouded, she asked to have the shutters opened so that she could see
the sky. Lying there she watched the daylight fade, and still desiring
light asked for candles to be lit around her. Then she lifted up what
remained of her voice and sang the _Veni Creator Spiritus_. But she
never took her eyes from the sky. The black Italian sky with its great
flashing stars hung before her like a spangled curtain veiling heaven
when, having finished her hymn, she lifted up her voice again and cried
triumphantly: "No more earth! No more earth!"

It is not perhaps what we should cry who have not her eagle gaze and can
see heavenly things only through the homely, friendly shapes of the
things that are made. But it links her death-bed with that wonderful
moment years ago in the convent chapel, the moment of her conversion,
when she cried in joy: "No more world! No more sin!" Between her and
that moment stretched years of the profoundest experience the human
heart can know. She was going to heaven, but she already knew it well,
having lived there even in her flesh. She knew purgatory too--the
purgatory into which she had plunged herself at her first clear sight of
God and of her own sins, and that more subtly cleansing purgatory she
lay in now, passive, enduring pains not of her own seeking. But soon she
would be free, saved not only from sin--which indeed had now no hold
upon her--but all the humiliation and frustration of her human bondage.
So she could gladly cry: "No more earth! No more earth!"



                                  12

After this she lingered for another fortnight. Sometimes her mind was
clear, and she added a codicil to her will and fixed her burial place,
or rather agreed to her friends' suggestion for it. At other times she
continued to display all the symptoms of a terrible illness, which
however mental and nervous in origin was now rampantly organic. By the
middle of September she was delirious and vomiting blood. Yet the
friends and physicians gathered round her bed still saw nothing but the
supernatural in her state. As for Maestro Giovan Battista Boerio, it is
possible that his own failure to cure her had converted him to the idea
that she was incurable by any earthly physician.

It is certainly remarkable that in spite of occasional paralyses,
vomitings and the most violent symptoms of organic disaster, she never
failed to receive and retain the Blessed Sacrament. Two days before her
death she had a particularly terrible haemorrhage; nevertheless she
communicated at the usual hour. A little later she must have become
delirious, for it is surely in delirium that she spoke her last coherent
words: "Drive away," she said, "that beast which is looking for food."

She spoke quite calmly and appeared neither agitated nor distressed. It
is probable that all she saw, in a sort of dream, was some animal, some
pasturing cow perhaps, ridiculously out of place in her bedroom. But her
friends, of course, could accept nothing so homely, and decided that she
had seen a ravenous demon threatening to devour her soul. In that case
it is surprising that she remained calm; moreover, she had never been in
the habit of seeing demons. But she must not be allowed to die after
words that any non-privileged sufferer might have spoken. Indeed, in
time it was decided that even though referring to a daemonic onslaught
these last words were not good enough, and in the later editions of her
_Life and Doctrine_ they are followed by the more edifying: "Lord, into
Thy hands I commend my spirit." But as this phrase does not appear until
the edition of 1615, a hundred years after her death, Catherine almost
certainly did not utter it.

The next morning she lost more blood, but received Holy Communion as
usual. It was for the last time. All the rest of the day, which was a
Saturday, she lay motionless, almost pulseless, and when, as Sunday
dawned, her friends asked her if she would like once more to
communicate, she said nothing, but pointed to the sky. A few minutes
later her soul passed as peacefully from earth to heaven as the night
passed into the day.



                                  13

Caterina Fiesca Adorna = St. Catherine of Genoa.

From the moment of her death her cause, or candidature for canonisation,
was in being, but it was not till over two hundred years later that
amidst all the dignified splendour of a grand ceremony she was finally
raised to the altars of the Universal Church. There is nothing automatic
or perfunctory about the process of canonisation. It involves an immense
amount of study and research, a most painstaking sifting of the
evidence. It therefore moves most swiftly when the candidate has
belonged to a religious order, which can in the nature of things devote
much time and many minds to the business. But Catherine belonged to no
religious order, not even as a tertiary, and though there was a general
and immediate desire for her unique type of holiness to receive official
recognition, there was, to put it plainly, nobody to do the work.

There were, however, two very strong currents of influence to move the
powers. One was her own family--the Fieschi, leaders and rulers in
Genoa, with many ecclesiastical connections. The other was the popular
cultus that started in the city almost immediately after her death.
Though she had been a sick woman for the last few years of her life, her
name was still blessed by the poor, by those whom she had nursed in
hospital or as a _Donna de la misericordia_ visited in their own homes.
The decree of Pope Urban VIII, which forbade the public veneration of
those whose extraordinary holiness had not been formally recognised by
the Church, was not promulgated till more than a hundred years later,
and by that time this cultus of Catherine was so firmly established that
it was allowed to continue unchecked. It was not, however, till 1675
that the title _Beata_, which had been informally hers since her death,
was officially bestowed upon her.

The process of her canonisation went forward slowly. By this time her
fame had spread, and among those who pressed her cause were the King of
Spain and King Louis XIII of France. But before the ceremony could take
place her teaching, as received and written down by her faithful friends
and disciples, Messer Ettore Vernazza and Don Cattaneo Marabotto, must
be carefully studied in order to receive the approbation of the Holy
See. In all there were three lines of investigation--her teaching, "the
heroicity of her virtues", and the miracles claimed to have been worked
by her after her death.

At last the infinitely slow, careful, cautious process was complete, and
on Trinity Sunday, 1737, "in order that the faithful in Christ may have
in Blessed Catherine a perfect example of the Love of God and their
neighbour", Pope Clement XII formally canonised Caterina Fiesca Adorna
in the Basilica of St. John Lateran. The function included three
beatifications, one of them being that of Vincent de Paul, a
"divinitarian" lover of mankind who, though very different from
Catherine in temperament, was in his works of mercy, like Ettore
Vernazza, her true son and a man after her own heart.

St. Catherine of Genoa--Widow. That is how she appears in the calendar
of the Universal Church, and her Mass (which is not universal, but "by
special grant in certain places") is based on the common of a holy woman
not a martyr, which is sometimes called the Common of Widows. It seems
clear, however, that the valiant woman of the lesson is not a widow;
indeed she would probably regard it as a stain on her efficiency if her
husband pre-deceased her. But throughout the missal the designation of
widow is liable to misunderstanding, and after studying the feasts of
those holy women who are neither virgins nor martyrs one could not be
surprised at any insurance company which should refuse to insure a
saint's husband, as not a single one of them seems to have survived his
spouse.

The reason for this no doubt is that in most cases the sanctity of the
wife has not flowered till the death of her husband removed certain
human and earthly obstructions. St. Frances of Rome and St. Bridget of
Sweden (for instance, and there are many others) devoted their widowhood
to the founding of religious orders. But one must acknowledge that the
description sometimes appears arbitrary, as in the case of St. Margaret
of Scotland, who survived her husband only two days and probably did not
even know of his death, as he was killed in battle at some distance from
her. St. Catherine of Genoa certainly survived her Giuliano by a much
longer period, thirteen years altogether, but her widowhood does not
appear to have made the smallest difference to her way of life either
spiritual or material.

She continued to live in the same house, to do the same work, to see the
same friends, to follow the same practices of prayer and contemplation.
She was neither more nor less a worker, a teacher and a saint. Indeed
throughout her life Giuliano seems to have had little or no influence on
her, except in so far as the misery of the first years of her marriage
stems from his bad treatment and neglect. After their reunion he sinks
almost into nonentity, though it is possible that this may be due in
part to hagiographical suppressions, and that really Catherine thought
and spoke of him more than would appear from the official records. But
it seems certain that it was she and not he who ruled their little home,
who made the decisions and offered the sacrifices. We never hear of him
speaking or acting in any way that would make his presence felt, so when
after twenty-three years that presence was withdrawn it can have made
very little difference.

Catherine's sanctity stands apart from marriage. Neither her wifehood
nor her widowhood marks it in any degree. Detached, independent,
self-sufficing (except during the last few tired years) she moves
through the distractions of human life as calmly as a strong ship cuts
through the waves. There was no need for her to withdraw from the world
into some religious order, for from that first cry of "No more world!"
that world had lost its power against her, and she had lost her need of
it even as an intermediary.

"_Sitivit anima mea ad Deum fortem vivum_" are the first words of the
Mass appointed for her feast on March 22nd, the day of her conversion.
"O God, my whole soul longs for thee, as a deer for running water
. . . ." She had indeed longed, she had indeed drunken at Paradisal
waters, till the vessel of her heart was full--"A heart to serve thee,
O God, a heart to serve thee. . . ." She had walked in Paradise, but
she had also walked the wards of a hospital. She was a great lady both
in the city of Genoa and the city of God, but her friends were the poor,
the sick, the plague-stricken. She chose them because they were His.



                                  14

Von Hgel says of Catherine: "She became a saint because she had to." If
she had not she might have sunk into a psychological abyss in which her
character, or even perhaps her reason, would have disintegrated. Her
nervous, brooding, introverted nature had in it all the seeds of chaos.
We have met her type, we have read of it in volumes of psychology, we
have seen and heard of the miseries and abnormalities to which it can
become a prey.

But for the grace of God, those first ten unhappy years of her marriage
might have set the pattern of her whole life. Already we see the threat
of pathological illness--"Oh, God," she prayed, "may I be three months
ill in bed." She might have become a standard hysteric case if there had
not been in the depths of her being, striving under the dominion of what
she calls in her teaching the False Self, a True Self athirst for God.
It was that self, rising suddenly out of the deep and sinking its false
image, which transformed her in a moment, sending her unusual powers
flowing into the right channels, so that hysteria passed into ecstasy,
morbidity into mysticism, and introspection became wisdom. The false
self was still there, buried in what had been the grave of the true, but
its clamour was for ever stilled and never again could it hope to
dominate the mind and will which were now both in union with the mind
and will of God.

Catherine's type of sanctity is certainly unusual, almost one could say
eccentric. The strength of her individuality is shown both by its
practices and its abstentions. She went daily to Holy Communion at a
time when such frequency was more likely to provoke censure than
admiration; yet during the greater part of her convert life she pursued
her adventurous way to heaven without what many would have considered
the necessary guidance of a director. There were also her unusual
reluctances in the use of intercessory prayer and the invocation of
saints, balanced by equally unusual compulsions in the matter of
fasting.

But though both positively and negatively an eccentric, Catherine was,
unlike many eccentrics, neither proud nor obstinate. She did her best to
avoid calling attention to herself, forcing herself to eat if others
were present during her fasts, abstaining even for a while from Holy
Communion when one whom she revered suggested it was a presumption on
her part. And when age and infirmity made it difficult for her to
maintain her special way of life, she changed it without hesitation,
abandoning her fasts and turning to the comfort offered by a director
whose powers in all save his priesthood were inferior to her own.

Undoubtedly she had great gifts of mind and intelligence. There was
nothing of the "simple saint" about her, yet the simplest, most
expansive, friendly saint has nothing to teach her in fundamental
tenderness of heart. She combined with the heights of mystical prayer a
life of humble service to others, visiting the poor, nursing the sick,
at the cost of her health and the risk of her life. There is nothing
"withdrawn" about her except in temperament, and even that flowers
suddenly into the most beautiful acts of love--Catherine leaving her
best silk gown to her husband's illicit child, Catherine so readily
forgiving that same husband who had injured her so deeply, and living
with him in friendship and kindness to the end of his life, Catherine
the kind friend and counsellor of the whole Vernazza family, Catherine
who loved and cared for as a daughter her little servant girl, and above
all Catherine who kissed the Word on the lips of the dying
plague-stricken woman, transforming even death itself into love.





_Cornelia Connelly_



                                   1

It is a cold January morning in the Florence of 1880. A thin, sharp wind
blows down from the mountains through the brown and yellow streets, and
the congregation of the American Episcopal church shudders and huddles
down into its furs as it comes out of the steam-heated warmth. It is not
a large congregation, for the cold and lovely churches of the city are a
temptation even to those of another religion. Only a faithful few,
either staunch Protestants, or nostalgic exiles or invalids who require
steam-heat, attend eleven o'clock Matins at the American Church.

"Sure, it does one good to hear an American voice in the pulpit," says
one of them to her friend. "How long has Mr. Connelly been here?"

"Some twenty years or more, I reckon. Mom used to know him way back in
'61. But he doesn't look as if he'd go on much longer now. He's getting
old."

"How old is he?"

"I couldn't tell you for sure, Remira, but he's getting on for eighty."

"Does he live alone?"

"Oh, no. His daughter Adeline lives with him. You saw her at the
organ--at least you saw her hat. She looks after him and sees to all the
church chores."

"Is she the only one?"

"I'm not sure. I believe there's a son over in the States. But Adeline's
the only one in Florence. I like her. Folks say she sometimes goes to
one of those Italian Popish churches when her father isn't around, but I
can't blame her for that, considering all things."

"What things?"

The friend buttons her collar more firmly against the wind as she begins
really to talk.

"Would it surprise you, Remira, to hear that her mother was a Roman
Catholic nun?"

It certainly has surprised Remira.

"My! You don't say! How could that have happened? How very, very
strange!"

"It sure is a strange story, and you'll think it stranger still when I
tell you that for more than ten years Mr. Connelly was a Popish priest."

Remira stops in her tracks.

"Lord a' mercy! Then how----"

"I'll tell you how it all happened. You can't live as long as I have in
Florence without hearing the story. But let's step out. This wind is
searching me."



                                   2

When the beautiful Miss Cornelia Peacock married the Rev. Pierce
Connelly, her eldest sister, Mrs. Montgomery, was seriously displeased.
She had been her guardian ever since the death of their parents, and had
brought her up specially with a view to making a good marriage. The
Peacocks were one of the oldest families in Philadelphia, proud of their
Yorkshire descent and occupying an important position in the city; while
Cornelia herself was a lovely girl, with a skin like magnolia blossom,
lively dark eyes and a shining weight of jetblack hair. She was gifted
too, and her sister had developed her gifts by engaging some of the best
professors in town as her instructors. She could accompany her own fine
voice on the guitar, she could draw and paint, speak French--in fact she
had all the right female accomplishments, based on a firm grounding of
more useful subjects.

She had money, too, not an enormous amount, but enough to give her
beauty and talent a fitting dowry. It was dreadful to see her throwing
herself away like this on a mere clergyman of no particular family, only
a vaguely Irish origin. It is true that the Peacocks had always been
Episcopalians, as suited their English descent, and if a bishop had
asked for Cornelia. . . . There was no good telling her that Pierce
Connelly would one day be a bishop, because she was quite sure that he
would not.

It was her sister Mrs. Duval who was always saying that Pierce Connelly
would make his mark. The young man had evidently "got round" her, for
she liked him very much indeed. He might not be all they could have
hoped for Cornelia, but he was a perfectly delightful man, charming and
intelligent, and so gifted that he was bound to rise in his profession.
His family, too, though nobodies in Philadelphia, had both property and
influence in the South.

While the sisters argued, Cornelia quietly took the matter into her own
hands. Besides her creamy skin and her dark eyes, she had a peculiarly
firm, well-shaped mouth, a little too large, perhaps, for the simpering
fashions of the day, but beautifully drawn, expressive and determined.
When Mrs. Montgomery scolded her about Pierce her eyelids might droop,
but her mouth remained firmly set, and as soon as she was twenty-one and
legally her own mistress she married Pierce Connelly.

The marriage took place from Mrs. Duval's house, on the first of
December, 1831, and soon after it the young couple moved south to
Natchez in Mississippi, where a living had been found for Pierce by his
relations. They were an attractive pair, and must have surprised many in
those surroundings where the middle-aged and stuffy are more commonly
found. The new rector was young, ambitious and enthusiastic, with
unusual powers of attraction; while as for the rector's wife, she might
have been described in the same words as Tom Bertram uses to describe
Mary Crawford in _Mansfield Park_--"a sweet, pretty, elegant, lively
girl."

She did much better, however, than Mary Crawford would have done as a
clergyman's wife. She had always been a good churchwoman, and though her
duties at that time (two years before the Oxford Movement) could
scarcely have been burdensome, she was scrupulous in fulfilling them as
well as in caring for her home and concerning herself with the local
works of mercy. Pierce soon made himself popular, both by his eloquence
in the pulpit and his good influence in the parish, and both he and
Cornelia made the rectory a pleasant place, where one could hear good
music and join (if one was able) in good conversation. Altogether the
Connellys were a great success. Their circle in Natchez was mainly that
of the well-to-do planters outside the town and such of its citizens as
prospered on the wealth of the plantations. Those were the days of
slave-labour, and the whole district was prosperous, with the easy,
leisured, cultured prosperity of the South before the Civil War.

It was not, however, such a predominantly Episcopalian society as that
which they had left. The States of Louisiana and Mississippi had only
recently been taken over from France and Catholicism flourished to an
extent which was something quite new in the Connelly experience. In
Philadelphia they had had no contact with it whatever--indeed it was not
till they came to Natchez that Cornelia had seen even the outside of a
convent. But now they were to meet and speak to Catholics, who though
not their parishioners were their neighbours. They were not bigoted, nor
did they shun all discussion of their religious differences. Cornelia in
particular was interested in the strange unknown life that, while she
pursued her own cheerful, ordered, prosperous way, was going on within
those convent walls.

Four years passed, and the Connellys had a son and daughter, Mercer and
Adeline. Pierce was spoken of as a rising man in his profession, sure
of early preferment, and Cornelia was loved for her lightness and
goodness of heart. Life seemed to have fulfilled all the happy promises
of their wedding day.

But now there appeared in Pierce a growing restlessness. He was
successful, he was popular, yet he seemed uneasy. His life as rector of
Natchez no longer satisfied him, and after a time he confided to his
devoted, anxious wife that he had begun to have doubts as to his
position in the Protestant Episcopal Church. Those new contacts with
Catholicism had unsettled him. He had heard the call of a higher truth,
of Truth itself, from that Catholic and Roman Church of which five years
ago he had known little but the name. Now that he knew more, his
conviction was growing that it was all that it claimed to be, the
infallible interpreter of the mind of God. In which case ...

It must have been a perfect moment when his Cornelia, whom he had feared
might be stricken by this blow at the central order of her fife, told
him that his doubt and unsettlement had been hers also, that unknown to
each other they had been walking the same lanes of thought, and reached
the same journey's end.



                                   3

Here I am making certain presumptions. I am presuming that the Connellys
did not discuss their changing attitude towards Catholicism until it had
crystallised into a definite purpose, and I am presuming that Pierce was
the first to put that purpose into words. I have no facts to go upon,
only probabilities. I think it probable that during the incubation stage
of their doubts, each would have been afraid of upsetting the other. In
those days conversions to Rome, especially in clerical circles, were
even more rare and more disruptive than they are now. Cornelia
especially would have held in check the attraction she felt stealing
over her, knowing that her yielding to it would mean the breaking up of
her husband's life. In those early stages, before the full truth
appeared, she would even have regarded it as a temptation, and it was
not till she knew her own joy when he told her his mind that she
realised how far she had travelled without him. As for Pierce being the
first to speak, I base that assumption on the continuous pattern of
their lives, which consistently shows him always taking the first step,
to be followed by Cornelia, who then goes far ahead of him.

This was what happened now. After more discussion, some reading and much
prayer, their choice was made. They both decided to join the Church of
Rome, renouncing the religion in which they had been brought up and
which in the providence of God had brought them together. It meant many
sacrifices--the sacrifice of their home, of their friends, and, for
Pierce, of a good position and a promising future. But one sacrifice was
spared them. They were well enough off to have no financial anxieties.
Unlike many who were to follow him in later years, Pierce Connelly in
surrendering his living did not surrender his livelihood. Indeed by this
time he had sufficient private means to be able to plan a visit to Rome,
where he decided their reception should take place.

This idea, though it delayed the event for some months, appealed to his
sense of fitness, to say nothing of his sense of drama and possibly of
his own importance. It would be much better than being received in some
small-town church where the priest spoke Latin with an American accent.
He pictured a big occasion, a great day, on which he and his Cornelia
should be reconciled to their holy mother the Church in the very centre
of her life and heart.

But his Cornelia, with a keener sense of the supernatural, could not
endure the delay. She longed for the sacraments and hated the thought of
having to wait for them till she was in Rome. It did not seem to her to
matter where one was received into the Church that is everywhere. The
only important consideration was when. As she found her husband
determined on this Roman plan, she boldly suggested that she should be
received without him while they were waiting for their ship at New
Orleans, and it is significant that, adoring her as he did and united as
they had been in the adventure until now, he still chose to wait for his
big occasion, being only the witness of hers. She was received into the
Catholic Church by Bishop Blanc of New Orleans, and made her first
communion in the cathedral.

Pierce's great day came later, and very much as he had planned it. The
Connellys arrived in Rome with introductions to many important people,
and when Pierce was reconciled on the Palm Sunday of 1836, he had a no
less illustrious sponsor than the Earl of Shrewsbury. The friendship
with the Shrewsbury family thus begun was to play an important part in
their lives and to continue through good and evil for many years.

The two young people had always moved in good society, but the society
of Philadelphia and Natchez was necessarily very different from the
society of cosmopolitan Rome. They found themselves for the first time
in the midst of an aristocracy, and the change appears to have gone to
Pierce's head. He did not cease to be pious and devout, but his letters
to his family at home were so full of talk of "great people" and
"valuable acquaintances", that in the end his more democratic brothers
revolted and openly called him a worldly-minded snob.

His wife reacted very differently to her new surroundings. The
differences between husband and wife were now beginning to show.
Hitherto in their five years of marriage they had appeared very much
alike in character and disposition--a. "happy couple", a "united pair".
But Catholicism had turned them into individuals, first revealing, then
emphasising, important divergencies of outlook and behaviour.

Cornelia moved easily in the cosmopolitan society in which she found
herself for the first time. The admiration which she excited wherever
she went was a part of her husband's pride. He comments smugly, "I am
sure that her Christian feelings are far too strong for her ever to be
carried away either by love of admiration or love for society." How
right he was. Her social success could not give her half the delight
that she found in the treasures of Rome--the buildings, the paintings,
the music. She decided to take advantage of her opportunities and
renewed her studies of music and drawing under the best masters of the
city. But neither her own talents nor the beauty with which she was
surrounded made the real joy of those months. That joy was the
ever-flowing, ever-growing joy of her religion. She had not been in the
Church a year, but already she was a creature returned to its natural
element "as a duck to water" . . . only the well-worn simile can express
the perfectly unforced naturalness of her plunge into this new
environment. At last, though it seemed as if it had been always, she was
living the life for which she had been born.



                                   4

Her happiness being of this nature, she was able to take it with her
when they left home and returned to Natchez, though it was a return
clouded by bad news and straitened circumstances. There had been some
losses in the family fortune and for a time it looked as if they would
be really poor. Moreover, Natchez was full of their former friends, now
turned unfriendly by their change of religion.

Cornelia had much to endure and to contend with during the months that
followed. Pierce, always easily depressed, began to feel all the
anxieties of a man who has lost the job he was trained for, and does not
know how to find another: He declared himself ready to take anything--a
clerkship in a bank or a drivership on a plantation, neither of which
seemed a practical suggestion. It was a much better idea to become a
schoolmaster, which he did on being offered the post of Professor of
English at the College of St. Charles, Grand Cteau, Louisiana.

Both the Connellys must have been greatly relieved to leave Natchez and
the shadows of their former life and establish themselves in a new
circle which was almost entirely Catholic. They now had three children,
for another little son, John Henry, had been born towards the end of
their European trip. All the children, of course, were now Catholics,
and Cornelia was adding to her delight by teaching them their first
steps in religion.

The family's circumstances were henceforth easier--Pierce had his salary
to supplement their income, and Cornelia had been given the post of
music mistress at the Sacred Heart Convent which adjoined the college.
This was for her a very happy situation, for not only did it give scope
and value to her great musical gifts, but it brought her into close
contact with an order to which she had been specially devoted ever since
visiting the Mother-house at the Trinit dei Manti in Rome. There she
had made the acquaintance of many of the nuns, and here she became the
personal friend of Madame Cutts the superior and profited much from the
friendship in her spiritual life.

This was growing apace. Though she had been in the Church only two years
she was already treading the higher ways of prayer and sacrifice.
Pierce, too, was making progress; indeed the couple were impressive in
their piety, in their happiness and in their love of each other. They
must have displayed their religion to the world outside in a most
attractive light, for all but one of Cornelia's large family became
Catholics, and Pierce's brother John was also converted, together with
his future wife.

The Connellys lived in a little cottage belonging to the convent, to
which they gave the name of Gracemere. Here flourished all the graces of
religion and family life. Not content with bringing up her own children
in the faith, Cornelia took into her home a little negro slave-girl,
whom she converted and then set free. The old South lives again in this
act, as it lives in the sunshine and the shade of the garden at
Gracemere, where Cornelia sits watching her children at play, her guitar
upon her knee.

"When I first became aware", she wrote at this period, "that the
religious state was higher than the secular, I secretly rejoiced that my
state in life was fixed and that such a sacrifice would never be asked
of me."

She was not one of those ungracious souls who look primly and askance at
the gifts of God, as if they were not given us to enjoy. She thankfully
rejoiced in her lovely home and happy family. Yet her soul could not
forget that her life was not the life of the Man of Sorrows and its
deeper knowledge rose suddenly in an act that changed her entire world.

A day came which was to be to her what the day of her conversion had
been to St. Catherine of Genoa. Cornelia was never converted, except in
the technical, intellectual sense of a change from one religion to
another. She had changed her opinions, her allegiance, but her soul was
not twice born. All that had happened was the immense improvement of its
growth by its transference from an artificial to a natural soil.
Nevertheless a day came which was a turning-point in her life. It was a
day like any other day of the early Louisiana springtime, and as on
every other day Cornelia sat in her sunny garden, watching her children
at play, her guitar upon her knee. Perhaps she sang there in the garden
the old songs of the South, "Shining River", and "Shady Grove", her
lovely voice rising among the spring voices of the birds, while the
flowers in the spring borders matched the gay, streaming ribbons of her
guitar.

It was a moment--perfect in its beauty, its happiness, its goodness, and
suddenly in the midst of it her soul rose up and cried--"Oh, my God, if
this happiness be not for thy glory and the good of my soul--take it
from me. I make the sacrifice."

She had done it. She had challenged the divine eagle to swoop on its
prey. She had said amen to her own spoliation. It was a heroic act and
its reward was on heroic levels. Twenty-four hours later she sat in her
garden. The sunshine and the springtime and the flowers were the same,
but instead of the guitar upon her knee lay the agonised body of her
youngest child, little John, her special treasure, dying in torment
after being pushed by a playful dog into a vat of boiling sugar.



                                   5

When a few days later the little boy was buried with all the joyful,
tender rites that the Church keeps for those who die "immaculate in the
Way", Cornelia could not know that when she herself came to die he would
be the only one of her family whom she could confidently expect to meet
again in heaven. She had not realised yet the full effect of her
offering. She may even have thought that she had already been fully
taken at her word. But she had offered all and she had not yet lost all.

Indeed at the moment a new hope had dawned in her life. She was
expecting another child, perhaps another son, to comfort her and fill
the empty place. On the other hand, she was beginning to feel anxious
about her husband. There was something on his mind. She did not think it
could still be little John's loss, for he did not seem so much unhappy
as preoccupied. There was also a change in his manner towards her, and a
withdrawal of his confidence.

She observed these things but she did nothing to change them--she did
not coax or plague him to tell her what he obviously wished to conceal.
She accepted his withdrawal as she had accepted her other sorrow. It was
part of the holocaust she had offered. Yet in the heart of her
acceptance was an increasing dread. "Oh, my God," she prayed, "trim thy
vine, cut it to the quick, but in thy great mercy root it not up yet."

In those words, "root it not up" lay perhaps a presage of what was,
coming, for her whole life was shortly to be torn up by the roots. The
spring was over, and the long, stifling summer, but though October had
come the air was still warm and heavy in the deep South. The morning was
as hot as any in an English June when Pierce and Cornelia walked home
together from Mass on the feast of St. Edward the Confessor. They had
been to Holy Communion and Cornelia's thoughts were still in heaven when
her husband spoke. Perhaps we may allow our imagination to build up a
conversation of which we have no record except her later declaration
that if it had not been for God's grace she would have died of sorrow.

"My love," said Pierce, "you may have noticed lately that there's
something on my mind."

"I have indeed," said Cornelia, thankful that at last he seemed likely
to confide in her.

"I didn't want to tell you anything till my mind was made up. I would
have hid my preoccupation from you if I could, but I know that because
you love me you must have seen it in spite of my efforts. I'm going to
ask great things of your love for me, Cornelia."

"You can't ask too much." He took her hand.

"And of your love of God."

What could Pierce have to ask of her love of God? Her mind must have
moved among many conjectures, but she was totally unprepared for what
was coming.

"I feel," he said slowly--"or rather I'm convinced that God is calling
me to be a priest."

The full import of his words can hardly have dawned on her at once. We
can see her facing him in a sort of bewilderment.

" Oh, Pierce . . . . but how . . . .?"

"It can be done," he continued, "if _you_ are willing. It is your
decision. But it means a great sacrifice from you, my dear. I have gone
into the matter and I have found that a married man like myself can be
accepted for the priesthood only if his wife before his ordination
enters a religious order."

The shock of his words nearly choked her. All she could say was--

Pierce, the children. . . ."

For a moment he too was silent. Then he said quietly:

"These things take time. It may be some years before I can be ordained,
and by then Merty and Ady will be at school. It will merely be a case of
providing for their holidays, and I shall be at hand. . . ."

"But there will be . . . . What about . . . .?" Had Pierce forgotten
the child that was coming?

He checked--pondered--then said: "If it is God's will that I become a
priest, he will provide for _all_ our children. There are many things
that could happen. My brother and his wife would I am sure be eager to
help us, or the child might even be taken charge of by the convent you
enter--for a while at least. But all this, as I've said, is far ahead in
the future, and we must trust in God. If it is his will----"

"If it is his will," said Cornelia with white lips--"His will be done."

She could say no less, and no more, for she was nearly fainting.



                                   6

The more one thinks of Pierce's announcement, whatever form it actually
took, the more one is appalled by the sheer tactlessness (to use no
stronger word) of the time he chose to make it. He might at least have
waited until Cornelia's child was born. To have compelled her to go
through her pregnancy with the knowledge that birth must be followed by
separation was a barbarity comparable only to that which, in the bad old
days before prison reform, obliged condemned women to see the gallows
waiting for them as soon as they had recovered from their lying-in. It
is hardly surprising that Elizabeth Fry found these wretched mothers
full of a deep resentment. But there was no resentment in Cornelia,
though her husband with a few words had turned her deepest joys to
sorrows. Her happy home, his tender care, her children's love, were now
all so many wounds in her heart. She suffered agony at the thought of
the day when she must lose them all and begin a life for which she had
never felt any vocation.

It may perhaps be wondered why she submitted so readily, why she had not
attempted to argue, or said at least: "This is not the time to talk of
such things. They must stand over till our child is born." No doubt
Pierce would have listened to her, for he loved her deeply, though he
was not always very clever in his way of showing it. But we have to
remember that first in Cornelia's heart, before her husband, before her
children, came the love of God. Undoubtedly she saw God's will in this
decision--following as it did so soon after her offering of herself and
all she had. She would not have believed that Pierce could have asked of
her such a sacrifice--which after all was a sacrifice for him, too--if
he had not been quite convinced that God required it of them both. His
call to the priesthood was a great honour for him and for her and for
their children. For her too was the special honour of giving her dearest
possession to God. He had asked her for this gift, so she gave it gladly
with all her wounded heart.

There were, however, some bad moments when her natural, human feelings
would have their way, though she was strong enough to hide them from all
save her spiritual advisers.

"Is it necessary," she cried to one of these--"is it necessary for
Pierce to make this sacrifice and sacrifice me? I love my husband; I
love my darling children. Why must I give them up?"

Nothing of course could happen until after the birth of the expected
child, and no one but the couple's directors knew what was intended.
Cornelia maintained her calm and even her gaiety, showing that integrity
and stability of character which was among her greatest gifts. Many a
woman, one thinks, would have miscarried her child in such a situation,
or at least injured its health and vitality with the poison of hidden
distress. But little Frank was born at his full term, a sturdy, healthy
baby; untouched by his mother's suffering.



                                   7

A few months after his birth Cornelia went into retreat at the convent,
and here and now for the first time she experienced a sense of vocation.
Hitherto all her instincts had been opposed to the religious life. She
was a wife and a mother and her vocation was to her home and family.
When Pierce had spoken of a change it had seemed to her quite impossible
that she should ever as it were put her whole nature into reverse.

But she had always believed that the religious life was the higher one,
though she had never thought the call would come to her--indeed, she had
rejoiced that it could not. Now at last she heard it, and being what she
was, she gave her whole heart in response.

This is recorded in the notes she made during the retreat: "Examined
vocation. Decided. Simplicity--confidence. Oh, my good Jesus, I do give
myself all to thee, to suffer and die on the cross, poor as thou wert
poor, abandoned as thou wert abandoned."

Yet even now the future was not decided, and the uncertainty must have
acted as an irritant on her sorrows. Such a momentous step as the
ordination of a husband and father could not be undertaken without much
preparation and time for thought. It was not, of course, the first time
that a married man had been ordained, and the procedure for such an
event was fixed by custom and canon law. But the Connellys' youth--she
was only thirty-three and he five years older--put their separation and
the disruption of their family into an altogether different class from
that of those elderly or middle-aged couples who, having fledged their
children, decide to give up the rest of their lives to religion.

A year had passed since Pierce's announcement, and outwardly their life
was the same. Friends and visitors who saw the same happy, cultured
exterior could not know that inside the future had eaten it hollow. To
change the metaphor, Gracemere was no longer a home but the platform of
a railway station where a couple waits, filling with desultory
conversation the time that must elapse before the arrival of the train
that is to part them for ever.

That train came in some six months later, when little Frank was a year
old, taking Pierce away to England and the home of the Shrewsburys while
still leaving his ordination a secret and distant adventure. The earl
had heard with concern that a man of whom he had always thought most
highly had been reduced by financial losses to become a mere usher in a
school. He wrote offering to undertake the education at Stonyhurst of
Mercer the eldest boy and suggesting that the whole family should move
to England, where Pierce would find better opportunities for the
exercise of his talents than he enjoyed at Grand Cteau. With the
kindest hospitality he invited Cornelia and her children to Alton
Towers.

It was agreed that the offer should be accepted only in part. Pierce
would go to Europe, taking Mercer with him, but Cornelia would stay
behind at Grand Cteau with the two younger children. It would be as it
were a dress rehearsal of their final separation, and a test of Pierce's
vocation. He would try to find a temporary post, preferably one that
would bring him to Rome, and if it all turned out as he hoped and
expected he would then ask for ordination.

Gracemere was to be given up and Cornelia and the children were to be
lodged at the convent, her part of the dress rehearsal. All the family's
furniture and possessions were sold by public auction, and when Pierce
and his young son sailed for England they left behind them a wife and
mother utterly despoiled.

She now regarded herself as virtually a postulant. She lived with
Adeline and Frank in a small cottage in the convent grounds, taught in
the school, and joined in the community retreat. Her sister, Mary
Peacock, converted by her example, was already a novice, and Cornelia
had no thought but of herself becoming a Sacred Heart nun at Grand
Cteau as soon as the future should be decided.

But this decision was still like a pilgrim's horizon, continuing to
recede. Pierce had arrived in England, had settled Mercer at Stonyhurst,
spent a few weeks with the Shrewsburys at Alton Towers, and finally
accepted the post of travelling companion to a young Englishman
(needless to say "of one of the best families") with whom he was to
visit Belgium, Germany, Italy and France.

"What a delightful time," he writes to his brother, "if Nelie were with
me! How much rather would I be at home with her and the little ones than
anywhere else without them . . . . All the magnificence and greatness I
am in the midst of is a poor--very poor--exchange for solitude and holy
quiet."

Do we altogether believe him? I am not sure that we do.



                                   8

A letter which Cornelia Connelly might have written to her husband, but
did not:


Convent of the Sacred Heart,
Grand Cteau,
Louisiana.

                                         Feast of St. Aloysius, 1843.

My love,

It is now almost a year that you have been gone, and little Frank can
hardly remember you, though he prays every night for his dear Papa. We
all, the children and I, follow you on your travels, spreading out the
map of Europe on our little dining-table and underlining in red ink the
places you have visited, while we read and re-read the descriptions you
give in your letters. What a wonderful tour you must be having and how
you must be enjoying it! I am glad you find young Mr. Berkeley such an
agreeable companion and of course it must add very much to the pleasures
of your trip to meet so many distinguished people. But, my dear love,
when are you going to Rome? I had thought you would have been there by
now, and as you are so completely in charge of your route, I am at a
loss to understand why you are not. When you went away you told me that
the main object of your leaving us was to go there as quickly as
possible. Yet you write from Fribourg, from Munich, from Milan, from
Ancona, yet never mention Rome. I cannot help longing for you to go
there, so that our future lives may be settled and the lives of our
children. I will not disguise from you that I find this long period of
uncertainty most trying to my spirits. I am neither in the world nor out
of it, nor know which I shall be a year hence. Nor can I deny an uneasy
feeling that your present life spent in luxurious travel and fashionable
society is not the best possible preparation for a life of prayer and
sacrifice. My dear one, I have given you to God and I want that gift to
be as perfect as human nature will allow. I fear lest it become
blemished in the course of these delays. I do not presume to dictate to
you or even to advise you, but I cannot refrain from asking you to
consider whether it would not be possible to expedite your journey to
the Holy City where alone our case can be decided. I am sure Mr.
Berkeley would not object, having shown himself so perfectly complying
hitherto.

The children and I are well, thank God! Though little Ady alarmed us all
a month ago (when I would not write of it) by coming out in an eruption
of her skin which made us fear the measles. She was of course taken good
care of, but as I was teaching in the school I was unable to nurse her
or even to visit her in case I should carry the infection to others. I
found this a heavy cross, but I realised that as I must learn to live
without my children it was good training for me. That being so, I
forebore even to inquire after her. So you see, my dearest, I am doing
what little I can to fit myself for this great and wonderful thing that
is to change our lives.

I am glad you have such good reports of Mercer. I write to him
regularly, for I suppose that I shall always be able to do that. He has
sent me some nice letters too. But I wish he did not have these
day-dreams. His mind seems always to be wandering among castles in the
air! I fear that this may interfere with his studies. He has not told me
yet where he is in school.

I must go now and prepare my lessons for tomorrow's classes. God bless
you, my beloved, and write to me soon--from Rome.

                   Ever your devoted wife,

                                                    CORNELIA CONNELLY.


Actually her diary contains this entry for the feast of St.
Aloysius--"Profit by all temptations! ! ! !"



                                   9

At last Pierce Connelly was in Rome. It is hard to conjecture why he
took so long to arrive there, because when he finally did so he
immediately set about his petition to the ecclesiastical authorities for
leave to separate from his wife as a preliminary to ordination. Their
answer possibly surprised him. He was told that nothing whatsoever could
be done in her absence. She must come to Rome and give her consent in
person. Till then he had gone his way, prime mover of the enterprise,
doubtless imagining that it could go forward and reach its end on his
sole impulse. Now for the first time he realised that Cornelia was to
have her public say in the matter. It was not enough to inform the
authorities that she had freely consented to his wishes from the very
first moment of knowing them and was now living a semi-conventual life
in anticipation of their fulfilment. She must appear in person and
formally express her sanction before anything could be done. The Vatican
refused to move without her.

This would mean another delay, which this time would not be Pierce's
fault. But once more his behaviour becomes a mystery. He wrote to
Cornelia, telling her what had happened and what was required and
stating that he himself would come over and fetch her. As bear-leader to
the most docile (and well-provided) of bears, he was able, by suggesting
the enlargement of a visit to America, to extend his tour and travel
free of cost to Philadelphia where she was to meet him. Cornelia, deeply
thankful for this call to action, set her affairs in order and left the
convent with her children. But when she arrived in Philadelphia she was
astonished to find that they were not to go straight to Rome, but stay
where they were for a month and then go as guests of the Shrewsburys to
Alton Towers. This was not at all what she had bargained for, nor had
she expected to find Pierce plunging happily into social life, accepting
invitations for them both, and taking all his former pride in the
admiration she excited wherever she went.

She had lived a semi-conventual life for over a year and thought she had
renounced the world entirely. It was painful to have to make this return
and renew the taste of what she hoped she had forgotten. But even Alton
Towers did not see the end of it. They left England only for Paris and
"half a dozen dinner parties with the Duchesse de D. and the Princesse
de B." It was all unexpected and mysterious.

Some might say that Cornelia's own behaviour was as mysterious as her
husband's. Why did she put up with all this? She might have challenged
him and said: Either we go straight to Rome and arrange for our
separation or we return to Grand Cteau and our normal lives. I cannot
live indefinitely between two worlds.

The answer lies no doubt in the total offering she had made of herself
and her decision to see God's will in her husband's. She was not a
mystic. Unlike St. Catherine her Love did not direct her save through
the voices of others. Her confessor and her husband were her guides and
she would not challenge their decisions--or lack of decision. Besides,
she knew herself too well to trust any choice or decision of her own in
this matter. Her human longings were all for a return to the family life
she had found so happy, and she dared not speak lest self should get
control of her tongue. There was nothing to be gained by protest but her
own comfort, and that she had learned to do without. She was too holy
and wise not to have seen had there been any obvious flaw in her
husband's sincerity, and in considering his vocation she could not
altogether disapprove of these delays, of this half-return to the world
they expected to leave, since both the delays and the return should
serve to give him a deeper insight into his own heart. She could not
object to them merely because they added to her sufferings the torment
of hope, though this torment must have increased almost beyond endurance
as the Connellys, always with the faithful and obliging Mr. Berkeley,
moved from Paris to Orleans, from Orleans, to Avignon, to Genoa, to
Leghorn--making their leisurely way to Rome in the days before the
railroads. Often during that slow journey Cornelia must have had to bear
the unbearable hope that the course of events would suggest to Pierce
that he had no vocation or indeed that the ecclesiastical authorities
might decide that it would be inadvisable to ordain him.



                                  10

At last they were in Rome and dining with princes. In the midst of the
usual social round they settled in the Via Ripetta and little Adehne was
sent as a pupil to the Sacred Heart Convent at the Trinit dei Monti. In
visiting her there Cornelia was able to renew her contacts with that
other world which she had thought would be her only world by now.

The next delay came from the Church authorities, who made no reply to
the couple's petition for separation. This does not seem to have caused
any marked distress to Pierce, who at once started making plans for his
travels years ahead as the tutor of young Talbot, Shrewsbury's heir. It
would, however, be a mistake to attribute his light-heartedness to any
relaxation of his desire for the priesthood. Rather, it was due to his
conviction that this desire would ultimately be granted. Absolutely sure
of himself and of others in their relation to him, he had nothing to
consider but how to pass pleasantly and profitably the time of waiting.

Cornelia, on the other hand, found in this ecclesiastical silence a
further test of her heroism. It now seemed to her almost likely that the
Pope would decline the petition and all she had given up would be
restored to her. In her mind must have lived, even if unacknowledged,
the thought of Abraham's remitted sacrifice. It was now four years since
that St. Edward's Day when to a call very like the call to Abraham she
had answered, "Here am I." From that moment her will had never faltered,
even in the depths of human grief and loss; and now as the agonies of
hope increased there was no change in her. She showed no outward signs
of struggle as she went on her quiet, purposeful way. Through complete
self-abandonment she had won that rarest gift of complete
self-possession. No one could say more fully or more truthfully than
she--"Here am I."

She may have been right in supposing that the Papal silence displayed a
reluctance to ordain her husband. Pope Gregory XVI had received the
Connellys in private audience when they first came to Rome in 1836, and
had taken a personal interest in them ever since. He may have hesitated
as to the rightness of breaking up so young a family or of ordaining in
such exceptional circumstances a man of whose vocation he could not in
the nature of things be absolutely certain. Possibly nothing more would
have happened if there had not been staying in Rome that winter a very
holy American prelate, Bishop Flaget of Bardstown, who had known Pierce
and Cornelia for some years and heartily approved of Pierce's
aspiration. It is only a surmise that the Bishop intervened on his
behalf, but it seems likely that he would have done so and that his
better knowledge would induce the Pope to make a favourable decision.
Anyhow, delays were ended rather suddenly and on St. Patrick's Day
Pierce was able to write to his brother and for the first time make his
intentions known.

After giving an account of the matter and explaining the real purpose of
his journeys to Europe, with the news that he was to receive Minor
Orders almost immediately, he added:

"Nelie at the same time will enter the Convent of the Sacred Heart where
little Ady is, not as a novice but only as a postulant, remaining at
liberty as long as Frank has need of her. He is to be received with his
nurse in a cottage in the garden of the convent just as he was at Grand
Cteau. Cornelia will always pass her nights with him, and he has the
most beautiful garden you can imagine to play in, large and high, with a
sweet view of all Rome."

This happy disposal of those who were to bear the brunt of his sacrifice
is characteristic of Pierce, also the paragraph that follows.

"You know the Prince Borghese has taken charge of Frank's education, and
he will be put either here in the College of Nobles at Rome, or with
Merty at Stonyhurst in England, as soon as he is old enough. So far, you
see, things have been ordered very wonderfully. . . . The children are
at once placed as well as little princes could desire, with the interest
and protection of great and holy people." Even Frank's nurse gets a
splash of gilding--"Nelie has the sweetest little person in the world to
take care of Frank, well brought up, never at service before, indeed
more of a governess than a nurse . . . Lady Shrewsbury's sister heard of
her for us."

His brothers John and George must have answered this letter as good
Christians, for when he next writes to George he thanks him for "the
wise and Christian way in which you judge what we have done". George
seems also to have written as a good American, for Pierce continues:
"You as well as dear John seem disposed to judge rather harshly of the
worldly tone of part of the letters I sent you," and after justifying
himself at some length finally clinches the matter by pointing out that
Our Lord himself took care that his Mother should be of royal blood.

By this time Pierce had received Minor Orders.



                                  11

On a fine spring day there is no lovelier sight in Rome than the Trinit
dei Monti. High above the Spanish Steps the twin towers soar into the
breathless dazzle of the sky, while on their flank the convent spreads
its great umber facade against dark clouds of ilex in the Borghese
Gardens.

On a fine spring day Cornelia Connelly made this beautiful place her
prison. She felt it as a prison. For the first time her strong, gay
spirit failed. The conflict was over and she had fallen wounded and
exhausted on the empty battlefield. "My soul sleeps", she wrote, and she
might have added: "My body says, like the starling--'I can't get out.'"

For the first time she experienced the full rigours of convent life--the
cold cell, the hard bed, and above all the surrounding, confining walls.
The "most beautiful garden you can imagine" and the "sweet view of Rome"
were all very well for those who could exchange them at will for the
freedom of the streets and the houses of their friends. To Cornelia they
were as the exercise-yard of a prison and the view between prison bars.
Under the weight of sorrow and reaction her health failed, mentally and
physically, and she who had always been so brave, so sane, now longed
for death and even thought it was near.

In spite of the presence of her little boy and the kindness of the nuns,
many of whom she already knew well, she felt utterly alone. The child
was too young to be a companion (when he was old enough she would have
to send him away) and the nuns' vocation was so utterly different from
her own that it was impossible for them to understand half of what she
felt and suffered. "Unless," she writes at this period, "the Lord had
been my helper, my soul had almost dwelt in hell."

Pierce had received his Minor Orders in the convent chapel and it was
there a year later that she made the vow of perpetual chastity which
must precede his elevation to the priesthood. This followed quickly. On
the Sunday after she made her vow he received the sub-diaconate and the
diaconate a week later. On the third Sunday, July 6th, he was ordained
priest.

Cornelia had given her gift to God, and for a moment the clouds parted
as she saw her gift accepted and ratified. On the day following his
ordination, Pierce said his first Mass in the chapel of the Trinit dei
Monti. It was also the day of little Adeline's first communion. Kneeling
beside her child at the altar and receiving the sacred host from her
husband's hand, Cornelia tasted life, not death, and saw the cross she
had carried so long bud like Aaron's rod and become a flowering tree
among the brooks of paradise.

It was a moment too big for time, and had soon escaped from it. In its
wake the nights and days dragged their slow, hardening length. Cornelia
now knew definitely that she was out of place. She found it almost an
impossible strain to adapt herself to convent life--at least to the life
of this particular convent. The Trinit dei Monti belonged to the same
order as Grand Cteau, but this was Italy, not America; if there were no
differences of rule there were differences of routine, and of outlook if
not of aspiration. She taught in the school, but she had by now
sufficient experience as a teacher to have formed her own ideas on the
teaching and training of girls. She had an ever-growing conviction that
it was not here God meant her to live and work. Yet this Order of the
Sacred Heart was the only one she knew. As she was only a postulant she
was free to leave it, but where else could she go? Once more uncertainty
was added to her trials. She felt that God did not wish her to stay
where she was, but his remoter purposes for her were hidden.

Then at last Providence moved, and she was shown her way, no longer
through her husband's choices but through the Church authorities who had
taken his place. Dr. Wiseman, then head of the Venerable English College
in Rome, had just returned from a visit to England where he had been
deeply impressed by the Church's opportunities in a country which he
felt convinced was now on the brink of a great Catholic revival. He
realised the important part that education must play in such a movement,
and he also realised that though Catholic boys were already fairly well
provided for, very little had been done for the girls. He saw the need
for a teaching order on much the same lines as the Order of the Sacred
Heart, but with perhaps a more modern outlook and a greater freedom from
tradition. It says much for his wisdom and enlightenment that he at once
thought of Cornelia Connelly as the best possible leader of such an
enterprise.

He had known her since her first days in Rome and thought most highly of
her gifts and graces, mental and spiritual. She was thrown away in her
present situation and he suggested to the Pope that here was the very
woman they needed in England as the pioneer of Catholic education for
girls. Pope Gregory, who also knew her well, received the idea with
enthusiasm and in a personal interview with Cornelia he sketched for her
the Church's plan and the part she was to play in it.

His voice must have seemed to her indeed the voice of God, resolving all
her perplexities. Now at last she was to be used, set free from her
beautiful garden and sweet view to do a work which she felt capable of
performing and which she knew was sorely needed. For the first time she
could see her sacrifice as a prelude to a new life for her as well as
for Pierce. Her function was not always to be to stand aside, to get out
of his way. She at last had a way of her own.



                                  12

In a very few weeks she had left the Trinit dei Monti. She could not go
to England till certain preparations had been made and suitable
accommodation found for her. But so that she might be at once available
when all was ready, it was thought best that she should wait in Paris
rather than in Rome. So to Paris she went with her children, staying at
the Convent of the Assumption. She must have left the Trinit with mixed
feelings. There she had experienced at least one blessed moment and many
bitter ones. She had known love and kindness but also loneliness and
dereliction.

She went but she left behind her a memorial which will always keep her
name in the Order of the Sacred Heart even though it was not to be the
order of her adoption. There is a story told by the pilgrims who come to
visit the shrine of Mater Admirabilis--of which I believe there is a
reproduction in every Sacred Heart convent throughout the world. It
concerns a fellow postulant who like Cornelia herself had studied art
and was asked to paint a fresco on the wall of one of the corridors. But
for some reason the painter's skill failed her and the work was so badly
done that the Mother Superior ordered its obliteration. The next
morning, however, when with a pail of whitewash the order was to be
carried out, the picture had changed. Not only was the painting itself
now beyond reproach, but there was about it a new quality of
supernatural beauty which thrilled and awed all who looked upon it. Such
a work must never be destroyed and it was ordered to remain.

So deeply did it now impress all who saw it, that it soon became a
centre of pilgrimage where many graces have been obtained and countless
prayers answered. It is known that Cornelia Connelly helped with the
painting, though whether it was her paintbrush or her prayers that
changed it so wonderfully I do not know. But as a memorial of her at the
Trinit dei Monti it is singularly appropriate--Mater Admirabilis ....
The Mother sits in a sunny green field, her work-basket beside her,
sewing for the Christ who is to come. On her face is a little secret
smile, the smile of a woman who ponders God's secrets in her heart and
waits for the Holy Child.

Cornelia Connelly was thirty-six years old when she embarked on the
great adventure of her life--the founding of the Society of the Holy
Child Jesus. The name had come to her while she was at prayer, and there
is something especially touching in that placing of Mary's Child in the
centre of her life, instead of her own darling children, now given to
God. For the years that remained to her (and they were many, for she
lived to be seventy years old) she was to have two special devotions, to
the Mother of Sorrows and to the Holy Child. Between them they tell the
story of her life.

She was happy now. She was called to action, to a work she felt able and
eager to do. She was happy about Pierce, too. After some hesitation as
to whether he should join the Jesuits, he had gone as chaplain to Lord
Shrewsbury at Alton Towers. Cornelia could picture him there, exercising
his ministry in surroundings that she herself knew well.

The distribution of Catholicism in England was then very different from
what it is now. It was then only just beginning to invade the big
industrial towns, and for the most part remained still centred in little
groups and communities on the estates of the big Catholic landowners.
The Shrewsburys, the Norfolks, the Blundells and many others had acted
as protectors to their tenants in penal times, and though those times
were over, they still liked to see their estates as centres of Catholic
life. Probably all Lord Shrewsbury's employees as well as most of the
dwellers in the village were Catholics, and therefore the work of his
chaplain would not have differed much from that of a busy parish priest.
Cornelia wrote to her brother-in-law from Paris to tell him that Pierce
was "deeply engaged in the duties of his ministry, instructing,
preaching, hearing confessions, etc., etc." Then she added words that in
future years would be painful to read or to remember: "So you see it is
not for nothing I have given him to God."

A month or two later Dr. Wiseman called her to England to begin work in
his own district. The re-establishment of the Hierarchy was still some
years ahead, and the country was divided into missionary districts under
a vicar general. Dr. Wiseman as Bishop of the Midland District arranged
for Cornelia and her children to be accommodated at the Convent of the
Sisters of Mercy in Birmingham.

It was not till she arrived in England that she realised that she
herself was to be the foundress of the new congregation. She had always
imagined that the work would be organised by someone with more
experience than she had of the religious life and that she herself would
occupy an auxiliary and subordinate position. But now she found that
she, though not yet even a novice, was to do and be everything, and her
spirits may well have quailed. The lot of a nun in Protestant England
less than twenty years after Catholic Emancipation was not in any
circumstances a happy one, and Cornelia's own especial circumstances--a
nun with two small children and a mysterious priest husband, an American
accent and no money--certainly would not make the situation easier.

However, she set about it all with her wonted drive and courage, and the
community already had four members by the time it moved at Dr. Wiseman's
direction to Derby. The date of the move must have appeared significant
to Cornelia, for it was St. Edward's Day. As she sat with her three
companions in the roofless third-class carriage that jogged them
mercilessly along one of the earliest railways, she must have thought of
that same morning six years ago when in the far-off sunshine of
Louisiana she had first seen the terrifying shadow of the life she was
leading today.

The little party arrived at Derby (one of them very sick after the
journey) to find a vast convent almost without furniture. Kind helpers
had prepared for their arrival by cooking a leg of mutton with some
carrots and potatoes, but had unfortunately omitted to provide any
knives, forks or plates. Nor was there any altar in the convent chapel.
Cornelia's first act was to borrow cutlery and crockery, so that she and
her companions could eat their dinner, her next to borrow an altar,
tabernacle, ciborium and candlesticks, so that they could hear Mass and
have the Blessed Sacrament with them in their new home.

Though they were so few in number and the convent did not contain even
the necessaries of life, she introduced at once a normal conventual rule
and started the society's work of education by teaching in the parish
school. It was not, however, till December that Bishop Wiseman gave the
religious habit to her and to two other members of the community, so as
she put it, they were "all novices together". A year later she was
formally professed and installed as Mother Superior of the Society of
the Holy Child Jesus.

She was now Mother Connelly, mother of a new family, and a family almost
as much dependent on her motherly care as her own children had been. For
the members of her community were all very young girls, some only in
their teens, some recent converts, all quite inexperienced in the ways
of the religious life. No doubt they helped satisfy maternal instincts
that were otherwise cruelly frustrated. For her own children were no
longer with her. Pierce had taken them away.

It is hard to think why he should have done so, for the arrangements for
their welfare that had been made at his ordination were working quite
satisfactorily. One can only imagine that he was moving in response to
the first stirrings of that jealousy of his wife's new position which
was later on to become such a disruptive force. He may have compensated
himself for the loss of his authority over her by exercising it where it
still remained in its full strength. His reasons no doubt were a puzzle
even to Cornelia, but his actions were unmistakable. Quite arbitrarily
and suddenly he decided that Adeline and Frank should go away to school.
Adeline was nearly fourteen and already had some experience of school
life, but her mother no doubt had hoped that she would finish her
education under her own eye in one of the schools of the society. As for
Frank, he was still only a baby, not yet six years old, and it seemed
barbarous to send him away. The Church authorities entirely approved of
his staying with his mother till he was eight, and to have him snatched
away from her like this was enough to break her heart.

There was, however, nothing that she could do about it. Pierce was still
the children's legal guardian and had absolute control. She could only
face the situation as she had faced every adverse situation in her life
hitherto, with courage and the complete acceptance of God's will. She
even wrote cheerfully to Mercer about "the nice school at Hampstead
where I had put our darling little Frank. . . . Mrs. Nicholson says he
has only cried once since I left him."

Mercer was allowed to visit her during the school holidays, but lately
he too had become an anxiety and for an even more painful reason. He was
turning out badly, showing himself both lazy and deceitful. His
schoolwork and his conduct left much to be desired. No doubt his
peculiar family circumstances were having the same effect on him as they
would have had on most children, and he escaped from them into dreams in
which he compensated himself for having a home-life so unlike that of
other boys by performing deeds of incredible valour. He attempted the
same readjustment in the conscious field by continually begging for
money and other things that he thought likely to increase his popularity
and prestige. But it was a situation that no Victorian mother, however
wise and holy, could be expected to understand. Disappointed and
bewildered she asks him: "What do you want with an eyeglass?"



                                  13

But more distressing and alarming than Mercer's behaviour must by now
have become the behaviour of Mercer's father. In any attempt to
understand Pierce Connelly at this time two facts must be taken into
consideration. The first was the death of Pope Gregory towards the end
of 1846, the second was the conception and growth of an almost
pathological jealousy of Bishop Wiseman.

The late Pope had been a sincere friend and admirer of the Connellys,
and Pierce no doubt had hoped great things from his favour. His
successor, Pius IX, was not interested, nor had Lord Shrewsbury, on whom
Pierce had relied for his advancement, much influence in the new Papal
Court. We do not know to what heights Pierce's ambition had soared, but
it was probably not far short of a cardinal's hat. Now he saw nothing
ahead but monotonous years of work as a country priest. His chaplaincy
at Alton had done very well as a steppingstone to higher things, but as
an end in itself he found it stultifying and frustrating.

At the same time his wife seemed to be, in commercial language, on to a
good thing, and one uses commercial language all the more readily
because Pierce's attitude towards the Church has often suggested the
attitude of a keen business man towards a promising enterprise. Apart
from his infatuation with high Catholic society, he had always laid
great stress on the need for recommending Catholicism to the people at
large, and he often wrote of it to his brothers as he might have written
of some big business corporation in need of all the succours of
publicity and popularity. "Nothing will contribute more to make
Catholics popular and do more good than the establishment of Colleges
and Convents. . . . Our newspapers and tracts and books too it ought to
be the business of every Catholic to encourage and disseminate. . . . If
every practical Catholic would deny himself to the amount of one tenth
of his income for the sake of works of piety and charity, our Church
would double itself in five years from its increased means and its
increased respect."

At first he seems to have taken in his wife's new venture the same sort
of pride that he used to take in her social success. He writes proudly
and happily to his brother about the great work to which she has been
called, and does not seem to have been blind to the place of his own
ordination in the designs of Providence for the conversion of England.
But this commendable attitude soon changed, the change being no doubt
due to the second factor in Pierce's deterioration, his jealousy of Dr.
Wiseman.

To understand this one must remember that for fifteen years he had
dominated his wife to the extent of being absolute master of her fate.
She had seen in his wishes the will of God, and in consequence he seems
to have done exactly what he liked with her in everything. She had
accepted his decisions and also his indecisions, his procrastinations
and his sudden acts. But in the end his power had destroyed itself, for
its final act had placed her outside his control. Of him, her husband,
Pierce Connelly, she was now completely independent. He had no power
over her in her new life or in connection with the society she had
founded. It is possible that he had not sufficiently considered this
result of his actions. In itself it would have been bad enough. But not
only was Cornelia independent of him, she had become dependent on
another man.

Very soon after her coming to England Dr. Wiseman begins to appear in a
sinister light. In the first place Pierce held him responsible for her
not having started her new congregation in America, which he declared
had been her own wish. "You ought to know," he wrote to his brother, "it
was no doing of Cornelia's coming to England." The bishop had then
compelled her to take possession of the convent in Derby "much against
her will and even her judgment". Almost immediately after her removal
there Pierce set to work to do what he imagined would loosen his rival's
hold upon his wife. (It helps towards the understanding of his
extraordinary behaviour if we use the language of conjugal jealousy.)

Two of his steps were contradictory. At first he demanded of Dr. Wiseman
that she should take her final religious vows without waiting till she
had accomplished a year in the novitiate. No doubt he imagined that as a
full-fledged religious she would be more independent of her bishop than
as a novice. When this move naturally failed he made one in the opposite
direction and demanded that she should not take any final vows at all,
protesting that if she did so he might be considered responsible for the
debts of her community.

Both these attempts at interference failed, but in a third he was
entirely and devastatingly successful. Without first consulting either
Cornelia or Dr. Wiseman he wrote to a friend in Rome, Dr. Samuele
Asperti, and invited him to come to England as chaplain to the new
congregation. This was a gratuitous piece of meddling. Cornelia had
always been on the best of terms with the Derby priests in whose parish
she worked, while the spiritual direction of the community was in the
capable hands of the Jesuits. She knew nothing of Dr. Asperti save that
he was her husband's friend, and it is at first sight surprising that
she should have submitted to this unwarranted intrusion in her affairs.
But on reflection one realises that she was no more accustomed than
Pierce to the new state of things. She had always let him rule her and
could not yet break herself of the habit.

Here one cannot help pausing to compare her with that other saintly
wife, Caterina Fiesca Adorna. How would she have reacted if her Giuliano
had interfered with her work in the hospital? One can be pretty sure
that he would not have been allowed to do so. The medieval wife would
have listened to his advice and accepted his co-operation, but with any
highhanded acts of interference (had he been disposed to make them) he
would have had no success at all. Yet Catherine had not a stronger mind
or will than Cornelia. If one thing is proved and certain it is the
latter's strength and independence of character. One can only see here a
lingering of the Victorian wife who for so long had regarded submission
as a religious duty, echoing the poet's: "He for God only, she for God
in Him." She had not yet discovered that there was very little of God in
the later decisions of Pierce Connelly.



                                  14

It was not till Dr. Asperti had actually arrived and was in residence
that she realised all the trouble her obedience had brought on herself
and her congregation. The doctor was a fiery Italian, impetuous and
bigoted, with characteristically Mediterranean ideas on such subjects as
religious communities, Catholic parishes and the conversion of England.
He made trouble not only in the society but in the parish, and soon
Cornelia's happy, orderly little world was in process of eruption.

To make matters worse, at about this time her friend and protector Dr.
Wiseman was removed from the Midlands to the London District. Not only
was she left without his counsel at a crisis in her affairs, but he was
no longer able to guarantee the society's finances, with the result that
she soon found herself seriously in debt. The community now had nearly
twenty members, all busily at work. Besides the parish school there was
a new school for "young ladies" and a Sunday class for two hundred mill
girls. Cornelia had assumed a load of work and responsibility, and it
now looked as if it was going to be too much for her. In desperation she
appealed to the new Bishop of the Midland District, Dr. Ullathorne.

The Bishop did the best he could. He made the convent a canonical
visitation and expressed his unqualified approval of the society and its
work. But he considered its temporal difficulties too serious to be
overcome under present conditions, and advised Mother Connelly to leave
her expensive and unwieldy quarters in Derby and find something smaller
and cheaper to run. In fact he advised her to accept an offer which Dr.
Wiseman himself had made a short while earlier, when it had occurred to
her good friend that her troubles might be a call to move elsewhere. He
had therefore written to tell her of "a place prepared, or nearly so,
for your reception, where you will be not merely welcomed, but hailed
with joy".

The young Sisters of the Community were not pleased at the thought of
moving. It seemed like an acknowledgment of failure and the undoing of
their work. But Cornelia accepted it as she accepted all that came to
her through the voice of her superiors, as the will of God. She said to
her nuns: "We are Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus. What must we expect
but opposition, persecution, and flight into Egypt."

Egypt in this case was Hastings, or rather the new suburb of St.
Leonards which Decimus Burton had designed a mile westward of the town.
Here pale Regency facades and colonnades gleamed on the seafront or
against the trees of a public garden which he had fashionably
embellished with a maze. It was a resort of elegance, shrugging away
from the picturesque old fishing and bathing town on the other side of
the hill. This hill was a sort of _cordon sanitaire_ between fashion and
mere popularity. From White Rock where it met the sea, it rose a couple
of hundred feet to what had long been known as Spitalman's Down. The
name was all that remained of a hospital which Isabella de Cham had
built there long ago, and was already in process of changing, as the
inhabitants both of Hastings and St. Leonards began to speak of the
Catholic Ground.

For the Down was now the property of a Catholic priest, who had enclosed
the land and erected several buildings. There was also a chapel, a
garden and other grounds, extending to over fourteen acres and
completely surrounded by a stone wall. No other houses were in sight and
the whole commanded a beautiful, uninterrupted view of the sea. It would
be an ideal spot for any convent, but especially for one associated with
a school. Hastings and St. Leonards were noted for their healthy climate
and the place being already in Catholic hands the transfer could be
easily arranged.

Now the reader must meet the Reverend Mr. Jones, the real old-time
Catholic priest, survival of pre-emancipation days, with his
silver-topped cane and his buckled shoes. At that period secular priests
were never addressed as Father (a later custom introduced from Ireland),
but he always scrupulously addressed all nuns as Dame. He was a rich man
who had laid out his riches for the good of the Church, his ambition
being for his establishment to become a centre of religious education.
Unfortunately his temper was rather uncertain and former institutions
that had settled at All Souls (as the property was called after the
dedication of the chapel) had not stayed there long. Dr. Wiseman must
have had a real faith in Mother Connelly's wise and peaceable nature
when he recommended her to go there.

She went down to St. Leonards to inspect the premises and had scarcely
set foot on the Catholic Ground before her heart was filled with a
mysterious sensation of familiarity combined with new experience which
she recognised as the memory of a dream. She had already visited this
place and it was with a sense of home-coming that she wandered through
the buildings and over the grounds with their wide, amazing view of the
sea. The last of her fears and hesitations were removed, for she clearly
saw God's hand in this. She felt that here indeed was the spot chosen by
heaven for her work to go forward in a new strength, and before she went
to bed that night she wrote to her community, bidding them thank God for
having found them such a lovely and suitable home. Fortunately no dream
had told her all that she would suffer there or what would be in her
heart as she looked out at that wide, amazing sea.



                                  15

Throughout almost the whole of her stay in Derby Pierce Connelly had
been making trouble. His desire to interfere with his wife's
congregation had become almost a mania--no doubt because he hoped that
by dominating it he could regain some of his lost dominion over herself.
When he found that even the appointment of Dr. Asperti was not going to
help him, for the chaplain, though a disruptive force, was too
conscientious a priest to lend himself to such schemes, he had suddenly
left Alton and gone to Italy, crowning the rashness of his act by taking
his children with him.

Without a word to their mother he had removed them from their several
schools, giving as his reason that the ecclesiastical authorities were
plotting to kidnap them. One might almost see here the first symptoms of
delusional insanity, and it is certain that Pierce's words and conduct
from now onwards show an increasing lack of mental control. Hitherto he
had not been in the habit of acting rashly or without realism. He had
carefully weighed and pondered, indeed procrastinated, the various steps
he had taken. But now he rushed wildly into a maze of follies. He
suddenly appeared in Rome, assaulting the College of Propaganda with the
preposterous demand that the Society of the Holy Child should be exempt
from episcopal visitation. His next move was to proclaim himself the
society's founder and demand the approval of a rule which he himself had
drawn up. Here once again he had gone too far, for Propaganda naturally
wrote for confirmation to Bishop Wiseman (then still in the Midland
District) enclosing a copy of the imposed rule. The result was an
emphatic statement that Mr. Connelly had no authority whatsoever to act
in the matter.

Cornelia was in dire distress. She suspected (as indeed he himself
confirmed later) that he had taken away her children expressly to have a
bargaining hold over her. They were the hostages of her society, and one
hardly knows whether to admire most the clear self-knowledge, or the
devoted heroism with which she took steps against her own heart. In
order to make sure that her love of her children should not betray her
love of God she made the following vow: "In union with my crucified Lord
and by his most Precious Blood: in adoration, satisfaction, thanksgiving
and petition, I, Cornelia, vow to have no future intercourse with my
children and their father, beyond what is for the greater glory of God,
and is His manifest will made known to me through my director."

She did, however, all she could to calm her husband's frenzy by writing
to his and her faithful friend Lord Shrewsbury, beseeching his
intervention. After telling him that Pierce's visit to Rome "has been
only time and money thrown away", and that she would herself write to
Propaganda to decline any changes in the rule of her society, she begs:
"Will you, then, my dear Lord, explain all this to him in your own
gentle, holy way, and induce him to turn his heart all to his flock for
the love of God."

She had given him as a gift to God and she had purchased that gift with
everything in life that she held most dear. It now looked as if her gift
might be spoiled, made worthless, leaving her with the payment only. It
is easy to imagine what the enemy of her soul would make of this, how he
would urge her to cut her losses and keep at least her children. Her vow
must have been to her then like a rock in a stormy sea, to which she
clung, but against which also she was dashed and bruised so that the
whole of her, heart, mind and soul, seemed to be bleeding.

It must be remembered too that this storm broke in the midst of the
troubles and anxieties that preceded her move from Derby. If she could
ever escape from thoughts of her husband and children it would be into
thoughts of the strife caused by Dr. Asperti or of the debts with which
she had been burdened by Dr. Wiseman's departure. Only the strongest
soul could have survived such a battering.

Then less than a month after her letter to Lord Shrewsbury, her husband
came back from Rome to renew his persecution in person. The removal to
another part of England of the man his mind had dressed up as his rival
and enemy did not cause the improvement that might have been hoped.
Indeed, it led to fresh trouble, for when Pierce applied (through his
confessor--he scorned to act in person) for facilities for an interview
with his wife, the delay caused by Dr. Wiseman's absence was so great
that he determined to act without episcopal consent. He suddenly arrived
at the convent and demanded to see Cornelia. She, supported by Dr.
Asperti, refused. Pierce insisted. She still refused. He refused to
leave the convent until he had seen her, but she would not leave her
cell. For six hours he raged in the parlour, sending demands and
messages by scared lay-sisters. When at last he realised that he could
not break down his wife's determination, he went off vowing vengeance on
the convent, on Dr. Asperti, and above all on the man he considered the
villain of it all, Bishop Wiseman.

It is easy to imagine his reaction to the news that Cornelia was going
to follow the bishop into his new district and set up her convent under
his protection. Before she herself had actually left Derby (though
several of the nuns had already gone) he wrote to Dr. Ullathorne,
demanding his intervention. The letter, though it still shows an outer
dressing of piety (leaning like so much of Pierce's piety towards
smugness), contains some curious phrases for a priest to have written.
After an unctuous beginning: "It has pleased Almighty God, more than
once, as it appears to me, to call me to hard trials", he goes on to
write of "principles which unlike dogmas or matters of discipline are
too clear for anyone to doubt about". After that it is not perhaps
surprising of him to proclaim: "I am a man, a husband and a father
before I am a priest." He then proceeds to announce the real purpose of
his letter. "I hear she is about to leave your Lordship's jurisdiction
and come again under that of Dr. Wiseman. My object in writing is to beg
your Lordship to prevent this if possible." Then comes his threat: "If
the laws of justice and honour cannot at once be enforced by the
authorities of the Church, I am determined to apply to those of the
country."

Poor Cornelia entered her beautiful new convent only to be served with a
writ to appear before the Court of Arches to answer her husband's suit
for the restitution of conjugal rights.



                                  16

It would be a cynical understatement to call it a bad start. The scandal
was nation-wide and the evil which it threatened appeared world-wide.
The mere local failure of Cornelia's new school, or even of her society
itself, was a minor catastrophe compared with the damage likely to be
done to the Catholic cause in England and even abroad. Anti-Catholic
feeling had been growing in the country ever since the beginning of the
Oxford Movement, and it would now swell on a richer diet than it had
known for years. Here was a man robbed by the Papists of his wife, whom
they had shut up in a convent, refusing to let him even see her. That
they had not done the same with his children was due only to the smart
counter-move by which he had snatched them out of their clutches. The
fact that he himself was a priest may have fogged the situation a little
for some, but for the majority it only set out the magnitude of the
outrage which had driven him to take such a step against the Church in
which he ministered. In legal circles dry jokes were cracked on this
unique event in the history of the English law--a Roman Catholic priest
suing a Roman Catholic nun for restitution of conjugal rights before the
Protestant Court of Arches.

Until the Divorce Act of 1857 matrimonial cases could be heard only in
the ecclesiastical courts (except for those demanding the rare divorce
_a vinculo matrimonii_ for which an Act of Parliament was required). So
in summoning Cornelia before the Court of Arches Pierce was taking the
only course open to a husband who wished to get back a runaway wife. The
court, presided over by the Dean of Arches, the chief law officer of the
Archbishop of Canterbury, was an exclusively Anglican tribunal. It could
not be expected to understand the situation, and its decision was almost
a foregone conclusion for Cornelia, who saw in her husband's action the
betrayal not only of herself and her society but of his own priesthood.

There was a rumour that he had publicly apostatised, and though this
could not be confirmed it is obvious that every consideration both of
Catholic loyalty and personal religion had been swept away by the
madness of pride and jealousy. Cornelia wept for her children who now
might fall into Protestant hands. If Pierce had hoped by his action to
detach her from Dr. Wiseman, he had only once again defeated his own
ends. For these terrible events had made her rely more and more on her
kind friend and protector, who stood loyally at her side from the moment
when in answer to her news that she had received her husband's citation,
he wrote, "Fear nothing . . . you will be fully instructed what to do.
No personal appearance will be required of you. I will look after
everything for you. I never turn my back on one whom God has given into
my care."

As for Pierce, he too must have felt confident of the court's decision
in his favour--so confident that he wrote to Dr. Winter, his successor
in the chaplaincy at Alton, suggesting that he should escort Cornelia
from St. Leonards to Albury Park in Surrey, where friends of his had
offered to receive her, and thus spare him the necessity of resorting to
compulsion for the enforcement of the Court's decree. "The lawyer's
letter in my hands says: 'She may now be compelled by force to return
. . . any agreement between you and her, or between either of you and any
third person notwithstanding.' They must now therefore know that force
can be used and most surely it shall be used."

The case of Connelly _v._ Connelly came before the Court of Arches in
May, and as had been generally expected, judgment was given for the
plaintiff. Cornelia's counsel at once gave notice of appeal, thus
delaying any possible enforcement of the court's decree by its
officials. But though no legal compulsion could yet be used, Pierce's
earlier threats carried the possibility that he would intervene
illegally. His manner both of talking and writing suggested that he was
prepared to learn at least one lesson from the ecclesiastical
authorities and kidnap his wife. There was a rumour that he had hired a
yacht and intended with the help of friends to raid the Convent of the
Holy Child and forcibly remove the Mother Superior.

Cornelia's friends urged her to leave the country, but she steadfastly
refused, though she thanked them gratefully for their advice and offers
of protection. "A flight like this," she wrote to Lady Shrewsbury,
"would be an acknowledgment of some cause for flight, which would be
contrary to the truth. We have nothing to fear. God and truth are on our
side."

A flight would also mean abandoning her young society, too young to be
left without a mother--not only on account of its own tender age (barely
three years founded, only six months at St. Leonards), but on account of
the age of its members, few of whom were over twenty. It was with that
same pity for the youth of her new family that Cornelia decided to keep
the news of her tragedy from all save one or two of the oldest. This was
of course easier to do in a convent than it would have been in an
ordinary household. Nevertheless it required not only constant vigilance
but a firm control of her own demeanour, so that nothing could be
suspected from any appearances of strain or sorrow. She for whom gaiety
had always been a note of life must continue to be gay, to smile as
though the enemy of her soul had not snatched her gift out of God's
hands and thrown it in the mud. She must busy herself with the small
domestic concerns of the community, give practical help to her
inexperienced cook, decide how far a pair of shoes had exceeded the
requirements of religious poverty. She must sympathise with the small
griefs and cares of her postulants and novices as if there were no other
griefs or cares.

These young things must not notice that she never went alone either to
the parlour or the garden, and of course they did not know that in her
cell a disguise hung ready to put on if the worst should happen and she
should have to flee. One day it looked as if that moment was near.

"Look, Mother, at that pretty yacht out at sea. I wonder where it comes
from and where it's going. It wasn't here yesterday."

Her calm, wise eyes gaze quietly over the edges of the garden to where,
below, the Channel spreads like a shining floor round a white ship at
anchor. The sudden leap of her heart has already become a prayer as she
answers smiling--

"Yes, it's a lovely sight. I often thank God for our view of the sea."



                                  17

For days that must have seemed like weeks that yacht lay at anchor off
Hastings. Then one morning Cornelia looked out and it was gone. The
Channel lay an innocent, empty stretch of water blinked with sunshine.
The yacht had disappeared and nothing had happened. Pierce had made no
attempt to carry off his wife. Perhaps his nerve had failed him, or his
opportunity; more likely his decreasing funds had disposed him to wait
for the almost certain decision of the Privy Council, which would give
his schemes the backing of the law.

If it had been a foregone conclusion that the Court of Arches would
decide in his favour, the verdict of the Privy Council seemed doubly
assured. But now suddenly the power of evil began to fail, as it so
often does on the very edge of triumph, thus reflecting the enemy's
eternal frustration and final impotence. The case could not have been
tried at a worse time. The recent restoration of the hierarchy, combined
with Dr. (now Cardinal) Wiseman's somewhat injudicious utterance from
the Flaminian Gate, had thrown the country into the grip of the most
virulent No-Popery epidemic since the Gordon Riots. The Ecclesiastical
Titles Bill (aimed at the new Catholic bishops) was actually before the
House of Commons when Mother Connelly's appeal was heard by the Lord of
the Privy Council--"the most Protestant Court of what was at the moment
the most bigoted country in Europe".

The result was a remarkable instance of the different ways in which God
and Satan treat their clients. Incidentally it must also be regarded as
a shining example of the integrity of English Law. In spite of the
clamour around them the Lords maintained their judicial impartiality and
allowed Cornelia's appeal, reversing the decision of the Court of
Arches. The matter was not finally closed--there were still certain
steps Pierce could have taken towards a new trial. But fortunately by
this time he was almost totally without funds and could do no more.

Cornelia was delivered from his persecution, but she was not delivered
and never would be from the suffering he had brought into her life. For
months, even for years, she had to see him expose himself in frenzied
assaults on the Church whose priest her sacrifice had made him. She had
to see him rob her children of their faith, and when at last he withdrew
with them to another country, leave behind him the smoke of a scandal
which it would take years for her society to live down.

The decision of the Privy Council seems to have robbed Pierce of his
last few remains of sanity and self-control. His plunge into what an
Anglican bishop has described as the Protestant underworld suggests the
plunge of the Gadarene swine over their cliff. Down into the depths he
hurled himself, with howls of rage against the Church which had now
become in his distorted mind the representative and enlargement of his
hated rival Cardinal Wiseman.

Only such a supposition accounts for his behaviour and utterances, which
are almost those of a madman. They are so wild that one would have
expected them to defeat their own ends and cause only incredulity in
those who saw and heard him. But those were the bigoted Protestants of
mid-Victorian England, already frightened half out of their minds by the
restoration of the hierarchy and Cardinal Wiseman's pastoral. Pierce
provided these gentry with a veritable armoury of offence. One who until
he saw the light had been himself a Catholic priest, fully instructed in
the laws of his Church and familiar with all the secrets of the
confessional, had declared in all the finality of print that Dr. Wiseman
was now teaching the children of England that the burning of heretics
"whenever practicable and expedient" was as binding as Friday
abstinence. No doubt he himself had given permission to certain of his
penitents to poison their relatives, which he proclaimed "according to
the Church may occasionally be innocent and lawful", even though he had
not had cause to order the shooting of his Sovereign, which was however
the sort of thing, he assured his readers, which might happen any day.

His pamphlet _Reasons for Abjuring Allegiance to the See of Rome_ went
into twenty editions. No doubt it would not have had such a sale in
modern times, when the enemies of the Church base their attack on very
different grounds. The old-fashioned "hissing Protestant" is almost
extinct, though echoes of his voice can still sometimes be heard in
remote districts. Only a few years ago a Sussex wood-cutter was told by
his aged father when he announced his intention to join the Church of
Rome--"Well, well, my boy, if 'ee will do it I can't stop'ee. But mark
my words, lad, _dey'll burn'ee, dey'll burn'ee_."

Pierce Connelly set the Smithfield fires a-smoking in many a nervous
Victorian imagination. Then after a time he grew tired of it all and
left the country. He took the children with him. By this time the poor
things must have grown used to being dragged to and fro between England
and Italy. Mercer was nearly grown up, Adeline in her late teens, while
Frank was only ten. All three had spent the last few years in an
atmosphere with which the home-life of a modern divorced couple would
compare favourably. Cornelia was heartbroken at their loss, which
involved, she knew, the loss of their religion.

The fact that Pierce was able to apostatise all three may at first seem
surprising when we consider how firmly they had been grounded in the
Catholic faith and how carefully trained in it during their early years
by parents they deeply loved. But we must observe two things. First,
that their father was by general report a most persuasive and attractive
man. This may hardly appear from his conduct or from such of his
correspondence as has been passed on to us, but the evidence is too
clear and too consistent to be ignored. "Charming" and even
"fascinating" are adjectives which those who knew him personally did not
find out of place. He also provided the children with a home which
contained at least one resident parent, a luxury they had not enjoyed
since the days of Grand Cteau. Life with him must have begun once more
to appear normal and respectable--they ceased to bear the stigma of
being different from everybody else.

The other consideration is that more than possibly their youthful
religion had been tried too high. Children are not unlike Baron
Friedrich von Hgel's dog Puck, of whom he used to say that, much as he
loved his master, he evidently found it a strain to be always in human
company, and sometimes had to run off and be his canine self in the
company of other dogs. To what extent the young Connellys were allowed
to enjoy the company of "other dogs" is doubtful--it probably was not
great. In their home the spiritual atmosphere would have been intense,
and Catholic school-life at that period was rigid and demanding, as
indeed was all school-life. (A part of Cornelia's achievement with her
new society was to soften and modernise Victorian ideas on education.)
Pierce in his early Catholic days had been exceedingly stiff in his
demands on himself and others. His letters to his brothers are full of
exhortations to abjure "pretty things"--displaying a streak of
Puritanism as much out of place as his addiction to the "best people".
Even Cornelia sometimes appears in her letters to Mercer at Stonyhurst
to ask too much of a young boy who already had so many strains upon him.

It was of course a time of stern ideas on conduct and morality, and
America before the Civil War was just as "Victorian" as the Queen's own
country. Children of the tenderest age have a natural affinity and
aptitude for religion, but it is not till they are much older that they
begin to have anything in the nature of a moral sense. The grafting of a
moral code upon a spiritual attraction is a process requiring great
sympathy and delicacy, and one that can easily be mishandled. Above all
the child with his supernatural attraction to heaven and God and the
saints must not be allowed to think that these things are only means to
an end--an end, moreover, necessarily involved with the convenience and
credit of his elders. It is a sad reflection that the faith of the young
Connellys may not have been lost only through the disruption of their
home and the blandishments of their father, but also through a sort of
spiritual and moral suffocation in which the very holiest of those who
loved them had a share.

Be that as it may, Cornelia's children were lost to her in this world
both bodily and spiritually. Mercer and Frank both died outside the
Church, and though after her father's death Adeline returned to the
practice of her religion, that was not till after Cornelia herself had
been dead some years.



                                  18

As for Pierce Connelly, the end of his story is as peculiar as any part
of it. If the Gadarene swine had halted their rush "down a steep place
into the sea" to browse the scanty pasture of some ledge above the level
of the waves, they would have provided a parallel to his last years
spent as Minister of the American Church in Florence. One can only guess
the considerations that guided him. No doubt they were partly financial,
for he had spent nearly all his money on litigation and his chances of
finding employment were very much worse than when he had found himself
in a similar position fifteen years earlier. Moreover, the last five of
those years had been spent in hurling himself against the Rock of Peter,
and he was perhaps feeling exhausted and glad to settle down in a
position which might by this time have had a certain amount of nostalgic
attraction. One may wonder, perhaps, at the American Church authorities
receiving him back after his excursion into Popery. But possibly they
thought that he had atoned for his lapse by the thoroughness of his
anti-Catholic propaganda.

One wonders more at his settling in the midst of a Catholic city, where
a sky-line of spires and a clangor of bells would ceaselessly call to
his memory past years. In that memory lay buried not only splendours and
privileges, not only the love of his wife, but moments of sacred
experience and spiritual ecstasy. When he heard, as he must have heard
many times of a morning, the three sweet, short strokes of the sacring
bell, did he never see Pierce Connelly at the altar, lifting the sacred
host? Possibly after banging his head so madly against the Rock he had
suffered a sort of spiritual concussion and no longer thought of these
things. The same state would account in a different way for his
acceptance of what could be considered only a humble position. He was
pastor of a church that had no real footing in the city, no permanent
congregation, which ministered only to foreigners in transit and was
regarded by the citizens as a mere conventicle. From every point of view
it seems a strange ending for a man who had once dreamed of a cardinal's
hat.

What was really in his heart during those last years of anticlimax, it
is only for the judge of all to know, and we can only guess that it was
the prayers and offered sufferings of his wife that kept him thus
precariously on his ledge when he might so easily have fallen the whole
way into the abyss. But we may be quite sure that she never ceased to
pray for him and that her prayers were powerful with God. In one respect
Pierce Connelly stands unique in that interesting category of "saints'
husbands". It was he who provided his wife with most of the raw material
for her holiness. Every step she took on the way to heaven was on his
impulsion, either following or resisting him. But for him she would
never have founded the society which has spread all over the world and
done such an inconceivable amount for Catholic education. Until he
confronted her with his desire for the priesthood she had had no thought
but of spending and ending her days as his wife and the mother of his
children. No doubt Cornelia Connelly would in any event have left behind
her a happy and fragrant memory, but it is entirely due to her husband
that she has left so very much more. Certainly she had never dreamed of
entering a religious order. By the very nature of things that would have
been impossible, though there is always that pathetic little note which
proclaims her thankfulness that the choice is not and never can be
offered her. It is also most unlikely that without Pierce's leadership
she would even have become a Catholic. I am not suggesting that she
would have resisted the truth, but there is always a stage in a
conversion, before conviction has been attained, which belongs to
attraction only, and Cornelia with her spirit of self-denial and strong
sense of duty would almost certainly have resisted an attraction which
threatened a husband's peace.

Then when his leadership had been changed to attack, and instead of
being her good angel he became her tempter and soul's enemy, it was
through him that she trod the higher, more mysterious paths of
suffering. She had already suffered through him in the depths of her
tenderest human affections, but now she was also to suffer in the
highest peak and summit of her soul. For now she had lost the sustaining
thought that what she suffered was the will of God. "I would grind
myself to powder," she once had said, "if by that I could accomplish
God's will." But this apostasy, this awful dereliction of a consecrated
priest, this loss by her children of the gift of faith could not
possibly be according to his will. It could only be the work of the
devil which for some mysterious reason he had allowed. She knew that God
cannot will evil, but that he sometimes allows it, when it is capable of
being turned into a greater good. There is always a higher card with
which to take the devil's trick, and it was for Cornelia to play that
card and win with it, instead of the four souls he had taken from her
(and who knows but that she won those too), countless young lives
trained in faith and holiness for the greater glory of God.



                                  19

At the time when Mother Connelly started her great work of educating the
Catholic girls of England, the education of women was almost at its
lowest ebb in this country. Though the position of governess was still
practically the only one open to a woman who had to earn her living,
very little was done to raise her mental equipment above that of the
average schoolboy. Indeed the governess probably knew less about such
subjects as arithmetic, history and literature than her younger
brothers. "Accomplishments" were still the chief stock-in-trade of the
schoolroom. To know more was to be "learned" and to be "learned" was to
be unattractive to men and undisposable in the marriage market.

Cornelia Connelly had had a better education than was generally given to
girls, and she certainly had a much richer and clearer mind than most of
her contemporaries. She also had had some experience of teaching at
Grand Cteau and at the Trinit dei Monti, which led her to form certain
ideas on what was still known as "female education". These ideas are
remarkably enlightened and progressive for her times. Such pioneers as
Miss Beale and Miss Buss had scarcely begun their work of reform when
she produced her _Book of Studies_, in which she had set down the
educational aims of her Society.

These aims include a thorough grounding in English, French, writing,
arithmetic, geography, history and grammar. Then, greatly daring, with
her older classes, she breaks into the exclusively masculine enclosures
of philosophy, astronomy, geology, Latin and Greek, and even
architecture and heraldry. At the same time she would not neglect such
almost necessary accomplishments in those pre-wireless days as music and
singing, and she balanced her curriculum with the usual feminine arts of
needlework and embroidery, to which she had added lace-making and other
activities useful to the Church such as the making up of vestments.

In none of these things would she tolerate the amateurish standards so
prevalent in many girls' schools. Everything must be up to the
professional mark, and she engaged specialists from London as
instructors. On yet another point she showed her enlightened and
adventurous spirit. Those were the days when girls still had to wear
back-boards and walk with weights on their heads in the interests of
deportment. It occurred to Mother Connelly that a girl could hardly
learn better how to move, walk, come into a room, etc., to say nothing
of speaking clearly and musically, than by acting a part in a play. The
performance of plays therefore became, as it is still, an important part
of her curriculum. And this happened at a time when the Reverend Edmund
Bertram might still be living at Mansfield Parsonage. Many considered it
a dangerous novelty, and some parents were shocked to the pitch of
removing their daughters. But Mother Connelly refused to sacrifice her
ideals to prejudice, and in time the opposition to her innovations died
away, and her boarding-school at St. Leonards became famous throughout
the country for providing the very best type of Catholic education.

It was Catholic with a large and a small C. In all knowledge Cornelia
aimed at a Christian synthesis. The rule of her society expressly states
that it had "chosen education as a means to gain souls to God". All the
teaching was given by women leading dedicated lives, and the subjects
were chosen with a view to leading the pupils to "the invisible things
of God through the medium of the visible". "_Ut dum visibiliter Deum
cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur_. . ." Thus,
through the Christmas preface, she united her society with the greatest
feast of the Holy Child.

It is interesting to notice here that in the religious training of young
people in her schools Cornelia appears to have avoided that rather
smothering intensity that she sometimes showed in her dealings with her
own children. The type of religious education given by her society
shared the enlightenment displayed in other subjects. For instance, in
teaching Church history, she insisted that mistakes and scandals should
not be left out or glossed over. It was better that the children should
hear of these things from teachers who would use them as proofs of the
Church's divine origin than, perhaps later on, from those who saw them
only as occasions for disillusion and scepticism.

Her schools also, more than other Convent schools, allowed the pupils a
great deal of freedom and fun. No doubt her fears for her own brood had
led to a state of anxiety in which she had over-stressed the claims of
motherhood--requiring, for instance, that poor Mercer should confess his
faults to her as well as to his confessor, and showering reproaches
where perhaps encouragement, or even a little teasing, would have done
more good. The change is all part of the flowering of her nature as it
responded more and more closely to the supernatural. The weakness she
had shown in her own family--too uncritical an acceptance of the will of
a selfish man, too much anxious concern for her children's welfare--have
disappeared now that she is the Mother of that so much larger family,
the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.

Mother Connelly did not confine her educational work to "young ladies".
She started Poor Schools, as they were then called, in St. Leonards,
London (where her nuns had to wear the cast-off clothing of the
Postulants, in order to escape being pelted in the streets), Preston and
Blackpool. Public education was at that time in a shocking state. The
school-leaving age was ten, and the subjects taught amounted to little
more than reading, writing and arithmetic. Corporations such as the
National Society did what they could by establishing "middle schools"
for those children whose parents could afford to keep them at school a
year or two longer, and Mother Connelly worked on similar lines, adding
to the curriculum grammar and geography, as well as such useful though,
in those days, unusual subjects as hygiene and domestic economy.

Her work did not go unappreciated. School inspectors praised her highly.
One even declared that her school was "one of the most perfect
institutions of its kind in Europe". But much dearer to her soul must
have been Cardinal Wiseman's words, spoken twenty years after he had
brought her to England expressly to salvage and promote Catholic
education--"You have realised the desire of my heart."

She had her struggles and many bitter trials and disappointments besides
those caused by her husband. Even before the tumult and scandal of the
Connelly _v._ Connelly case had died away, she had begun to have trouble
with the Reverend Mr. Jones. This was hardly surprising, as no less than
six communities had already failed to live with him, but it was a cruel
addition to her other cares to think that once more she and her young
nuns would have to move house. Taking her usual refuge in prayer, she
started a novena for the whole community. They must all have been a
little disconcerted by the form taken (presumably) by the answer, for on
the last day of the novena Mr. Jones died. He died suddenly and
unexpectedly, but he died peaceably, assuring Cornelia that his will
would ensure her remaining in her present home, where indeed her society
has carried on its work ever since.

For many years it was the mother house, to be succeeded in that capacity
by the convent at Mayfield, Sussex, which she had founded as the result
of a school picnic among the ruins of what had once been the palace of
the Archbishops of Canterbury. When the development and increase of the
society necessitated a more central seat of government, Mayfield became
the English provincial house and the mother house was transferred to
Rome.

At the time of Cornelia's death in 1879, there were convents not only in
St. Leonards and Mayfield, but in London, Preston, Blackpool, Sevenoaks,
and at Neuilly in France. There were also three schools in her native
city of Philadelphia and one at Sharon Hill in the same State. Since her
death four more convents have been established in England (at Harrogate,
Oxford, Birmingham and Lancaster), three in Eire, one in Switzerland,
one in Rome, six in Africa, and no less than twenty-two in the United
States. These convents are all power-stations of Catholic education,
energising every sort of school-boarding schools, day schools, grammar
schools, parochial schools, preparatory schools, training colleges and
university hostels. The Society of the Holy Child Jesus has spread over
the world an enlightened, progressive, effective system of Christian
education--truly a rich harvest to have sprung from the seed of one
woman's broken heart.



                                  20

St. Catherine of Genoa "became a saint because she had to"--because
without the support and integration of the supernatural her difficult,
introverted nature would have collapsed into hysteria. But no such
psychological necessity can have influenced Cornelia Connelly. In any
sort of life she would have found a measure of success and happiness.
Her charm and her talents would have made her popular in any society,
while her strong affections and domestic tastes predestined her to a
happy marriage. By giving herself to God, she lost all these things that
she would otherwise have enjoyed. Her religion, far from unifying a
broken life, disrupted everything except her own being.

I am not thinking here of the religion she was brought up in and
practised for the first twenty-six years of her life, but of that more
exacting, urgent faith which she and her husband adopted soon after
their marriage. If either they had failed to hear or failed to respond
to its call, she might have passed tranquilly into old age, watching her
children grow up and bring her their children. To the end of her life
she would have remained her husband's darling. No doubt he would have
given her some anxious moments, but at least she would not have seen him
broken on the Rock. Or even if he and she had gone so far as to join the
Catholic Church together, they might still have kept themselves in the
shallows of Catholicism, where so many paddle and splash, and never
risked those deep waters in which she had been cruelly buffeted and he
had been drowned. Again, a less holy woman--perhaps only a little
less--would have refused to sacrifice herself to Pierce's vocation. If
she had refused there would have been no Society of the Holy Child
Jesus, but also no broken home or broken hearts.

Certainly the impact of the supernatural on Cornelia's mind and
character was more in the way of a test and a purge than a deliverance,
and the fact that she survived the ordeal without mental injury bears
witness not only to the power of grace but to the psychological
integrity of the nature that responded to it.

With so strong and self-reliant a personality it is perhaps surprising
to find her consistently moulding her spiritual life on the will of
others. In this she could not be more unlike St. Catherine, who for so
long went her lone, eccentric way with no guidance save the inward
promptings of her Love. Cornelia from the first made a practice of
frequent confession and obedience to a director. She also followed her
husband's leadership, even at times when perhaps a little opposition
would have been good for him. All the more important decisions of her
life were his in their first inspiration. Indeed her spiritual life is
built on her married life; it begins in her compliance as a wife and
crowns itself in the holocaust of her home and family.

When Pierce Connelly's authority was removed by his own act, she turned
instead to the authority which that same act had put in its place, and
to the end of her life she accepted the guidance either of Dr. Wiseman
or (when the new diocese was created) of the Bishop of Southwark. Yet it
would be a mistake to regard her as a woman easily led, or so derivative
in her ideas that she could not act without advice and example. This is
proved by the fact that in every case where authority abused its power
she showed herself as firm in resistance as she had hitherto been docile
in acceptance. Not only did she reject Pierce's usurped authority at a
mighty cost, but at least on one occasion she showed herself equally
resolute with Dr. Wiseman when he had, as she thought, taken in a local
dispute an attitude unjust and injurious to her community. Her obedience
was from strength and not from weakness, and may well have been part of
a deliberate plan to subdue and transform her own will which her clear
self-knowledge may have shown her as in danger of becoming headstrong.
For her the voice of authority, whether her husband's or that of her
ecclesiastical superiors, was not its own but the incarnate logos of a
higher will.

It must be remembered that unlike St. Catherine, she had no inner voice
to direct her. The threshold of consciousness in that other's so
different nature was, as we have seen, abnormally high. Therefore many
mental processes which most of us consciously transact would seem to
come from elsewhere, from outside herself and thus appear to be invested
with an authority which we can seldom recognise in our conscious
thoughts. Had Cornelia had a different mental constitution, with a
higher threshold, it is possible that her _Book of Studies_ might have
been as it were dictated by her unconscious mind and come to her with
all the mystery and impressiveness of an inner revelation. Had it done
so it would have been neither more nor less supernatural than the
reasonings of her normal consciousness, inspired by grace. But Cornelia,
as far as we know, had no visions, no locutions, no ecstacies. She
followed the normal ways of thought and prayer. Like St. Catherine, she
was a teacher, but she expounded no private revelation, only the age-old
revelation of universal truth, which it was her task and privilege to
adapt to the needs of modern education. Hers is no "difficult" character
to be saved by grace from psychological ruin, but one of the sanest,
healthiest specimens of mental integrity that ever responded to
spiritual inspirations.

Yet these two women, so unlike each other, these two wives, so different
in their attitude both to their husbands and to their own souls, have
one point of resemblance that wipes out all their divergencies. They
have a meeting-place in the gospel of St. Catherine's feast. Cornelia
Connelly is not a saint of the Church, but in the gospel of the Mass of
"A Holy Woman not a Martyr" her story as well as Catherine's is told.
Both Catherine and Cornelia are the merchant who found that treasure
hidden in a field, both are the trader who found the pearl of great
cost. Both sold all that they had and bought the treasure and the pearl.
The only difference lies in the nature of the personal goods that they
sold and we could argue as to who paid most. But the point is that both
paid all. Indeed for the saints there is no lower price.




                              THE MAIDENS



_Isabella Rosa de Santa Maria de Flores_



                                   1

It was difficult to enter Lima on that August day some eighty years
after the Conquistadors had taken possession of Peru. The streets were
jammed with the crowds that struggled towards the Dominican church from
every corner of the city. Only a fraction of them could have seen the
hearse that was being carried along the principal street, first by
members of the Cathedral Chapter, then by the Senators and members of
the Royal Council, finally by the heads of the various religious orders.

On the hearse lay the body of a woman, a young girl, slight and small
under the folds of her Dominican habit, with her face exposed according
to the Spanish custom, to show a beauty that mocked at death under a
crown of living flowers. The crowds pressed on the cortge in spite of
the Viceroy's Guard along the street, and the soldiers were obliged to
drag away those who tried to snatch flowers from the bier or cut
fragments from the dead girl's clothing.

Slowly, very slowly, the procession fought its way to the church, where
the Archbishop was waiting to receive the body. At last the coffin was
placed on a sort of stage in the midst of the Rosary chapel, and
immediately the crowd, wedged between it and the walls, began to
shout--"A miracle! A miracle!" The statue of the Blessed Virgin, the
people declared, had greeted this other virgin who had so often prayed
at her feet. Lights poured from the carven whirlings of her robe, and
all her baroque movement became alive and gracious as her eyes fixed
themselves on the sleeping girl before her. The people burst into tears
and the church rang with cries of joy.

Meanwhile the fathers of the convent ranged themselves round the bier,
to protect it from the crowd which was becoming beside itself, and to
allow the sick to approach and cure their ills by touching the body.
Then they began the Office for the Dead; but it was finished only with
difficulty, so frantic had the crowd become, pushing and jostling the
friars, so that they had to take refuge on the steps of the high altar,
and drowning their singing with shouts of joy and gratitude.

"Leave us our Rose--our dear Rose . . . ." and the friars were obliged
to put off the burial till the next day.

Reluctantly the crowd dispersed. The chapel was still crowded, but at
least one could move in the streets. The traveller from Spain could
proceed on his journey after being held a prisoner for more than two
hours by these funeral ecstasies. He had left his ship that morning at
Callao and was on his way to Cuzco in the mountains, intending to pause
only for sight of the capital, with its many fine buildings and
innumerable churches, which he had been told were as magnificent as
those at home in Spain.

Lima, the new town of the Pizarros, was certainly a beautiful city,
lying sheltered in the placid curve of the Rimac Valley, among fields
and orchards, well removed from the storms of the Pacific and protected
further inland by the whole range of the Andes, whose snowy towers
showed him the remoteness of his final destination. He had not time to
do more than stop for a meal at the principal inn, but it would be long
enough to satisfy not only his hunger but also, which was even more
urgent, his curiosity. Who was this mysterious Rose whose name had
become a chant on the lips of the crowd? Was she a member of the
Viceroy's family? Or a famous courtesan? Or had she at one time saved
the city from the plague?--or from some armed attack? What had she done
to cause this riot?

The landlord shook his head.

"'No, Senor--she is no relation of the Viceroy--though for a time before
her death she lived in the Questor's family. Mind you, her people are
good people. Her father, Don Gaspar do de Flores, was a distinguished
soldier, though now he is old and crippled--I understand that he could
not attend his daughter's funeral. Her mother too comes of a good
family--de Herrara, of this city. But they are not rich; they lost their
money in the wars and the troubles that have been with us ever since the
city started. De Flores has a large house and garden, but also a large
family, and I understand that he lives very poorly, with only one
servant. And this young girl, his daughter, who has just died, she used
to work for them, cultivating and selling flowers and making the most
ravishing embroideries. My wife says you would think an angel had worked
them, so beautiful they are, and I believe they were much sought after
by our noble families. I cannot think how the old people will manage
without her."

"But then," asked the stranger, "why . . .?"

"Why, Seor? . . ."

"Why this extraordinary outburst--these throngs of people? You would
think a queen was being buried."

"Seor," said the innkeeper, "she was greater than a queen. She was a
saint."



                                   2

What then was this age and this city wherein a saint was given the
honours that in our present civilisation are reserved for film-stars?
The crowds that surged round Rose de Flores' bier, snatching at the
flowers, snipping bits off her mantle, can be compared only with the
bobby-soxers struggling for fragments of Robert Taylor's tie. Certainly
saints were no novelty in Lima that the populace should thus lose its
head over one of them. Living there at the same time as Rose were at
least two who were subsequently canonised--St. Turribius, the
Archbishop, and St. Francis Solano--and one _beatus_, the half-caste
Dominican lay-brother, Martin Porres.

But though it was a city of saints, Lima was no heavenly city. The
streets that had been trodden by the feet of the elect had also run with
blood. From the year of its foundation it had been the battle-ground of
bloodthirsty desperadoes who had fought not only among themselves but
with the powers of the home-country which sought to pacify their
disorders.

In comparison with the conquest of Mexico, where the invaders had been
opposed by a nation of warriors, the conquest of Peru had been almost
peaceful. Several factors had contributed to the ease with which the
Spaniards took possession of a country which in its ultimate fastnesses
was virtually impregnable. The inhabitants, unlike the Mexicans, were of
a peaceable disposition, given more to agriculture than to arms, and
even had they been inclined to offer any resistance their defence would
have been compromised by the strife that had arisen within their royal
house. Two rival Incas, Atahualpa and Huascar, were actually at war when
the Spaniards landed. To crown all, the national religion traced back
the country's history to a divine couple who had arrived mysteriously
from the north, and had taught the hitherto barbarous people the arts of
civilisation. Whether the Children of the Sun were a myth, or as is more
probable actual visitants from some other country, it is a significant
part of the story that they were _white_; and when, having instructed
the natives in the use of the plough and the spinning-wheel, and started
the royal line of the Incas, they finally disappeared, it was understood
that one day they would return, and for centuries the pious Peruvians
had watched and waited for the arrival of white men from the sea. For a
time at least these white-skinned strangers sailing in from another
world were regarded as the descendants of Manco Capac and Mama Ocollo
and the fulfilment of their promise.

The Spaniards were welcomed and might have settled happily in the
country but for the unfortunate circumstance that the natives,
unprovided and unskilled in the working of base metals, used gold for
almost every purpose that iron or copper would be used for in other
countries. To the dazzled eyes of the invaders Peru was El Dorado, the
golden land, where even the cooking pots were made of gold.

In a passion of greed and excitement they set to work to strip the
country, despoiling equally the temple and the kitchen, driving the
people to forced labour in the gold-mines and torturing their rulers to
find imagined hoards of treasure. The consequences were riots and
revolts even in that mild populace, and endless quarrels and
assassinations among themselves, so that in the end blood flowed as
freely in peace-loving Peru as in warlike Mexico.

Side by side with this strife, spoliation and misery went another sort
of conquest. It is difficult for our modern outlook to capture the
spirit in which these various expeditions set out from Spain to discover
a new world. Side by side with Spanish Imperialism, went the love of
adventure, the desire for wealth, and also, strange as it may seem to
the modern mind, a genuine desire to convert these undiscovered
countries to Christ. From the first, plans were made to plant in them
not only the Spanish flag but the cross. Every expedition was
accompanied by clergy who were to act not only as chaplains but as
missionaries. Ignorance has sadly twisted the story of the
evangelisation of the New World. The monks and friars who devoted (and
often laid down) their lives to the work of preaching the gospel have
been branded with the cruelties of the Conquistadors, to whom they and
their methods offered a startling contrast. The fact that the
Inquisition was established in Peru in 1570 has been taken to involve
the persecution of the Indian population and the forcing of Christianity
on those of a different faith. The fact is that by an express provision
of the Holy See, the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over the Indians at
all, its authority being limited to the Spanish population.

It is remarkable that the country as a whole and without any harsher
weapons than preaching and persuasion, very soon yielded itself to
Christianity in spite of the cruelties and excesses of its Christian
conquerors. This no doubt was mainly due to the enlightened methods of
the Dominicans and the Jesuits, who familiarised themselves with various
Indian dialects as well as the Quiche language, established a printing
press and founded a training college for missionaries as well as
innumerable schools, churches, convents and hospitals, thus convincing
the people that the white man had other objects besides their robbery
and destruction.

Archbishop Turribius, in particular, distinguished himself by his
devoted ministry to the Indians. He protected their interests against
the Spanish colonists, now two generations settled in the country,
instituted many reforms in their government and treatment, and
personally visited on foot, no less than twice, the entire territory
under his jurisdiction, which comprised at that time nearly the whole of
South America. He had started on a third visitation when death came to
him suddenly in the spring of 166.



                                   3

Turribius is the only one of the saints of Lima with whom St. Rose is
known to have had any personal association. One would think that she
must often have seen the saintly Brother Martin in the Dominican church
or out shopping with his basket, and it is certain that she had heard
of, though she did not actually hear, the famous sermon of St. Francis
Solano, in which he threatened the city with destruction. But there is
no record of her having met or spoken to either of these holy men,
whereas from her very early days she was in contact with the Archbishop.

Indeed it was he who had given her the name of Rose at her confirmation.
She had been christened Isabella after her grandmother, Isabella de
Herrara, but so great was her beauty as an infant that her mother
invariably called her Rose. And here is our first brush with the
hagiographers, who are to confuse our path for the whole of this short
life journey. The simple, pleasing story of a mother who compared her
child's fresh loveliness with that of a flower and substituted a floral
pet-name for the more pompous mouthful of Isabella, gives way before a
"miraculous" event in which a supernatural rose blooms in the infant's
cradle. In preferring the natural to the supernatural version of this
story I am only following the mind of the Church which teaches that if
any event plainly admits of a natural explanation, a supernatural one
should not be found for it.

The hagiographers have made the story of Rose de Flores even more
difficult to write than it is by nature, and I shall have to cross
issues with them on other grounds besides this. There was so much of the
marvellous and the inexplicable in her life that it seems unnecessary to
add to it, especially as many of the additions have not the simple charm
of the one just given. Rose was born covered by a membrane or "caul", an
event insufficiently rare, one would think, to require any miraculous
explanation, though that is the one offered by most of her biographers.
She also yelled lustily when shown by her proud mother to strangers. It
requires a hagiographer to transform this all but universal behaviour on
the part of infants into a precocious example of humility and the spirit
of mortification.

My use of the word hagiographer is no doubt open to criticism. Taken
literally, it means no more than a writer about a saint or saints,
whereas I am using it to describe someone who writes about a saint in a
special manner. Strictly speaking, Von Hgel is a hagiographer when he
writes about St. Catherine of Genoa, but there is a whole abyss between
his way of writing and that of those two typical hagiographers Battista
Vernazza and Don Marabotto. For my purpose, Von Hgel is a biographer.
His aim throughout has been to arrive at the facts about his subject,
whether those facts be historical or psychological or spiritual. The aim
of the hagiographer on the other hand seems to be to promote a cultus.
He approaches his subject from the angle of unqualified admiration, or
as Monsignor Alfredo Ottaviani, assessor of the holy office, has more
bluntly put it, "with unpardonable levity . . . with more imagination
that judgment". Fact (or as some might say, truth) is with him a
secondary consideration. He is there to create prodigies, and if there
are two versions of an incident, one normal and the other preternormal
or miraculous, he will choose the latter. He will also suppress or
disguise the weaknesses of his hero, who must be invariably perfect.
This leads not only to the omission of anything he may consider contrary
to perfection, but the offering to our admiration of that which our
judgment tells us is not admirable.

The life of St. Rose bristles with incidents of both kinds--the
gratuitously prodigious (using the word in its original sense, before it
passed through eighteenth-century slang into a lesser meaning) and the
doubtfully admirable. Having in her case no learned, patient Baron
Friedrich von Hgel to sift facts and distinguish sources, we must do
what we can for ourselves, always keeping in mind the Church's ruling as
to the relative values of the natural and the supernatural in explaining
phenomena. Indeed the formulated judgments of the Catholic Church
provide in St. Rose's case a healthy antidote to the excesses of
hagiography. The panel of theologians who examined her during her life
records its findings with the most temperate objectivity, while the
riots at her funeral and the subsequent exaggeration of her unauthorised
cultus led to the decree of Pope Urban XVIII which forbids any public
veneration until the ceremony of beatification has been duly performed.



                                   4

A Rose by any other name . . . Rose de Flores started her life as
Isabella, but her mother always called her Rose. Her grandmother, on the
other hand, insisted on calling her Isabella and considered the use of
any other name as a personal affront. The mother, however, persevered,
with the result that the unhappy child was badly mauled between them.
When she ran to her mother at the call of "Rose!" she would be slapped
by her grandmother, but if she obeyed her grandmother's summons to
"Isabella!" it was her mother who slapped. We can certainly here agree
with the hagiographers that she was an exceptionally obedient child,
because whenever and whatever she was called she ran--invariably to be
slapped by somebody.

The fixing of her name at her confirmation was due entirely to the
inspiration of the Archbishop, for by this time the dowager had won the
day and she was always called Isabella. Turribius already had a high
reputation for sanctity and his action quelled even Isabella de Herrara,
who thenceforward ceased to call her grandchild anything but Rose.
Indeed the only opposition was to come at a later date from the girl
herself. As she grew older she began to have scruples as to whether it
was right for her to be called by a name which had not been given her in
baptism but only on account of her personal beauty. She did not like to
take this problem to her confessor, but in the end it was solved, as so
many of her problems were to be, in the Rosary chapel of the Dominican
church. Here was a statue of the Blessed Virgin which she specially
loved, and as she knelt in prayer before it she heard these words in her
heart: "My divine child prefers the name of Rose, but he would like to
add to it the name of his Mother." From that day she called herself and
persuaded others to call her Rose of St. Mary.

But that was some years later, and in such a short life no years should
be passed over. So once more we return to her baptism. This was
privately administered as, though her birth had been unwontedly easy for
her mother who had had already ten similar experiences, the child
herself seemed likely to die. She had not only the beauty but the
fragility of a flower, and her health was not improved by her mother's
methods of rearing her. When she was nine months old, Maria de Flores
found herself unable to suckle her any longer, but out of pride and
obstinacy refused to engage a foster-mother, with the result that her
daughter nearly died of starvation. The hagiographers leap exultantly
upon this incident, pointing out that the saintly infant endured the
pangs of hunger without complaint. No doubt the poor little thing was
too weak to cry. Indeed, all things considered, her survival both now
and at a later date is a marvel as great as any that the hagiographers
have recorded.

All her life she was sickly and delicate, prone to mysterious ailments,
and from her earliest years she was subjected to the most clumsy and
mistaken treatment, yet she survived to inflict on herself penances that
might have been expected to kill the stoutest and toughest. Rose is yet
another instance of that extraordinary power of soul over body which we
have already observed in St. Catherine of Genoa, and which indeed in
some form or another is characteristic of all types of sanctity.

Her first penances were not of her own seeking, but were inflicted on
her by the medical practice of her day. "When a man hath sinned," says
the Preacher, "let him fall into the hands of the physician." This reads
strangely to us now, but it must have seemed apt enough to Rose's
generation, when often the most painful part of a disease would be its
cure. A thumb caught under the lid of a heavy coffer, an irritating skin
rash, an aural abscess, a nasal polypus, are all in themselves heavy
tests of endurance; but the fact that Rose endured with unflinching
heroism not only these ills but their remedies, speaks highly for her
courage and self-control. The de Flores' surgeon, Juan Perez de Zumeta,
was a great believer in corrosives, which he used as a preliminary to
the knife, but the child's worst sufferings were caused by her own
mother who insisted on treating a painful rash on her face and head with
an application of mercury that nearly removed the scalp.

On this occasion Rose revealed the sources of her courage, for her
mother when she discovered the damage she had done relieved some of her
anger with herself by blaming her victim: "Why didn't you tell me it was
hurting you? Why didn't you cry?"

Rose pointed to a picture of Our Lord wearing the crown of thorns.
"It didn't hurt me as much as that hurt him."

From her earliest childhood she had been attracted by this picture, and
when other children were at play, she would steal away and sit before
it, pouring out her treasures of prayer and pity. At the inquiry made
later in her life by the ecclesiastical authorities into her methods of
prayer she stated that from the very first she had practised the prayer
of union--she had known no other. She had learned to pray before she had
learned to speak--at least with any ease and precision. Her prayer was a
wordless flow from the heart, and its first object was the suffering
Christ who, probably through some crude daub of a travelling artist (for
in those days it was impossible to reproduce works of art), had captured
her childish imagination.

It was his suffering which enabled her to bear her own, and so lost did
she become in the contemplation of it that when she had nothing to bear,
being rid for a time of her ailments, she would feel as if something
were amiss and lacking in her life and would take steps to restore it.
She could not possibly ask any member of her family for help in such a
matter, so she turned to the servant of the household, a simple Peruvian
girl called Marianna, whose mind was probably of the same age as her
own. Between them they got hold of a heavy beam, which Rose would carry
on her shoulders as if it were the cross. Alone with Marianna she would
perform the penances that her childish mind dictated, all with a view to
making herself more like the object of her love.



                                   5

Unlike most delicate children, Rose developed early. She learned at an
early age to walk and talk and also to read. Accounts of her education
are conflicting. According to one, she was educated at the Dominican
convent, but the difficulty here is that there was no Dominican convent
for women in Lima until after her death. It is more likely that she was
taught by her mother in such moments of leisure as the poor, flustered
woman could command in the midst of her household toils. This fits in
with the accepted ideas on female education at this period, but there is
a difficulty, if it is really true that Rose knew Latin--knew it well
enough not only to read her office but to compose verses that have come
down to us as her work. I am inclined to solve it by considering them
the work of her biographers.

The reason she learned to read so early was not, however, the skill and
patience of her teacher, be that teacher Maria de Flores or somebody
better qualified. Like so many children she learned to read mainly
through her desire to master a special book. This in her case was the
Life of St. Catherine of Siena, whose story had taken hold of her
imagination, possibly because the home conditions of the saint were so
very like her own. Like herself, Catherine was the youngest of a large
family--indeed of a family more than twice the size of Rose's, for she
had twenty-three brothers and sisters. Like herself, Catherine had felt
an early attraction to prayer and penance, practising both in the face
of family mockery and parental opposition. In later life the
resemblances became even more striking, but this no doubt is due to the
fact that Rose deliberately modelled her behaviour on that of her
heroine.

There seems little doubt that it was in imitation of St. Catherine that
she made the vow that invariably causes the hagiographers to lift their
hands in respectful wonder while reducing the scoffers to ribaldry. The
pious infant's vow of perpetual virginity is a phenomenon that has
possibly edified the faithful less than it has amused the profane. Rose
made hers at the age of five, and one naturally asks--what could a child
of five have known about virginity? The question is of our own time, but
the answer comes from hers and is probably: More than you think. In any
case, the vow may have amounted to no more than a promise not to marry,
or more positively to enter a religious order. Of its binding nature one
may well be in doubt. Few confessors, I imagine, would consider binding
a vow made before the age of reason, and many girls may have looked back
on such a vow from the safe shores of marriage with a smile or a sigh.

Above all it is necessary to keep our Rose within the setting of her own
time and country. If we move her into ours we shall probably be guilty
of more blunders and misunderstandings than ever sprang from the roots
of an imprudent admiration. She lived for the whole of her short life in
a Spanish colony at the meeting of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. It was a time when in England young minds were being fed on
tales from the classics and European history--such as form the subjects
of Shakespeare's plays. In Catholic Spain--more temperamentally opposed
to the Renaissance than any other country--the romantic imagination was
still supplied from tales of chivalry and the lives of the saints. It is
unlikely that Rose ever read the former, but she certainly studied the
latter and modelled her life upon them. It was as natural for her to do
so as for a modern girl to model her appearance on that of an admired
film-star, and who shall say that the result was any worse?

We must certainly leave our times behind us and enter hers if we are to
understand a childish episode which her biographers have enlarged out of
nature. Though a quiet, delicate child, more fond of solitude than of
company and of reading than of play, she was so sweet and accommodating
that other children loved to come and play with her. One day a party of
little girls brought their dolls into her parents' garden, but instead
of joining them with her own doll like any normal little girl, Rose ran
away from them, leaving them to play by themselves. The reason she gave
was that dolls reminded her of idols; therefore she refused ever to play
with them or even to possess one.

We surely are not bound to see this incident as a shining example of
"precocious maturity in a mind above the puerilities of childhood". It
translates quite easily into natural childish behaviour if we consider
her upbringing and surroundings. She lived in a country still partly
pagan, and no doubt had heard some terrifying stories of the old Indian
gods from the Christianised Marianna. She would probably also, though
the Peruvians were not strictly speaking idolators, have seen effigies
of Mama Ocollo and Manco Capac, which, made according to the traditions
of Indian art, would have seemed to her hideous and frightening, apart
from her acceptance of the belief that "out of the mouth of idols the
devil sometimes speaks". And it is quite true that these images and her
friends' dolls would have been very much alike, for we must rid
ourselves of our naturalistic pretty-pretty conception of a doll if we
are to imagine the dolls of Lima in the fifteen-eighties. They were
probably crudely painted unjointed wooden objects, presenting no
difficulty to the maternal imagination of the average little girl, but
also providing matter for the imagination of a little girl of a very
different type, a little girl who feared and hated evil, so was afraid
of idols, and therefore, because these dolls reminded her of idols, was
afraid of dolls.

But in spite of her behaviour on this and doubtless other occasions Rose
continued to be sought after by her little friends. She was an entirely
lovable child, always ready to help, always willing to give up her own
way in matters that did not involve her ideas of good and evil, so she
could be allowed a few eccentricities. As she grew up her favour
increased and began to cause her anxiety. She feared that it might be at
least partly due to her personal beauty, which her mother's friends did
not scruple to praise to her face, and she began at an early age to take
strong measures against that which some might have thought a subject for
thanksgiving, the gracious gift of a God condescending to bestow on a
creature the reflection of one of his own attributes.

We shall find it easier to understand some very strange conduct if we
can continue to see Rose as a child, one who throughout her life never
lost the clear black-and-white vision of youth or learned to
sophisticate the simple logic of innocence. Certainly her almost
vindictive hatred of her own charms started in a thoroughly childish
manner. She was playing in the garden with one of her brothers
--Ferdinando was her favourite, the one with whom she "paired"
in that large family--and the game was becoming, as games with boys
often do, a little rough. Even Rose's gentle spirit was roused to anger
when Ferdinando pulled off her veil (the inevitable headgear of a
Spanish woman in the colonies, though little worn elsewhere) and rubbed
earth and sand into her hair. When he saw that she was furious, he
mocked her. "What's all the fuss about?" he cried as he danced round
her--"Why should you mind having dirt in your hair? You mean to be good
and holy, yet you carry on your head what is highly offensive to God.
Don't you know that a woman's hair is a net to drag men down into hell?
That there are souls who owe their damnation to nothing but a woman's
beautiful hair? Isn't your hair an instrument of perdition? So why
shouldn't I rub dirt in it?"

Rose was thunder-struck. Her blood ran cold. She had never thought of
this before, that she should carry on her head what might be a weapon in
the devil's armoury had never occurred to her till this moment. But now
that it had, she could endure the thought no longer. She must act at
once. She went quickly and quietly into the house, and taking a pair of
shears from her mother's work-basket cut off all her beautiful hair.



                                   6

It was perhaps lucky for her that the great veil which even a little
girl had to wear concealed the damage from her mother until the hair had
begun to grow again, for Maria de Flores took a very different view from
her daughter's on the subject of personal beauty.

And here we must pause to consider the woman who played such a leading
part in our saint's life. Of her father, Gaspardo de Flores, we know
little except that he was one of Lima's "new poor", a man of ancient
family, who had lost his substance and his health in the Peruvian wars.
No doubt it was his indifferent health that made him such a cipher in
his own family, for it was his wife who ruled the household, brought up
eleven children on a small income, and tried in vain to bring her
youngest daughter's unruly sanctity into line with her own ideas of
worldly advantage and decorum.

We have already written of saints' husbands and studied the parts that
two not very holy men played in the lives of two very holy women. But
now we are to meet a saint's mother and watch her behaviour under the
impact of her daughter's particularly disconcerting type of holiness.
Maria de Flores does not appear at first glance to have been a very good
mother. She certainly was a hot-tempered, excitable woman, who relieved
her feelings not only with words but with blows. We hear of her not only
slapping and cuffing her delicate child, but beating and kicking her.
She is fond of her, she is proud of her, but again and again she injures
her not only by violent but by careless treatment. We have already seen
how she nearly scalped her with an application of mercury, and there is
another story of her wrapping uncured furs round her daughter's hands
when these were swollen with rheumatism during an unhappy visit to the
marshy country outside Lima. The furs, securely bound over the hands,
caused a devastation second only to that caused by the girl herself when
she plunged those same hands into quicklime because someone had praised
their beauty.

This brings us to the other side of the question. We may blame the
Seora de Flores but we cannot help pitying her, nor can we entirely
withhold our sympathy. Her daughter Rose must have been in almost every
respect a sore trial to her. She was sweet, she was submissive on all
the points that her mother would have told you did not matter, but she
was as iron on the subject dearest to that mother's heart--the making of
a prosperous marriage.

Rose was the beauty of the family. The exact form that beauty took we do
not know, for we have no contemporary portrait of her and very little
detailed description. We are told that she had huge dark eyes with very
long lashes, but that would hardly have distinguished her in a
Spanish-Indian city such as Lima. We can only conjecture from her name
that her beauty had a fresh and flower-like quality. The Spaniards have
always admired fairness, and probably she was lighter-skinned than most
Spanish girls, with rose-petal colouring in her cheeks. Certainly her
beauty is emphasised by her biographers to the point of legend, and it
must have been considerable, since it was enough to cause her to be
sought in marriage by more than one young man of wealth and position in
spite of the absence of a dowry.

It is easy to see how dear this project would be to her mother's heart.
A rich marriage would set the family up for good and the only obstacle
to it came from Rose herself. Maria de Flores was not likely to have
been deterred by a vow of virginity made at the age of five, but Rose's
adolescent and adult opposition to the plan was something really
formidable. It endured, without flinching, ill-treatment from both her
parents, and there was always the uneasy thought that if driven to
desperation she might so disfigure herself as to become completely
unmarriageable.

The canonisation of a saint does not mean that the Church approves of
every one of his or her actions, and the ends of sanctity are defeated
by uncritical admiration which sees all behaviour on the same level of
perfection. One resents the facile assumption that by refusing to go out
visiting with her mother Rose was acting in a more edifying manner than
if she had cheerfully faced the stiffness and boredom of
Spanish-Colonial society. Moreover, the shifts by which she contrived to
make her mother leave her at home are scarcely in themselves admirable,
and to explain them by enlarging on her love of quiet and solitude is
only to attribute a selfish motive. Why is it that pious writers never
seem to realise that a love of quiet and solitude can be just as selfish
as a love of noise and company?

In order to sympathise with Rose in this matter we must remember the end
and object of it all. Her mother's social schemes, her dressing up of
her reluctant daughter in silk and velvet, her adornment of her lovely
head with flowers, were all part of a major campaign for getting her
married, and the best tactics lay in resistance even in the smallest
skirmishes. The battle swayed to and fro. Sometimes Maria de Flores won
and took out her daughter dressed in silk, crowned with flowers and
looking even more beautiful than she need have done because of her
refusal to wear cosmetics. At other times Rose was the winner, with
eyelids puffy and inflamed after an application of pepper or with a
bruised and swollen foot on which she had cunningly dropped a stone. In
the end it was Rose who won. The mother grew weary, the pepper-in-eye
treatment really frightened her; moreover in time her daughter's refusal
to marry became well known among her friends, so there was no longer any
use in offering her as merchandise.

Like a prudent general, Rose consolidated her victory. Not content with
merely stopping her mother dressing her up, she persuaded her to let her
wear the shapeless, dun-coloured cloak that was the uniform of the pious
women of Lima in contrast to the gay, many-coloured attire of their more
frivolous sisters. The existence of a definite style of dress for the
ultra-devout, distinguishing them not only from the fashionable world
but from the religious orders, seems an improvement on the modern custom
of the ultra-devout seeking an unworldly attire in the fashions of the
day before yesterday. The wearing of her cloak was a public proclamation
that Rose, though not belonging to any religious order, was not in the
marriage-market and must not be expected to take any part in the
ordinary social life of the city.

But though she was no longer required to go visiting with her mother,
she still found that she had to confront the enemy, who had adopted
methods of infiltration. One of the differences between the frivolous
circles of old-time Lima and present-day London is that while our
frivolous society mainly ignores religion, the gay ladies of Lima were
much occupied with it as an entertainment. Many of the social occasions
that Rose had shunned were pilgrimages to popular shrines, and now the
rumour that the Seorita de Flores had dedicated her virginity to God
drew to her mother's house curious sight-seers whose relation to the
holiness of their objects was about the same as the relation of a
football crowd to the actual players of the game. Rose shrank from these
people, but found it more difficult to escape them in her own home than
in theirs.

Her deliverance came with the help of her faithful friend and brother
Ferdinando. She persuaded him to help her build herself a little cell in
the depths of her father's garden. They chose a spot as far as possible
from the house, in a thicket of plane-trees and wild sugar-canes. Here,
like two children playing "house", they wove together branches with
creepers, making a green lattice for the walls, and a green thatch for
the roof. Inside Rose built a little altar with a large cross made out
of two boards and stuck over with flowers and feathers. That cross was
the brightest, gayest thing in the whole garden, adorned as it was, not
only with all the colours of tropical flowers, but with the iridescent
feathers of humming birds, parrots, minahs, flamingoes, all the glowing
aviary of Peru. Before it in her dun cloak knelt Rose like a little
brown dove.



                                   7

No one was more fully aware than Rose herself of what her family had
lost through her refusal to marry, and no one could have been more
generously determined that as far as possible their loss should be made
good. They should have no cause to regret her continued presence among
them. She had always been useful in the home, helping her mother and the
servant to cook and keep house, and lately she had taken upon herself
the nursing of Isabella de Herrara, now bedridden. These activities
saved money, since they spared her parents the necessity of employing
others, but they did not make it. Rose was determined in future to make
money and do what she could to revive the de Flores fortunes which were
drooping apace.

It is not quite certain of whom the household consisted at this
particular moment. As Rose was the youngest, her sisters were probably
all married, though not we may believe advantageously. Of her brothers
Ferdinando was still living at home and apparently earning nothing.
There were also two invalids or semi-invalids to support. Nevertheless
Rose's decision was a bold one, for in those days it was almost unknown
for a woman of gentle birth to earn her living, and the fact that she
worked to support her family must have appeared quite as unusual and
astonishing to her friends as her anchorite's cell in the garden.

It was that garden which became the scene of her labours. The de Flores'
house faced the street, opposite the church of the Holy Spirit, but at
the back of it was a large rambling garden or paddock, which for lack of
money to pay a gardener was now almost a wilderness. Rose took upon
herself to make this wilderness blossom as her name. She made
flower-beds and grew flowers for sale.

Lima was a city of flowers. The soil and climate encouraged the growth
not only of tropical varieties but of many that flourish in temperate
zones; and, which was perhaps unusual in a place where flowers grow
almost too easily, the ladies of Lima could not have too many of them.
They liked to have flowers in their hair as well as in their houses, and
Rose soon found her wares in great demand, especially as she was by all
reports an expert gardener. She not only grew flowers but she grafted
them and improved their species. Of course the hagiographers would
credit her with miraculous out-of-season bloomings and miraculous
out-of-nature blossoms, but we need not look further than the climate
and soil of Lima, in which orchids grow side by side with wallflowers,
and roses bloom all the year round, and the undoubted fact that Rose had
a green thumb.

She was also, besides a gardener, an expert needlewoman, and not content
with making flowers grow in her garden she made them grow on silk and
damask and velvet. Her embroidery was we are told of almost supernatural
beauty and commanded as ready a sale as her flowers, and doubtless
higher prices. Indeed the de Flores family were probably better off for
her labours than they would have been for her marriage, unless her
husband had been exceptionally accommodating. It was their realisation
of this which made them oppose a suggestion which was made at this time
that their daughter should join a religious order.

It may seem strange that she had not already done so or thought of doing
so. Apart from any question of personal holiness, the convent was then
the only alternative to marriage, and we may put down the fact that she
chose instead to lead a semi-conventual life in her own home to her
persisting devotion to St. Catherine of Siena. This saint had occupied a
cell in her parents' house, and Rose would apparently have been content
to do the same but for certain developments for which her friend and
confessor St. Turribius was mainly responsible.

She was of course leading a life very little different from that of a
nun who has made the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Her
poverty was independent of any vow and her vow of chastity was already
fourteen years old. Obedience was more uncertain, because in some
respects she was bound to remain her own mistress, but she sought to
observe it in obedience to her confessor and to her mother. The former
was sensible and practical enough, the latter involved her in more than
she would have had to endure from any novice-mistress or mother
superior. This was partly due to her own methods which left all
initiative to her mother, even in such a matter as a drink of water.
Rose would never ask for a drink--her mother must offer it or she would
go thirsty. Maria de Flores was a busy woman and a worried woman,
therefore probably a forgetful woman. Rose often went parched for days.
But here again one cannot feel for her without also feeling for her
mother. It must have been as great a trial to have this responsibility
forced upon her on the top of all the other cares as it was for Rose to
endure her failures to meet it.

No doubt Archbishop Turribius realised these and other objections to the
religious life at home. There was also the question of Rose's penances,
which we shall consider later. He possibly thought that they needed
regulation and supervision. Though he knew of her parents' very natural
objection to her removal, he used his influence to persuade them to let
her join a convent of Poor Clares which his aunt was setting up in Lima.
Turribius must have had great persuasive powers. Not only had he in the
past induced a redoubtable dowager to renounce the use of her own name
in her grandchild, but he was now able to convince a not particularly
devout couple that they must do without their breadwinner. A certain
amount of opposition seems to have come from Rose herself. She did not
fail to realise that she could lead her special sort of life more
satisfactorily in a convent than at home, but, still faithful to St.
Catherine, she would have preferred a Dominican to a Franciscan house,
and she had a presentiment (afterwards fulfilled) that one would be
opened in Lima before very long. She also seems to have had some real
scruples about leaving her family to shift for themselves. She probably
knew better than Turribius how completely they depended on her.

Certainly it was in a divided frame of mind that she at last set out for
her destination, escorted by her devoted Ferdinando. They went on foot,
and on the way, her heart still full of her heroine, she asked if she
might pause to say a prayer in her favourite haunt, the Rosary chapel of
the Dominican church. Here a marvellous event took place. Though the
mechanism of it is obviously psychological, that need not exclude a
supernatural inspiration. Rose found herself unable to rise from her
knees before the statue of the Blessed Virgin. In vain did Ferdinando
urge her to hurry, reminding her that where she was going she would have
plenty of time for prayer; in vain did he even try to drag her away. She
was as if nailed to the ground, until she suddenly realised that this
was God's way of showing her she was not to be a Poor Clare. Then she
found that she was able to get up and go home to her parents, and take
up her old way of life in spite of all its drawbacks, because God had
shown her plainly that that was the way he wished her to live.



                                   8

Her decision to join the Dominican third order came shortly afterwards.
There might be no Dominican convent for women in Lima, but there was a
flourishing branch of the secular third order, and our only surprise is
that Rose had not joined it before this. St. Catherine of Siena had been
a tertiary, and on her feast day the tertiaries, of Lima carried her
statue, adorned with silks and flowers, round the city. It was while
Rose was embroidering a robe for this statue, that the call to join the
Preaching Friars came to her characteristically through the persistent
flutterings of a large black-and-white butterfly, which flew round and
round her, and backwards and forwards in front of her eyes, as if
determined that she should admire its display of the Dominican colours.

The Third Order of St. Dominic, unlike so many tertiary bodies, is
organically a part of the society to which it is attached. Indeed it was
usual then for tertiaries to wear the Dominican habit (a privilege now
generally reserved for their burial), and Rose forthwith exchanged her
dove-like garb for the black-and-white vesture of a magpie.

The Black Friars were established to fight heresy, and for that reason
have not enjoyed outside the Church the popularity of their Franciscan
brethren. Certainly their connection with the Spanish Inquisition makes
a dark episode in their history, but it must not be thought to express
either the mind of their founder or the spirit of their order. St.
Dominic had intended that heresy should be fought with the weapons of
study and of argument, and the preachers were, as their name implies,
primarily evangelists. It was not as inquisitors but as missionaries
that they accompanied the Spanish invaders of the New World. We have
seen that in Peru the Inquisition, though established, had no concern
with the pagans of the country. It did not even, as in Portuguese India,
concern itself with those who relapsed after baptism. The Preaching
Friars were a powerful missionary force, and so little did their methods
resemble those of the Conquistadors that we have the strange and
pathetic spectacle of the Inca Atahualpa, basely betrayed by Pizarro and
cruelly ill-treated, asking for baptism at the hands of the saintly
Father Vincent Valverde.

The order stands, in general terms, for the approach to God through the
mind, and has produced such intellectual giants as Albertus Magnus and
Thomas Aquinas. It is perhaps a little difficult to see Rose in that
company. She is not an intellectual saint, her mysticism has not the
mental grounding which distinguishes that of St. Catherine of Genoa, and
she also lacks that other Catherine's virile intelligence and sturdy
common sense. If one were to hazard a guess as to her most suitable
setting it would be among the Carmelites. But heaven chose that she
should join the Black Friars, ultimately to shine with her heroine in
the Dominican firmament, twin stars of the Old World and the New.

This regularising, as it were, of her religious status made a certain
difference in her daily life. She used it to persuade her mother to
allow her to have a cell built in the garden, in succession to the
childish wigwam which she and Ferdinando put up together. This tiny
dwelling, five feet by four, was she assured her confessor quite large
enough for her and her Bridegroom to keep house in together. It was
furnished with a stool and a table only, for Rose still slept in the
house. She had given the key to her mother and would neither leave it at
night nor return to it in the morning without her escort.

Her refusal to walk even across the garden without Maria de Flores,
which must have added considerably to that poor lady's normal
harassments, was no doubt a part of her interpretation of the vow of
obedience. But it also expressed her reverence for that decorum which
Spanish custom had exalted almost into a moral virtue. Rose carried it
to the extreme of refusing even to go to Mass unchaperoned, though the
Church of the Holy Spirit was only just across the road. But she told an
officious lady who marvelled that anyone of her piety should not attend
Mass every day, that she did in fact hear Mass daily in several
churches, visiting them in the spirit when her mother was unable to
escort her bodily.

There, were also no doubt practical reasons for not leaving the house
unaccompanied. Rose was already famous in the city for her holiness and
no less famous for her beauty, and it would be only natural for certain
of the more light-minded citizens to want to see just how much the one
was able to safeguard the other. There is indeed a story of a terrified
Rose being pursued across the garden by a handsome young man. The
hagiographers insist that he was Satan in gallant disguise, but I prefer
Rose's own version of the evil-one as a huge black dog, smelling
abominably of sulphur.

Her days and nights were now mapped out with religious exactitude, but
in a proportion she would never have been allowed to keep in any
religious house. She gave no less than twelve hours in the twenty-four
to prayer, for ten she worked to support her family, and for two she
slept. How she managed to live so long with only two hours' sleep at
night (except when ordered by her confessor to make them four) is one of
the many mysteries of her physical life. She had been a delicate child
and all her life she was a delicate girl, prone to illnesses both known
and unknown to the medical science of her day. Yet not only did she deny
herself some two-thirds of the sleep considered essential to health, but
she was able to live for long periods without food or drink, keeping an
absolute fast for as long as ten days. We have seen that St. Catherine
of Genoa was able to go without eating for the whole of Lent, but in her
case the fast was not absolute. She would swallow a draught of vinegar
and salt which probably counteracted the acid-forming tendencies of her
body, and she was moreover powerfully sustained by her daily communion.
Rose was able to receive Holy Communion only at her mother's
convenience, and throughout her fasts would deny herself not only food
but water. Her normal diet, when not fasting, seems insufficient to
sustain life. She would never eat meat, fish or eggs, and to join in the
ordinary meals of her family made her vomit (as happened to Caterina
Adorna when to avoid singularity she ate during her fasts), but she
throve on a soup made of bitter herbs, sheep's gall and ashes. "_Ce
curieux potage_," as her anonymous French biographer temperately calls
this concoction, was brewed by herself, and as soon as the natural and
inevitable battle with Maria de Flores was won, constituted her main
diet when in health, though in sickness she would occasionally take a
little chocolate, considered in those days less as a food than as a
medicine.

Most certainly Rose, like St. Catherine of Genoa, had a soul firmly
seated in the saddle of Brother Ass; but unlike St. Catherine she beat
and belaboured that poor animal with a fury that ceased only with his
life. St. Catherine did penance for four years for the sins she had
committed before her conversion, but at the end of that period she
relaxed and adopted another mode of life--for we cannot consider as
expiatory her great fasts in Lent and Advent, which were rather an
inspired movement of her body in sympathy with her Love. Rose had no
"unconverted" period to atone for. From her babyhood she had been a
child of God. It is most unlikely that she had ever committed a mortal
sin--her baptismal innocence was like dew upon her. Yet her penances
never ceased, piling up in savagery until only to read of them is
painful and even shocking.

She had by now at twenty years old moved far from the child who used to
trudge about with a log upon her shoulders. These childish penances seem
first to have been undertaken out of love and pity for Our Lord in his
Passion, but later on the motive power changes and looks more like
hatred--hatred of sin and self. Rose's treatment of her own body is
positively vindictive. She assaulted every part of it. On her head she
wore, carefully hidden beneath her veil, a crown of nails and spikes;
next to her skin was a hair shirt--not the token garment that is little
more than a scapular, but a full-size shirt reaching to her knees and
with sleeves that came to her wrists. Round her waist she wore a steel
chain, pulled so tightly that it bit into her flesh. We have seen how
she plunged her beautiful hands into quicklime, though these could not
be punished as much as the rest for fear that they should become unfit
for work; but having one day realised that from her catalogue of bodily
chastisement she had left out the soles of her feet, she repaired the
omission by walking to and fro on the red-hot top of the kitchen stove.

Her bed, which might have been expected to provide some refreshment and
repose, even if for no more than two hours--_Exsultabunt sancti in
gloria: Laetabuntur in cubilibus suis_--was a terrible construction of
stones, shards, nails and thorns. She also scourged herself
regularly--with steel chains until stopped by her confessor. When she
died there is said to have been found among her papers the following
"design for a spiritual trousseau for the infant Jesus":

"In the year 1616, with the help of my Saviour and of his holy Mother, I
prepare a garment for my very dear Jesus, who is soon to be born naked
and shivering in the stable of Bethlehem. To weave his little shirt I
made use of fifty litanies, nine rosaries and five days of fasting in
memory of his Incarnation. I shall make his napkins of nine stations
before the Blessed Sacrament, nine divisions of the rosarian Psalter,
and nine days of fasting to honour the nine months he spent in his
Mother's womb. I will make the swaddling bands in which he is to be
wrapped with five days of abstinence, five rosaries and five stations in
honour of his Nativity. I will make him a coverlet with the devotion of
the Five Crowns of Our Lord, five absolute fasts and as many stations in
memory of his circumcision. As for the trimming of his dress and the
canopy that is to protect his crib, I shall make them of thirty-three
communions, thirty-three attendances at Mass, thirty-three hours of
mental prayer, thirty-three Paters, Aves and Credos, with as many
Glorias and Salve Reginas, thirty-three rosaries, thirty-three days of
fasting and three thousand lashes of the scourge, in veneration for the
thirty-three years he spent on earth. Finally, I shall place as food in
his cradle my tears, my sighs, my affections, and above all my heart and
my soul, so that I shall henceforth posses nothing that does not
entirely belong to him."



                                   9

This document, both terrible and touching, gives us a portrait of Rose
in her ferocity and in her innocence. We must not lose sight of her
innocence. We must not allow the black cloak to hide the white robe
beneath, or we shall find ourselves turning away from her, as a saint we
cannot bear to look at. She is without question a very "difficult" saint
and one almost impossible to commend to an age in which suffering has
become something of an indecency, a thing to be put an end to at all
costs, even of life itself. That a young and beautiful girl should so
afflict her body seems to us not only less admirable than it seemed to
her contemporaries but positively repulsive. We have studied psychology
and find ourselves confronted here with the abnormal. Let us face it. It
has never been claimed that all the saints were normal people, in fact
some of them were distinctly otherwise. The point we must keep in mind
is that even the abnormal can be sanctified.

It is impossible to understand Rose without her penances and we had
better begin our attempt by clearing the air. The fog here is partly due
to the general but mistaken idea that the saints are all for our
imitation, whereas some of them are for admiration only--using the word
in its strictly Latin sense of wonder. St. Rose is most emphatically not
for imitation. I do not suppose that there now exists in Christendom a
director who would allow his penitent to practise even half of her
penances. Her own spiritual advisers seem indeed to have done what they
could to abate their violence, but though she would always obey she
would also plead, and her pleading was apparently irresistible. She had
too a method of finding a way out of their prohibitions. When forbidden
to scourge herself with chains, she remembered that she had not been
forbidden to tie those chains round her waist, and when Father Juan de
Villalobus took away her crown and refused to give it back unless she
let him file down the nails, she restored those nails to all their
former powers of penetration by hammering her head with her fists.

Rose had no less than eleven directors in her short life, which does not
mean that they wearied of her obstinacy or that she wantonly changed
them. Clerical circles in Lima were far from static, for Peru was still
in a sense a missionary district and an outlying part of the Spanish
empire. Journeys to and from the motherland sometimes took several
months, and several more would be required for journeys into the
interior such as that on which her most important confessor St.
Turribius lost his life. Certainly none of those who had the privilege
of directing the soul of this ferocious child failed to attribute its
violence to its purity. They saw both the black and the white. With a
clearer vision than we can easily command in these days that are cloudy
with false conventions and philosophies they saw the black and the white
as irreconcilables which must always be at war. It was Rose's innocence
which showed her the infinite nature of sin. Had she been less of an
innocent creature, she would probably, like most of us, have seen it
only in its finite aspects. It is only if we see sin as finite that we
can call her penances exaggerated. If we see it as she saw it, as an
infinite transgression against the Infinite God, there is no possible
exaggeration of punishment short of an infinity which can be attained
only in hell.

The sin of Pizarro against the Inca Atahualpa revolts us in its finite
aspects as a crime against humanity, but there are sins which in their
finite aspects are hardly revolting at all. Yet those sins, if they are
sins in any degree, are sins against God and therefore infinite. This
truth of which Rose was fully aware accounts for her horror of what most
of us would call trifling sins. She can never have appeared to her
confessor as St. Catherine of Genoa appeared to Don Marabotto, as an
ingenuous boy bashfully owning to some small delinquency. She was a
fanatic about sin, afraid of it as some people are afraid of disease,
and in her fear detecting the symptoms in her own body--for had not
Ferdinando warned her that beauty like hers is the noose that catches
men and drags them down to hell? When in the last few years of her life
she received and nursed the diseased women of the town, no doubt she saw
in them the triumph of evil in girls like herself, girls who perhaps
still were beautiful and once were innocent.

But, unlike St. Catherine of Genoa, her penances were not for her own
sins and she probably knew nothing of the sins of the Conquistadors. She
saw sin apart from human attachments, in its diabolical essence, as an
immanence from another world, and she met it with weapons that belong to
that world rather than to this. Certainly all of her directors believed
that her desire for penance was supernatural and were diffident in their
efforts to control it, fearing no doubt lest they should be found to
fight against God--the God who, after all, has said: "He who loves his
life shall lose it, he who is an enemy to his own life in this world
shall keep it, so as to live eternally."



                                  10

We have done our best to understand how it was that Isabella Rosa de
Santa Maria de Flores became the enemy of her own life, so perhaps we
may now ask her to take off her black cloak and show us the more
attractive white robe beneath it. Though the Dominican black stands for
penance, a cloak is a misleading symbol in Rose's case, since it is worn
externally and her penances were performed so secretly that none knew of
them save her confessors and occasionally, when she needed a
confederate, the faithful servant Marianna. Indeed, she was so anxious
to conceal them that when in course of time they came to affect her
looks, making her face drawn and haggard, she prayed to have the
healthful curves and colours of her beauty restored, preferring to fly
the flag of Satan on her cheeks than risk his entering, through the
treacheries of pride and human respect, the inner fortress of her soul.

Her penances were certainly rumoured but they were never certainly
known, though we are told that once the intervention of her guardian
angel was required to hide her discipline. The attraction which made the
ladies of Lima flock to her cell was, as far as we can judge, a mingling
of her saintly reputation with a most winning personal charm. Perhaps
too they hoped to be admitted to a share of those supernatural favours
which constituted what we might call the white side of her life. It was
the gossip of the city that Our Lord and his Mother visited her
daily--mysterious voices had been heard talking in her cell; and more
than once a child (the little daughter of Isabella de Mexia and the
child of a servant in another house) had actually, with the privileged
eyes of childhood, seen the Infant Christ in her company "wearing a
dress of purple and azure blue".

Certainly her Dominican robe of innocence is not only white but
glistening in the light of visits from another world. When she told her
confessor that her little cell was quite big enough for her and her
Bridegroom to keep house in, she had meant her words to be taken
literally. Like her heroine, St. Catherine of Siena, she had gone
through the mystical experience known as the spiritual marriage. In a
vision, Our Lord, disguised as "a sculptor in marble or precious
stones", had told her that if she would henceforth live for him alone,
he would take care of her family; and shortly afterwards, in her
favourite haunt of the Rosary chapel, she had heard the voice of the
Holy Child speaking from his Mother's arms: "Rose of my heart, be my
bride." She had answered: "Lord, if you desire that which I should not
dare to hope for, I will be yours and remain eternally faithful to you."
Thus by means of visual and auditory symbols a spiritual event of the
first magnitude was accomplished in Rose's soul. Though it had some of
the effects of conversion it bore no other resemblance to it, being in
the nature of consummation rather than of transformation. From
henceforth her union with her Bridegroom was complete.

But her heart was still the heart of a child, and she remembered that a
wedding requires a ring. How should she obtain a ring? She could not
afford to buy one, but who had ever heard of a bride without a ring? As
once before, when the child-nun needed a cell, she turned for help to
her kind brother Ferdinando. She had grown in the last years very close
to this brother, whom she was instructing in the ways of interior
prayer. Would he make her a ring? We are told that he hesitated a
moment, and then as if suddenly inspired, seized a piece of paper and
drew on it a ring with a stone inscribed with the Holy Name. Rose asked
for an inscription inside, and to her intense delight he wrote the very
words she had heard in the Rosary chapel, but which he had never heard,
the words of the Holy Child himself--"Rose of my heart, be my bride." We
have no idea how Ferdinando was able to make this ring for her.
Doubtless he had his ways and means, for nothing miraculous has been
suggested (apart from its sudden transference from the altar on which
she had placed it on Maundy Thursday to her finger on Easter Sunday),
and she put it on to wear till the day of her death.

Her confessor at that time was Father Juan de Lorenzana, O.P., a man of
great sanctity combined with worldly wisdom. He was frequently consulted
by the Viceroy. He knew of the rumours going through the city and
thought it wise to make a thorough investigation of his penitent's
supernatural experiences. There is a curiously modern note about his
procedure, for he appointed a commission of theologians to inquire into
the matter, choosing as his principal collaborator a doctor of medicine,
Juan de Castillo. Other members of the commission were two Dominican
fathers, Louis de Bilbao and Juan Prez, and the learned Jesuit Digo
Martinez. All five interviewed Rose in her cell, chaperoned by Maria de
Flores and by Maria de Usateguy, wife of the Questor Gonzalez de la
Massa, who had become a close friend of the de Flores family.

It would indeed have required a miracle to squeeze without suffocation
eight persons into Rose's five-by-four cell. Doubtless the meeting
overflowed into the garden, where it must have made a bright pool of
colour in the shade of the plane-trees. The black of the Jesuit and the
magpie vesture of the Dominicans would have acted as foils to the
scarlet of the doctor of medicine, while the two duennas stood on either
side of Rose's black-and-white in the sombre yet glowing colours of
Spanish ladies dressed for an occasion--Maria de Flores doubtless
looking a little shabby, Maria de la Massa more richly attired than her
friend but still after a fashion that had long gone by in the mother
country.

The proceedings opened with a number of questions from the doctor of
medicine. These, however, were not medical but theological, designed to
discover Rose's method of prayer and how she had come to learn it. She
confessed that she had read few if any books on theology, and had only
her own words in which to describe her experiences. But it was obvious
that she had practised since early childhood the very highest form of
prayer, which is the mystical prayer of union. She had not learned it
from books--it had come to her naturally from the very first. In it she
was transported into wordless, imageless union with God, her senses
being in complete abeyance (up till her twelfth year she had suffered
occasionally from distractions, but never since then), though she was
capable all the time of continuing satisfactorily any work she was
engaged in, and many of her embroideries had been worked while she was
in this state of prayer. She did not, however, neglect vocal prayer, for
apart from saying the Little Office of her Dominican obligation, she
spent every day three hours of her allotted twelve in thanksgiving.

Dr. Castillo examined her on the subject of her penances, and here she
gave only muted replies, assuring him (as indeed in her simplicity she
believed) that she did nothing very extraordinary and nothing without
the approval of her director.

On the subject of her visions she was more detailed and illuminating.
She told him that she frequently saw Our Lord, both as a child and as a
man, and also his Mother, and that she talked to them familiarly every
day. She described how she saw her Saviour "clearly but in a fugitive
manner. He comes towards me and then disappears." Nor did she ever see
more of him than his head and shoulders. When he appeared as a child,
she saw him completely and for much longer, though generally as a tiny
figure only an inch or two high. He would run about between the lines of
a book she was reading. At other times he would be as large as a child
of eight. Once he had challenged her to a game of cards, the stake being
a peculiarly severe headache she was suffering from at the time. She won
and the headache immediately disappeared, but he demanded his revenge
and this time he was the winner. "Lord," she asked, "what do you claim
as your winnings?" He replied: "Your patience," and the headache
returned with redoubled force, so that she did not sleep at all that
night. But the next morning she had never felt so full of health and
vitality. This artless tale was actually told to her mother on another
occasion, but it is representative of many of what might be called her
lesser spiritual experiences. She seems to have had quite an exceptional
faculty of visualising her thoughts and imaginations, but when as the
result of their examination the theologians told her that her visions
were imaginary they did not mean what we should mean by the word.

Strictly speaking, imagination is "the faculty of representing to
oneself sensible objects independently of an actual impression of those
subjects on our senses". Common use has shrunk the meaning to a
representation of objects which have no real existence at all.
Theologically, of course, it by no means follows that an object which
makes no impression on our senses does not exist in reality, and the
last thing which this commission would have wished to convey was that
Rose's visions were in any sense illusions. What their findings made
clear is their belief that these supernatural experiences had been
clothed in images projected from her own mind, and that the external
visions seen and words heard were hers and must in no sense be taken as
literal representations of what lay behind them--which has been the
teaching of the Church throughout the ages.

Psychologists have suggested that the externalisation of images, which
normally happens only in our dreams, would be equally frequent and
normal in our waking hours if it was not inhibited by some other
faculty. This inhibiting faculty may be reduced in power by illness or
fatigue, and Rose as we know was frequently ill, and constantly working
and fasting. Her spiritual life, therefore, very easily became
externalised and the value of its impressions does not lie in their
externalisation but rather in the hidden depths of the supernatural
experience of which they were the symbols.

This her examiners made clear. When, however, she told them in answer to
another question that she saw God "as it were in a light which could be
compared to nothing in nature, a light without form, without limit,
without measure, a light that is pure and changeless, penetrating
everything and always the same in all places", they decided that in this
case the vision was intellectual, that is perceived by the mind and
soul.

They questioned her further on various dogmas of the Church--the Mystery
of the Holy Trinity, the Hypostatic Union, the Real Presence in the
Eucharist, predestination, grace, and the joys of the blessed in
heaven--also on such mystical subjects as the Illuminative Way and the
Dark Night of the Soul. To all these questions Rose gave gentle, modest
answers which showed nevertheless that grasp of divine truth which lay
within her simplicity.

The findings of the commission were unanimous. They declared (1) that
she had arrived at the Prayer of Union by a direct route, and not by the
usual approach through the Purgative Way, (2) that she had endured the
terrors of the Dark Night with heroic courage and perfect submission to
the will of God, (3) that undoubtedly the Holy Ghost had spoken to them
through her mouth. It is noteworthy that they made no further comment on
her visions or her penances, regarding the former no doubt as a
bye-product or outward projection of her intense life of interior
prayer, while the latter were the private concern of her director.

From that time Dr. Castillo frequently visited her, declaring that every
time he did so he came away refreshed and fortified. This indeed was the
experience of all her confessors, who drew strength from her as they
dispensed sacramental grace. Once when the sacristan of the Dominican
church told Father de Lorenzana that "Little Rose" was waiting to make
her confession, he replied: "This Rose whom you now call 'little' will
soon have her greatness known throughout the world."

One result of the commission which deserves recording is its effect on
Maria de Flores. She came at last to appreciate her daughter now that
others had declared her exceptional nature. Until then Rose had been
more of a nuisance than a credit, but now that all those learned
theologians had spoken of her so highly, her mother might believe that
there was something admirable in her after all. Which shows that she was
very like almost any other mother of a difficult daughter.


                                  11

The proper setting for a rose is a garden, and our especial Rose passed
most of her life in hers, making it the centre of her work and prayer.
In the interests both of safety and decorum her brief nights must be
spent in the house, but the first grey of dawn sees her threading her
way through the bushes and flowers, and her matins are far ahead of the
first bird-song.

The hagiographers have strange tales to tell, and as they are also
rather enchanting tales and have about them the freshness of early
morning, we shall not be too critical of the evidence. Moreover, even if
the details of these reports would not have satisfied Laplace, the
general atmosphere they create is, we are sure, the right one. For it is
only to be expected that this innocent creature should share the
delights of man's first innocence and be on terms of love and friendship
with the whole of God's creation.

We are told that God placed Adam in a garden, and a garden is the type
of a friendly, co-operative natural order, subject to man and serving
him. When Adam sinned he was exiled from the garden, and went out into
the wasteland, where nature is unfriendly or at best neutral. She holds
aloof, and our efforts towards communion with her suggest the wooing of
a frigid bride. She does not want us or need us. If she yields her
secrets it is only to our importunity--there is no response on her side.
Set against this general indifference, we sometimes meet pathetic
instances of individual devotion, of animal turning to human as to a
lost mediator, while on the human side a guilt-complex expresses itself
in pathological cruelty or pathological doting. The final enmity of
nature, outraged and vengeful, is typified by hell fire.

But paradise remains, and those who while still on earth yet live in
paradise, have a foretaste of its delight. Stories of friendship between
man and nature are common in the lives of the saints. Those who become
the enemies of their own lives sometimes become the friends of all other
forms of life. The friendship between St. Francis of Assisi and the
birds, to say nothing of the wolf of Gubbio, is nearly as well known
outside the Church as within it. While in Rose's own city of Lima, her
holy contemporary Martin Porres was soon to embroil himself with his
superiors by admitting sick animals to the Dominican hospital.

Her own especial friendship with nature is distinguished by a wider
reach than such friendships usually attain, even in the lives of the
saints; for it included creatures that the most fervent animal-lovers
generally choose to ignore, such as gnats, wasps, and mosquitoes, while
extending itself beyond the animal kingdom into the realm of plants and
flowers.

Flowers indeed were her livelihood, whether she grew them in flower-beds
or embroidered them on silk, and we might wonder why she has never been
made the patron saint of gardeners, so successful was she in their
cultivation. We are told that flowers would grow for her when they would
grow for no one else. She is credited with a whole miraculous bed of
gillyflowers, sprung up where not even a bud was to be seen the night
before. A fellow tertiary, Sister Caterina de Santa Maria, used
sometimes to walk with her from her house to her cell in the garden, and
she has given her account of a whole garden waking to greet its gardener
as she passed through it in the dawn. "The trees bowed over her as she
walked, the leaves rustled and made sweet music as they scattered their
pearls of dew, the flowers swayed their stems and hastened to uncurl
their petals, from which floated delicious scents. The birds began their
song as they fluttered around her, perching freely on her arms and
shoulders while the insects came in swarms and greeted her with their
humming."

Sister Caterina's reaction to the insects was not unlike what would have
been our own; on being stung by a lively mosquito she squashed it flat
against the wall. "What are you doing, Sister?" cried Rose in
dismay--"You are killing my guests." "That," said Catherine coldly, "is
not the name _I_ should give them." "And why not?" asked the mistress of
the house. "Why should we refuse these poor creatures a drop of our
blood, when Our Saviour so often refreshes us with his [the word-play
here suggests the marvel unknown in her time of blood transfusion].
However, I don't want my guests to hurt you, so if you promise not to
kill any more of them I will promise that they shall sting you no more
than they sting me."

Which they never did. Rose's sufferings did not include the common
ordeal of being stung by insects. "When I settled here," she said to her
confessor, who had some difficulty in approaching her through swarms of
gnats and mosquitoes, "I realised that it was necessary to live on good
terms with my neighbours. So I made a treaty with them, to which they
have been faithful. They don't hurt me and I don't hurt them. They often
take shelter under my roof, and in return they accompany with their
humming the praises I sing to God."

And indeed, says her biographer, it really was so. "Now, my friends,"
said Rose of a morning, opening her door, "let us sing together the
praises of God Almighty." Whereupon the insects would divide themselves
into two choirs, to accompany her recitation of the office till she
dismissed them with: "Go, little sisters, and find your next meal among
the flowers."

This transfer from an animal to a vegetable diet may account for the
fact that not only Rose but her visitors suffered so little from
mosquito bites. Her mother, her confessor, Sister Catherine, and
Gonzalez de la Massa and his wife were all immune. Another tertiary,
Francesca de Montoya, had however to pay a quittance of "three stings in
honour of the Blessed Trinity".



                                  12

There were others who shared Rose's garden sanctuary besides her friends
in the various orders of creation. As the rumour of her holiness grew,
the poor and sick of the city began to stream out to her for comfort.
Her Spanish rigidity of decorum did not oppose a ministry to the
diseased women of the town, whose souls she tended equally with their
bodies. Her parents' house was large, so she was able to accommodate her
patients in her own home, an arrangement to which her mother strangely
enough made no objection. She had already shown her nursing skill in her
ministrations to Isabella de Herrara, who had spent her last days under
her care. She also undoubtedly had the gift of healing. Nursing and
prayer were her medicines and with them she worked some remarkable
cures.

One in particular wakes echoes in our day. A certain religious had
become what must have been one of the first victims of the tobacco
habit. He had acquired it to such an extent that his health was affected
and in vain his physician and his monastic superiors sought to break him
of it. "For a trumpery satisfaction this monk risked death and perhaps
eternal loss." His friends begged Rose to help him, but for a time
humility made her hesitate. How could she succeed when so many with
greater skill and authority than herself had failed? But charity
prevailed, and with it the inspirations of common sense. For years
everyone had been reasoning and pleading with this poor man. There were
no words left for her to speak to him; so instead she would speak of
him. For five days she prayed without ceasing and "suddenly the sufferer
conceived such a horror of tobacco that the smell alone became
unbearable to him".

Most of Rose's patients, however, were of her own sex and kind, that is
women and girls of good family reduced to poverty. She helped them by
every means in her power, and having nothing of her own to give away she
lavishly disposed of the goods of others. This curious form of
generosity is common in the lives of the saints, and one would like to
suppose it the invention of those biographers "with more imagination
than judgment" whom the Holy Office deplores. According to one account,
Rose would read her victims little lectures on how pleased they ought to
be at this diversion of their possessions to others more in need of
them. But I prefer the excuse she made to her mother when the latter
very naturally protested at the bestowal of one of her only two cloaks
on the Seorita Francesca de Montoya, who had none and therefore by all
the laws of Spanish colonial custom was unable to go to church. "Do not
fret, my dear mother. I did this only because I know that two new cloaks
are shortly to be given you." As indeed they were. An unknown benefactor
sent Maria de Flores forty silver pieces for the express purpose of
buying herself a cloak, and hardly had she begun to wear it when her
friend, Maria de Sala, presented her with a beautiful piece of silk to
make another.

As time passed Rose's desire to comfort souls and bodies reached an
intensity that could not be satisfied with the few she was able to nurse
in her parents' house. She became a regular visitor at the hospitals,
where her nursing and her cures were as successful and numerous as they
had been at home. In this sweeping of the mystical impulse into
practical work for humanity, this emptying of the love of God into the
love of man, she resembles none more than St. Catherine of Genoa, and
there is an incident in one of the hospital wards which brings them
close to each other in a likeness which also presents a significant
contrast.

We have seen how St. Catherine caught the plague because, carried away
by the love of God, she kissed the mouth of a dying woman, or rather the
Name that mouth was trying to utter. Rose, moved by another sort of
frenzy, drank a bowl of blood which had been drawn some hours before
from a sick woman and was beginning to putrify. "What!" she cried to
herself, "you have a horror of the blood of your sister in Christ, and
you are yourself but a miserable creature, Drink up!" In both saints the
gesture is one of love towards the neighbour, but whereas in the case of
the Italian matron it is prompted by the love of God, causing an utter
self-forgetfulness, the Spanish maiden's impulse is the desire to punish
her own shrinking flesh. Both do a deed which is terrible, but in
Catherine's case also lovely, whereas our reaction to Rose's is
conditioned by those very shrinkings she attacked so fiercely in
herself. There is the further consideration that it could not have been
of the smallest comfort to the poor creature who had inspired it, while
Catherine's kiss must indeed have been a lovely memory to take out of
the world.


                                  13

It would have been fitting and would perhaps have pleased us better if
our Rose had died in the garden where she had lived for so many years.
But, as so often happens to her namesake, it was her fate to be plucked
and carried away to die in a house.

For a long time now the de la Massa family had been the friends of the
de Flores. Gonzalvo de la Massa was the questor or chief tax-gatherer of
Lima, and a wealthy man in high position, whereas Gaspardo de Flores had
sunk into poverty and obscurity. But wealth had no social significance
in that city, where birth, that is pure Spanish blood, and military
prowess were the touchstones; and de Flores, as an old soldier and
pure-bred Spaniard, would have considered himself the equal of any
nobleman in Peru.

Early in 1614 the de la Massas made the surprising suggestion that Rose
should come and live with them. It is surprising because hard to account
for by any reasoning we should consider cogent now. It certainly was not
a case of relieving her parents of an expense, because she must have
cost them almost nothing. Moreover, the family was largely dependent on
her labours, and when their consent was finally given for her removal it
was made a condition that those labours should continue. We may also
feel surprised that the de la Massas should invite into their household
a young woman whose ways were so remote from theirs or indeed from the
ways of ordinary mankind. But here, of course, we judge from the
distance of our own time and society. A saint in the home--and all Lima
now believed Rose to be a saint--would have been considered an honour
worth paying for in a certain amount of inconvenience. Her love of
solitude, her hours of prayer, her fasts, her flagellations would all
have shed lustre on those who had invited her to share their life.

But I suspect the real motive for the adoption (for adoption was what it
amounted to, though Rose was in her thirtieth year) was their affection
for their friends' daughter combined with a true appreciation of her
holiness and a desire to please God by giving it scope and protection.
No doubt they knew that things were often made hard for her in her
parents' house, for in spite of Maria de Flores' improvement since the
visit of the theologians, she still suffered from a sharp tongue, a rash
judgment and an explosive temper.

Rose too had reached an age when her frequent sicknesses and ferocious
penances had at last begun to affect her health. This is hardly
surprising; indeed the only surprise is that it had not happened till
now. A year of Rose's life would probably have killed any ordinary human
being, but it was not till she reached the age of thirty that her
friends began to feel any real anxiety about her health.

Certainly she led under their roof a life that was very much easier than
the life she had led at home. She protested to her director that she was
now without opportunities for sacrifice. Her bed of brickbats and
potshards had been thrown by her mother into the river, and though she
had permission to construct one like it for Lent, her confessor forbade
its use at other seasons. Maria de la Massa gave her as a bedroom the
room already occupied by her own little girls, which sheds a curious
light upon her as a mother but also illuminates Rose's sweetness and adaptability, for apparently the arrangement was accepted with the
greatest goodwill on both sides.

Waking after her self-allotted two hours, Rose would creep out of bed
and spend the rest of the night on a wooden stool, to pray while the
darkness lingered, then to take up her sewing with the first light. The
Seora de la Massa allowed her to observe her fasts, when she saw that
they and her peculiar diet improved her health rather than otherwise.
She also allowed her to build in an attic under the roof a cell to which
she retired every Thursday night, remaining there undisturbed till
Saturday morning.

Rose sadly missed her garden cell, where she had spent so many happy
hours, conversing familiarly with her Bridegroom and his Mother, and
reciting her office with the birds and insects. For she now lived a life
which, except for her retirement From Thursday to Saturday, was almost
bereft of solitude. But she had grown in spiritual stature since the
days when she believed that solitude was a good in itself, to be clung
to and fought for at no matter what cost to herself and others. She
accepted the new arrangement as the will of God, since it was the will
of her parents and of her director, and fulfilled its conditions
faithfully and without complaint. Her vow of obedience was now divided
equally between her mother and Maria de la Massa, who in her turn became
the dispenser of that unasked-for cup of water.

A twenty-two-hour day allows plenty of time for work as well as for
prayer, and Rose spent much of her time in household tasks, though these
could hardly have been as necessary in the wealthy, well-staffed
household of the de la Massas as they had been in her old home, and must
we fear have demoralised the servants, who doubtless came to look upon
her as one always available to do the more unpleasant work. She also, of
course, continued to work at her embroideries for the good of her
family. We are not told whether she still grew flowers for the market,
but as she constantly visited her parents' home it is probable she did
so. She also continued her nursing in the hospitals. In fact, except
that it became a little more normal, her life with the de la Massas
differed but little from her life with the de Flores.

It was at the questor's house that she reached the climax of her fame.
Long rumoured for her holiness and charity, she came at last to be
regarded as the preserver of the city of Lima. This city, like most in
the Spanish colonies, was a city of contrasts, of black and white, light
and darkness. On one side we find a sturdy growth of piety, fruiting in
no less than three saints and one _beatus_, on the other inconceivable
licence, debauchery, bloodshed and violence. There was also within its
walls a large Indian population, always trembling on the verge of
paganism. We have seen that heroic and self-sacrificing missionaries had
accompanied the Conquistadors without imitating their methods. But
though most of the native population of Peru was by this time nominally
Christian, there were still in that vast country tracts of forest and
mountain that had not been evangelised, and as the inhabitants of these
invaded or drifted into the Christian parts, old habits of thought and
worship only too readily came back. The Peruvian Indian was a docile,
easily-influenced creature, and those characteristics which had aided
the work of the missionaries were also favourable to its destruction.

At about this time the village of Anco-Anco, between Lima and Potosi,
was wiped out by an earthquake. Earthquakes are not uncommon in Peru,
but public opinion decided that this particular disaster had been due to
the sins of the inhabitants, who had all relapsed into paganism and had
all perished, except it was said for one young woman who in her
extremity had invoked the Blessed Virgin Mary instead of Manco Capac.

One could hardly expect the clergy and religious of Lima to forgo such
an opportunity to put the fear of God into their congregations. It was a
clear case for the text: "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise
perish." But apparently they had little success until a Franciscan
friar, Francis of Solano (afterwards canonised) came marching into Lima
from Tucumen, like Jonah marching into Nineveh or George Fox into
Lichfield--crying, "Woe! woe! to the bloody city! . . ." In the
market-place he preached a sermon which achieved in an hour what the
local clergy had failed to achieve in seven weeks--he thoroughly
frightened the citizens. Indeed he frightened them beyond his own
intentions, for his warning had been given in general terms: "Now is the
axe laid to the root of the tree and every tree which does not give good
fruit is cut down and cast into the fire." His terrified hearers took
his words to mean that Lima would be destroyed that very night, like
Anco-Anco, by fire and earthquake. Many fled into the country, others
rushed into the churches; others still ran to the questor's house to beg
little Rose de Flores to intervene with heaven on their behalf and save
them.

It is not likely that Rose shared the general panic, but the child who
had been afraid of dolls because she was afraid of idols must have found
a voice in her prayers as she thought of Anco-Anco and its idolatries.
We are told that she scourged herself that night as never before, and in
the morning the city of Lima was still there. The dreaded catastrophe
had not happened. Not a stone of the Pizarro palaces was out of place,
while the great yellow frontage of the cathedral blazed in nothing
fiercer than sunshine.

It was a miracle, of course. No citizen would believe that he had not
been the day before doomed to destruction. That the doom had been
averted could be due only to prayer, pre-eminently to the prayer of the
city's flower of sanctity, little Rose de Flores. From that day she was
to be more loved and reverenced than any other within its walls. The
holiness of a Turribius or a Francis or a Martin must bow to hers as the
patriarchs' sheaves bowed to little Joseph's. There were no scenes of
mob excitement, such as attended her funeral, nor was she even followed
in the streets by curious gazers as she made her way to the church or to
the hospital, the only places where she appeared in public. Her modesty
was respected because in all those stews of violence and promiscuity it
yet was understood, existing as an ideal long after its image had been
lost. But the city's life seemed to centre more and more closely upon
hers, as pulses beat to the measure of an invisible heart.

Only for a short time longer was she to go to and fro in its grateful
streets. Early in 1617 she announced that she would die that year. She
had known and proclaimed since childhood that she would die on the feast
of St. Bartholomew.

Rose had the gift of foretelling the future. There is too much evidence
for this to be in doubt. Five years earlier she had told her mother that
she would end her days as a nun in Lima's Dominican convent--which did
not then exist. She had been throwing rose petals into the air as an act
of homage to their Creator when her brother Ferdinando joined her with
the bet that he could throw them higher than she. So he could, but in
spite of that, his sister won the game, because her petals as she threw
them stayed in the air where they formed a cross in the midst of a
crown. Rose who "scried" rose petals as others have "scried" tea-leaves,
interpreted this to mean a convent in which many souls would leave the
earth to make a crown for the Bridegroom whose crucified life they
shared.

From that day she talked constantly of this convent, declaring that it
would be built in Lima and named after St. Catherine of Siena. Another
time in a dream she saw the adventure expressed in lilies. When Father
Louis de Bilbao, who was then her confessor, spoke his doubts that
another convent should ever be built in a city already chock-a-block
with them, she quietly informed him that at the laying of the foundation
stone he would say the Mass. As for her mother, when she told her
daughter bluntly not to make a fool of herself with her day-dreaming,
she was informed that she herself would be the first to take the veil.
Whereupon the poor woman burst into a perfect frenzy of rage, asking how
on earth she "who was busier than God" could possibly leave all her
chores and cares to become a nun, and anyhow who was to pay her dowry?

It was paid in fact by Lucia de la Draga, a young woman whom while still
a wife and mother Rose had recognised as the first prioress of her
convent. In 1622, five years after her death, the Convent of St.
Catherine of Siena was built in Lima. Father Louis de Bilbao said the
Mass at the laying of the foundation stone, and the widowed Lucia de la
Draga was made prioress under the name of Sister Lucia of the Trinity.
It was she who remitted the dowry of Maria de Flores, when the
latter--now also a widow, though at a very different age--asked to be
allowed to take the veil. For many years our saint's mother lived in the
convent of her daughter's day-dream--still, no doubt, occasionally
restless or even bad-tempered, but growing steadily more happy and at
ease with her surroundings till death at last brought her to the peace
her life had never known.

Poor frantic, flustered, frenzied Maria de Flores! It seems just
possible that her restlessness and bad temper were the result of a
missed vocation and that her ill-treatment of Rose was due to a secret
jealousy. The emergence of a religious vocation in the children of
parents who have missed it is a phenomenon we shall observe more closely
in the life of St. Thrse of Lisieux. It is by no means uncommon in the
secular as well as in the religious life. Dr. James Bridie has used the
idea for his play, _A Sleeping Clergyman_, and it is for psychologists
to decide whether a past renunciation or a present though hidden desire
is the more potent influence on the child who finally redeems the
failure of those before him.



                                  14

All through her life Rose's penances had been laced with the greater
merit of suffering she had not chosen for herself. She seems to have
experienced almost every sort of illness--asthma, pleurisy, headache,
stomach-ache, palpitations, a sore and swollen throat and a most painful
arthritis in her hands and feet. She was seldom without one or more of
these complaints, and shortly before she died it was revealed that in
her last illness she would suffer from them all.

That was her own interpretation of her famous vision of the two
rainbows, on which she was minutely questioned by her friend the doctor
Juan de Castillo.

"I found myself," she told him, "surrounded by a dazzling light, in the
midst of which was a many-coloured rainbow. Beyond that was another,
just as beautiful, which bore in its centre a cross dripping with blood.
Behind them both and filling all the space they occupied was the Divine
Humanity, which formed as it were the background to the picture."

Until then in her visions she had seen only Our Lord's head and
shoulders, apparently at some distance. But now he was close to her and
visible from head to feet. A fire radiated from him which seemed to
consume her soul, filling it with such bliss that she thought she had
left this world and was already in heaven. Then she saw those celestial
scales which appear in most representations of her, on which the Saviour
"as if he had wished himself to take charge of such a delicate
operation," weighed her sufferings against her graces. When they were
exactly balanced she heard him say, "Suffering and grace are equals, and
grace is given in proportion to pain. The cross is the true and only way
to heaven."

She had already put these words into the mouth of St. Catherine of
Siena, when in the course of some earlier illness a sympathetic friend
had asked her why she did not beg her heroine for a little respite.
"What would be the use? I know beforehand what she'd say. She'd ask me
if I expected to go to heaven by any other way than the way of the
Cross."

Dr. Castillo questioned her with theological minuteness on the details
of her vision. What were the colours of the two rainbows? Under what
similitude did grace appear on the scales? When Our Lord spoke was his
voice audible in her ears or only in her heart? Her answers to these
questions are all in the vague, struggling terms of one trying to
transpose a supernatural spiritual experience into the limitations of
the natural and physical. The colours of the rainbows were so many, so
varied, so different from earthly colours that she could not describe
them. Grace had "no physical shape or beauty. Without being God himself
it was like God," while the divine voice had been "like a ray of light
in my soul, leaving there the impression he wished to give me".

The impression that she herself gathered from this vision was of her own
imminent death in conditions of great agony. She warned Maria de la
Massa that she would die in her house: "And there is one thing I beg of
you. When I am all dried up with fever and beseech you for a cup of cold
water, please do not refuse me." This pathetic plea was so unlike Rose
that her friend was astonished as well as deeply moved. She readily gave
the promise, which she afterwards broke. When the time came and Rose,
burning with fever, made her request, she dared not fly in the face of
medical orders and was forced unwillingly to deny it. Rose understood
that she must accept her share of the pains of Calvary, and all she did
was to murmur with her parched lips: "_Sitio_--I thirst."


Her illness, which came upon her suddenly one night, completely baffled
the physicians. Most of her biographers regard this as a proof of its
supernatural origin, but if we consider the state of medical knowledge
at that time--when the circulation of the blood had not yet been
discovered and the body was still an affair of "humours"--it seems
unnecessary to turn to the miraculous for its frustrations. The wonder
is that the doctors were able to do as much as they did in the way of
diagnosis and alleviation. The various accounts, with their long list of
symptoms, suggest, as in St. Catherine's case, a breakdown of the entire
system through poisoning from the kidneys, and the marvel is that it had
not happened years earlier.

From the first there was no hope of her recovery. To have hoped would
have been to fly in the face of religion as well as medicine, for the
saint herself had announced that this was her last illness, giving the
exact date of its end, and making all the dispositions of a dying
person. She made a general confession of her whole life's sins, received
the viaticum and extreme unction, renewed her religious vows and asked
to have her scapular spread upon the bed. She then asked for all the de
la Massa household to be brought into her room, the servants as well as
the children, and with touching humility begged their pardon for all the
inconveniences caused them by her unusual way of life. Then she thanked
them for their care of her--"For two days more you'll have this heavy
burden, and I'll ask God that you do not lose the fruits of your long
patience."

Everybody cried, but Rose herself was joyful. She was going to her
Bridegroom, and going to him directly, without making any dark detours
in purgatory. Of that she was certain. Hearing two women talking at her
bedside and one of them proclaiming that God was merciful in allowing
souls to come to him that way, "and as for me, I desire nothing better,"
she broke into the conversation: "As for me, I carry my hopes higher.
Jesus Christ is my Bridegroom, and such a favour, though it would exceed
my merits, would not exceed his power."

One might think that if any human being could claim to have had her
purgatory here on earth it would be Rose. Nevertheless, she had made
what was at that time a very startling utterance. Contemporary ideas on
the after-life were tough. Divine Truth, though itself eternal, takes on
the reflections of the various ages through which it travels on its
passage through time, and Rose's age had an eschatology which our own
has softened almost to pap. Certainly the idea of hell was no
stumbling-block to the faithful. Everyone was afraid of hell, even the
good and the devout. The Renaissance had not brought scepticism to the
lands of the Spanish Main, and it was in a very far country that a poet
could sing:

            "I have a sin of fear that when I've spun
          My last thread I shall perish on the shore. . ."

The fear of extinction is probably the mortal fear of a generation that
has learned to doubt. In the ages of faith, which in Lima were extended
well beyond their European end in the sixteenth century, it was the idea
of hell which absorbed all the unresolved fears of the psyche, fears
cast not by Calvinism but from those shadows whence Calvinism had
sprung, blind fears which had lost the lights of hope and reason. To
such terrified souls purgatory would be not a threat but an escape and
the hope of avoiding it a challenge amounting almost to blasphemy.

But Rose trusted in her Bridegroom, and as death drew near her happiness
grew greater. Like St. Catherine of Genoa, she had in the midst of her
pain and fever reliefs of ecstasy, and on her return from one of these
she said to her confessor: "Oh, Father, if my time wasn't so short I
should have such beautiful things to tell you." Her physical sufferings
decreased as her body weakened, till at the end she was left lying only
in great exhaustion. Both her parents were at her bedside, though her
father, who himself was seriously ill, had had to be carried into her
room. She asked for their blessing and also begged that of her adopted
parents, the two de la Massas. She was so clear in her mind, that Father
de Lorenzana thought she would last some hours longer and wished to
defer his final blessing till the next day. But Rose assured him with a
smile that the next day she would be very far off.

It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Bartholomew, and she knew that
she would not outlive the striking of the hour. She begged the watchers
to lift her off her bed and lay her on the floor, so that like her
Bridegroom she should die on wood. When they refused, she turned for the
last time to her faithful Ferdinando, who had so often helped her to
fulfil the strange demands of her sanctity, and asked him to take away
her pillow. He did so, and her head found the cross on the wooden frame
of the bed. In her hand was a blessed candle, and she signed herself
with it as the clocks began to chime. From the belfries of Lima's
innumerable churches midnight went out in twelve strokes over the city,
and when the last had sounded she repeated three times the holiest Name,
adding the prayer "Be with me," and was gone.



                                  15

"Almighty God, giver of all good gifts, Who didst will that blessed
Rose, a flower of purity and patience, nourished betimes with the dew of
thy grace, should blossom in the far Indies, grant that we thy servants
may hasten to follow where the fragrance of her passage beckons us, and
so deserve, we likewise, to become a perfume offered to the Father by
Christ."

Thus the collect for her feast takes us back into the garden where her
soul grew and sweetened the streets of a city. Rose's canonisation was
not delayed like that of St. Catherine of Genoa, but followed swiftly on
her death, almost as a necessity. The scenes that attended her funeral,
when popular devotion reached such a pitch of delirious obstruction that
her body had finally to be buried by stealth, prolonged themselves into
a public cultus which was with difficulty halted by the decree of Pope
Urban VIII. Her post-mortem miracles, including two raisings from the
dead, were noised through the city of Lima which had also been swept by
a religious revival that spread from it throughout Peru, indeed
throughout the whole of the "far Indies". It would seem as if she had by
her penances made satisfaction for the sins of the Conquistadors and
redeemed her country's unhappy past. Certainly new tides of penitence,
purity and charity washed over those bloodstained cities and idolatrous
villages. Once more the confessionals were thronged, though this time it
was not in fear of a threatened catastrophe, but out of love for a
gracious, humble, childlike presence which still seemed to dwell among
them.

The Dominican order was not slow to act and her "cause" was set in
motion very soon after she died. According to the decree _Caelestis
Hierusalem cives_ fifty years must elapse between death and
canonisation, but almost as soon as this period was over the final
ceremony was performed, and Isabella Rosa de Santa Maria de Flores
became St. Rose of Lima and patron of the New World.

"Hail, St. Rose! Hail, joy of Lima, precious pearl of the Pacific, pure
gold of Peru, precious balsam of the Andes and inestimable treasure of
America!" In these terms, which we imagine would sound better in another
language, our little Rose is invoked from Baffin Land to Cape Horn.

_O Rose, fecisti viriliter_--Rose, thou hast done manfully. The antiphon
to the Magnificat of the second vespers of her feast brings out the
fiercer aspects of her character, as opposed to the fragrance manifested
in the Collect. Ferocity and fragrance . . . these express the two sides
of her difficult sanctity. Together they form that cross which she set
up in her childhood's first cell, the cross that was gaudy with feathers
and flowers. At first it must have looked almost like a child's toy, or
the ornament of a young girl's dressing-table; only a closer inspection
would reveal the hard, rough wood under all the colour and perfume.

During her lifetime Rose's penances were known only to a few. It was not
till the minute examination of her character and conduct required by the
canonisation process that they were revealed to those outside the little
circle of her intimates. No doubt it is mainly those penances which make
her such a difficult saint for our own day. We are tempted to look at
them from the psychological rather than the theological angle and to see
them as sadistic and abnormal. I have already suggested that their
ugliness is due to the simplicity of her nature which would not allow
her to reason against her own impulses or to make terms with sin. We
must further take into account the age in which she lived and the race
from which she sprang. It was an age of unbridled cruelty, legal
vindictiveness and domestic violence. This was so in all countries (it
would be an error to except our own, where Topcliffe had just gone into
comfortable retirement), but in addition Rose belonged to a nation which
has always carried a strain of cruelty, and even today can find
excitement rather than sickness in the sight and the smell of blood. In
her cruelty to herself Rose offered up and sanctified the cruelty of her
age and nation. Her cruelty sanctified because its impulse was the
hatred of sin and its victim was none other than herself. To all that
was not herself, whether human, animal, bird or insect, she extended a
measureless love.

But even apart from her penances Rose is not an easy saint. One obstacle
to any present-day devotion comparable to that which she enjoyed in the
past is the absence from her life of almost any form of action or
achievement. It is true that she was a mystic, but the lives of most
mystics have borne fruit in some definite act or message. St. Teresa not
only wrote her treatises but reformed the Carmelite order, St. John of
the Cross left his poems and a map of the spiritual life, St. Margaret
Mary brought into prominence a doctrine which till then had been only in
the background of the Church's theology and based on it a popular
devotion. Rose's own heroine, St. Catherine of Siena, had varied her
life of contemplation with some remarkable excursions into the
ecclesiastical politics of her day, while even St. Catherine of Genoa,
that lonely soul, left behind her a body of doctrine in addition to
having worked for years as matron of a hospital--a circumstance more
likely to impress the modern mind than Rose's private ministrations to
harlots and distressed gentlewomen.

If only when she worked in her parents' garden she had created a new
variety of her own name, or if even a shred of her embroidery remained
in some Peruvian reliquary. . . . We have nothing of her but some notes
which she may have written and some Latin poems which she almost
certainly did not write. Her visions too lack any wide significance.
They are entirely personal and miniature. I own that I find them more
convincing than many larger canvases. The tiny child running about
between the lines of Louis de Grenada's Interior Prayer, the distant
oval of Our Lord's head and shoulders, carry for me the same conviction
as that voice "like a horse-fly in a bottle" among all the lights and
spiritual elegances of Fatima. But though they must have brought the
joys of heaven into the purgatory she had sought on earth, they have no
special message for our own day, any more than they had for hers. They
were her private property, her personal reward.

She seems to be essentially a saint more easily seen from heaven than
from earth. Indeed there is something of the heavenly visitant about
her--her beauty, her innocence and her horror of sin. Imagine if it were
possible for such a being to come among us, would not its reactions be
very much like hers?--a horrified recoil from the mess we have made of
so much beauty and a movement of love and pity towards all the sufferers
from that mess, whether partakers of our own humanity or of the natural
order we have betrayed. I am not suggesting that her soul had different
origins from any other, but as it most wonderfully and beautifully
preserved its innocence, it was indeed among us as a heavenly stranger.

"The fragrance of her passage. . ." In days of old it was thought that
the sweet scent of flowers was a disinfectant, a protection against
disease; so we can see our Rose as a nosegay carried through the wards
of a hospital, followed by the turning faces of the sick. Even though
our vision of her day may have become blurred by facile assumptions and
too ready drifts with changing fashions, we still may "follow where the
fragrance of her passage beckons us" and find through her some of the
sweets and sunshine of the garden we have lost.





_Thrse Martin_



                                   1

"_On voit bien que nos clotres sont balays par une enfant de quinze
ans_."

The Mother Superior's cold, inspecting eye travelled over the wall to
where a spider's web had escaped the novice's broom. Then she walked on
towards the chapel.

It was cold. There was a chill in the air from the snow that had fallen
yesterday. The child had been so pleased. She loved the snow, she said,
but had scarcely dared hope that a fall of it would decorate the day of
her clothing, for the temperature had been unseasonably high. She
regarded the fall as a special grace, a delicate compliment from her
betrothed. Well, it might seem like that to her, but it was a compliment
her elders could well have done without. Mre Marie de Gonzague
shivered. Of course when you were as young as that you did not feel the
cold, but the day would come when little Thrse Martin would not be so
glad to see the snow.

Little Thrse Martin . . . . she had known her from childhood, though
that did not mean for very long. What funny little letters she used to
write--signing herself "Thrse de Jesu", as if she pictured herself
treading in the footsteps of the greatest of all Carmelites. She had
always longed to enter Carmel, or rather she had longed for it ever
since her favourite sister Pauline had entered the order. She had not
missed Marie, the eldest, so much. Now there were three Martin girls in
the Carmel at Lisieux, and if the old man were to die (and he had had
two strokes) there would be four, for she knew that Cline wished to
enter and was withheld only by the claims of home. Four sisters in one
Carmel--was not that too many? It would surely be difficult to
spiritualise so much family affection. . . . The Reverend Mother rebuked
herself. Who was she to talk of difficulty when it came to the things of
God? The God who could send snow out of a warm air . . . . again she
folded her lips. The child was so young--young even for her age and that
was too young for Carmel. But she had been frantic to enter at fifteen.
She had appealed to the bishop--she had appealed to the Pope; or rather
she had made a personal assault upon him . . . Reverend Mother
shuddered. Would she ever forget the story she had heard so many times
of what had happened on that pilgrimage? It seemed wrong that such
presumptuous daring should be rewarded. But it had been rewarded. Little
Thrse Martin was safe in Carmel, and clothed as a novice though still
only a child--a child whom no one apparently had taught how to use a
broom.

Mre Marie de Gonzague was now in chapel and on her knees. She begged
God on her knees to forgive her and change in her this spirit of
criticism and antagonism, to help her to resist the temptation to
dislike this girl who was now one of her own daughters. Oh, my God, help
me to be patient, help me to be just, help me to love little Thrse
Martin.



                                   2

To turn from Isabella Rosa de Santa Maria de Flores to Thrse Martin is
nearly as big a change as that from Peru to northern France. These two
seem as unlike each other as a couple of maiden saints could possibly
be. Since we have now approached the toy-cupboard of the Infant Jesus we
may perhaps without irreverence hear them singing to each other across
the continents and the centuries--

   "I'll tak' the high road and you'll tak' the low road
   And I'll be in heaven before ye."

St. Rose was a saint in the grand manner, a mystic, an ascetic, a
visionary, a prophet, a worker of miracles. St. Thrse professed to
have had no extraordinary experiences and certainly worked no wonders in
her lifetime. Rose was the enemy of her own life in ferocious penances,
yet her soul so fortified her body that it survived its maltreatment for
thirty-one years. Thrse practised no austerities beyond those required
by the order to which she belonged, yet died unresisting of a Normandy
winter's cold. Rose was a recluse and a solitary, who nevertheless
reigned as uncrowned queen of a city; while Thrse lived either with
her family or with her fellow Carmelites and was known to few outside
those circles. Rose left behind her no special message, no body of
doctrine, no revelation--her sanctity rests on "the fragrance of her
passage" through this world. Thrse passed through it almost unnoticed,
but bequeathed it a legacy that has made the fortune of countless humble
souls. Finally, Rose is not a saint for imitation. She stands for
impetration only, a victim for the sins of others, a sign in the
spiritual heavens, a strange, starry light. But Thrse has proclaimed
herself a model that all can imitate and leads the way to heaven by a
road on which even the smallest child can follow her.

The country we have just entered suggests another simile and we may
compare Rose to some wine of rare vintage, the _grand vin_ bottled at
the chteau for a special occasion, while Thrse is the _petit vin_
drunk at the family table. The first is for connoisseurs only; no one
would dream of using it merely to quench his thirst. Nor is it a wine of
which one can drink more than a small quantity--it would probably
disagree with a delicate stomach. St. Rose is such a wine, she is not
for the ordinary drinker, but St. Thrse declared herself expressly as
the friend of the ordinary man, the man who is not a connoisseur, who
does not understand the subtleties of holiness, who would be afraid to
search very deeply into the things of God. Yet such a man has his
thirst, and little Thrse Martin offers him a small wine _pour le
soif_.

When we leave interior things and study the externals of these lives,
the differences are not so great, indeed there are certain resemblances.
It is true that Rose was a well-born though impoverished lady, whereas
Thrse was only a _petite bourgeoise_ whose family had always been
comfortably off. Nevertheless the two girls have some remarkable points
in common. One is their childlike approach to the things of God. With
Thrse this is deliberate, a part of her doctrine, which is indeed an
elaboration of the text beginning: "Except ye become as little children
. . . ." With Rose the outlook seems unconscious, expressing itself in
the clarity of a child's vision and the uncompromising directness of a
child's innocence. Both were lovers of the Holy Child. Thrse bore his
name in Carmel, while St. Rose more sensationally received his daily
visits and wore his nuptial ring. Both young women, too, loved
flowers--Rose using them realistically as a means of livelihood, Thrse
using them symbolically to describe herself and her work. Rose is one
saint's name while the other calls herself the Little Flower and
promises a shower of roses. But here once more a contrast is at work.
Rose's life suggests little of her namesake save the fragrance, and if
we were to choose a floral symbol for her we should take one of those
huge, rare, waxy, orchidaceous lilies that lighten the darkness of some
tropical forest; while Thrse is the "_petite fleur blanche_" which her
father picked one afternoon in his garden--a little white rock-plant
growing on a wall, a small affair to wear in the button-hole.

A last most significant resemblance in the exterior lives of these two
is the isolation in which they lived from their own times. With Rose the
isolation was natural. Born in a Spanish colony, the child of parents
themselves born in exile, at a time when communications were both
difficult and dangerous, she had only the most tenuous contacts with that
Old World far away across the ocean. In Europe the Reformation had been
followed by the Counter-Reformation, yet in Rose's life there is no trace
of either. She did penance for the sins and idolatries of Peru, but
apparently never thought of offering herself as victim for the heresiarchs
of Europe and their dupes. Her world was entirely the New World of the
Americas, as remote from the changing fashions of Europe in religion as in dress, a world in which idolatry and not heresy was the enemy, a world
which ignored not only the Reformation but the Renaissance and carried its religion still along the straight line of the ages of faith.

Thrse's isolation was not natural but artificial. She belonged to that
social group which the French have called "_les emigrs de
I'interieure_", a group largely provincial and middle-class which for
half a century had held itself aloof from the main social, political and
artistic life of the country, inhabiting its own little private world of
domesticity and religion.

Its withdrawal had followed almost immediately on its emergence, which
was later than that of the English middle class, and it justified itself
against those already in the field by methods very different from those
of its British counterpart. The middle classes in England have always
had an important share in the political and cultural life of their
country. Their defences have been social rather than moral, the ramparts
of a class-consciousness which in most countries is to be found only in
the aristocracy and the proletariat. The group from which our saint
comes is really a group within a group, a sub-section of the
_bourgeoisie_, and its withdrawal from the rest is on moral rather than
on social grounds. It disapproved of contemporary morals, of
contemporary politics and literature and art, so it cut itself off from
them--in the case of politics almost completely, while in the cultural
field it clung to conventional, out-moded forms which it had purged of
all that it considered morally undesirable. It was an escapism which
impoverished both camps. The main body of political and artistic life
lost some valuable ideals and restraints, while the fugitives themselves
suffered all the losses incidental to their seclusion.

Our saint was born into an inconceivably narrow society. We know from
her own statement that she was not allowed to read a newspaper (her
violation of this rule on a certain occasion had some important results)
and she certainly never went to a theatre or to a dance, while even a
game of cards was regarded with suspicion. She had literary and artistic
gifts which though not of a very high order would in her British
counterpart almost certainly have involved some contacts with the
literature and art of her day. Thrse was a contemporary of Renoir,
Czanne, Van Gogh, Verlaine, yet there is no evidence, external or
internal, that she had ever heard of them. It is true that she entered a
Carmelite convent at the age of fifteen, but drawing, painting and
writing were all part of her occupations there without apparently
involving standards much higher than those of a Christmas card.

It would seem, then, that Thrse was not only a little flower, but a
little flower growing in a very little garden, a prim, neat, safe
small-town garden, where a tiny square of grass is mown and nothing is
attempted that the neighbours might disapprove of. This is the soil from
which she sprang and spread over the world.



                                   3

The reason no doubt is the same as that of all flourishing growth--a
fertile soil, a favourable climate. Thrse is the only one of my four
subjects who comes from a really pious home. The homes of the three
others were religious in the sense that religion was taught and
practised in them all. Caterina Fiesca, Cornelia Connelly and Rosa de
Flores were all brought up in good moral surroundings and the orthodoxy
of their day, but we have no evidence of any extremes of piety in their
families, whereas of the Martins it might be said that they were a
household of saints only one of whom was canonised.

Both Thrse's father and mother were exceptionally holy, and both had
at one time desired a religious vocation. Here indeed we have "a
sleeping clergyman". Louis Martin had tried in vain to enter the
monastery of Great St. Bernard, while Zlie Gurin had been refused by
the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. They met and married and all their
five daughters became nuns.

Thrse's sanctity begins with an old soldier living at Alenon. We know
little about Monsieur le Capitaine Martin except that "it was impossible
without emotion to hear him recite the Paternoster". Unlike that other
old soldier who fathered St. Rose, he was not poor, nor was he
particularly well-born. He came of good, sound _bourgeois_ stock and his
children adopted superior trades rather than professions. His favourite
son, Louis, became a jeweller in Alenon--that is after he had recovered
from the disappointment of his rejection by the Prior of Great St.
Bernard. It was really not so much a rejection as a postponement. He had
not finished his studies so he was told to go back and do so before he
applied again. But those few months must have shown him a different way
of serving God, for he had made no further attempt to leave the world
when fifteen years later his marriage took place.

The reasons for Zlie Gurin's rejection by the Sisters of Mercy are not
recorded, but the occasion seems to have convinced her that her true
vocation lay in marriage and motherhood. Her great hope now was for a
son who would become a missionary priest. . . . This hope must have
received as heavy a blow as the first when on their wedding night her
husband told her he wished them to live as brother and sister.

The story of the "white" marriage in which the wife is the reluctant
partner and the husband the wooer who finally establishes normal
relations used to be a fairly popular subject in fiction; but in this
case the reluctance was the bridegroom's and it was the tact and
patience of the bride which in the end persuaded him that her ideal was
the more supernatural of the two, as well as obviously the more natural.
Many years were spent in trying to give this missionary to God. Four
daughters were born before, after many tears and prayers, there came a
son. He lived five months. More tears, more prayers, and another son who
lived only a few months longer. After that we are told that the parents
ceased to pray for a missionary. Then their last child was born--the
child who is now the Patron of all the Missions.

She was christened Marie Franoise Thrse, and as in the case of St.
Rose her name became an early subject of controversy. Zlie Martin's
elder sister was a Visitation nun at Le Mans, and Thrse's middle name
was doubtless intended to please her. But Sister Marie-Dosithe was not
content and wished the child to be habitually called Franoise, whereas
the parents preferred to call her Thrse. It was the battle between
Isabella de Herrara and Maria de Flores fought again on more decorous
lines, and when the baby became ill soon after her christening the
Franoise party gained a temporary advantage. "You must invoke St.
Francis de Sales," wrote Sister Marie-Dosithe, "and promise him that if
my little niece recovers she shall be called by his name." One cannot
repress a shudder at the thought of the kindly, courteous, debonair St.
Francis (a saint who is "meek" in the true sense of that much misused
word) being used for this sort of pious blackmail. As might have been
expected, he would have nothing to do with it, and when the mother,
broken with anxiety, decided to make the promise, but only if and when
all hope was lost, her child immediately recovered.

Zlie Martin was a woman with a job. She had her own lace-making
business in Alenon, which she continued even after her husband had
retired and given up his jeweller's shop. He was ten years older than
she, but she was the first to die, after an operation for cancer, when
Thrse was only four years old. The little girl's memory goes back far,
very far, and in her autobiography she has much to say about her mother
and obviously remembers her death with sorrow. But in a family where the
eldest daughter is nearly old enough to be the mother of the youngest,
such a loss is not likely to have the domestic or psychological effects
that might follow it in a different sort of home. Zlie's place was
taken by the eldest daughter Marie, or rather it was shared between her
and the daughter next in age, Pauline.

To Thrse her sister Pauline had always been an almost heroic figure.
She day-dreamed about her as some children day-dream about the heroes
and heroines of their imagination. Whenever her mother asked: "What are
you thinking about?" the answer invariably was: "Pauline." And Pauline
was to be not only her heroine but virtually her mother for almost all
her life, first in the home where for many years she kept house for her
father and took charge of the younger children, and finally in Carmel
itself where as Mre Agnes de Jesu she is the "mre chrie" to whom the
classic _Histoire d'une me_ is addressed. "It is to you, my darling
Mother, you who are twice my Mother. . . ."

The Martins were an exceptionally devoted family and Thrse loved all
her sisters, even though she loved Pauline the best. Next to Pauline in
her affections came Cline, who was nearest to her in age, near enough
to be played with and quarrelled with; the confession to her mother:
"_J'ai battu Cline_," has the genuine nursery tone. Thrse was
obviously the dominant sister in spite of being the younger, but the
accounts show her as an amiable tyrant, only once descending to
rapacity. That was when, on being asked with her sister to choose some
dolls' clothes from a basket and having seen Cline modestly help
herself to a scrap of trimming, she calmly announced: "I'll take the
lot." She could not, however, be happy without Cline, and later on even
her life in Carmel was incomplete till this nearest if not dearest
sister (who alone of all the Martin girls seems to have cast a glance
towards the world) joined her there.



                                  4

But more than any of her sisters or than the mother she had lost Thrse
loved her father. We have already had two glimpses of him, but they are
not very illuminating, for they shed their light only on one side of his
character, a side which did not develop, since it embodied a
world-fleeing impulse that God did not wish to gratify. We have glanced
at the would-be monk and the would-be continent husband, and seen how he
renounced both these ideals for one which only a fanatic would consider
lower since it so plainly represents heaven's choice against his own.

Louis Joseph Stanislas Martin is the fourth member of that shadow
quartet which has been assembling behind our quartet in heaven. We have
already two saints' husbands and a saint's mother. Now we complete the
number with a saint's father. Freud has traced the idea of God to a
primitive father-complex. The Old Man of the prehistoric tribe has in
the course of the ages become the Father in Heaven. And though I am
given to understand that the theory is not much sounder
anthropologically than it is theologically, we must all recognise the
germ of truth that lies in it. A child's idea of God must inevitably be
conditioned by its idea of its own father. It has no other content to
put into the word when first it learns to pray. "Our Father" cannot be
so very different from "My father", and he becomes either a symbol of
love, care and kindness, or of severity, harshness and caprice.

For Thrse Martin fatherhood was a state made up altogether of goodness
and love. Monsieur Martin was not only the friend, counsellor and
companion of his children but the friend of all his little world. His
mind might be narrow but his heart was big with charity, and his
personal holiness makes him only a little less of a saint than his
daughter.

In nineteenth-century France, where even the rudimentary social services
that existed in our own country were unknown, every good man was still
his brother's keeper. Monsieur Martin held himself responsible for his
neighbour's welfare, and was always ready to help the unfortunate,
whether they deserved it or not. There is a story of his hauling a
drunken man out of the gutter where he was lying and helping him home
with one arm while with the other he carried his tools. Another story
lights up a gracious custom one hopes has not quite died out. When
Lonie Martin (the middle sister and the only one not to enter Carmel)
made her First Communion, her family took it upon themselves to "dress"
a poor child who was making hers at the same time. The custom, at least
in their case, went further and involved the child's presence throughout
the day in the home of her benefactors and her equal share of the First
Communion celebrations, including a dinner with a "_pice monte_". This
reminds us of an episode in Maxence van der Meersch's novel _La Pauvre
Fille_, in which a family living horribly in an unspeakable Paris slum
is sustained not only by the gifts of the charitable but by the manner
of their giving. One of the losses that must be set against the gains of
a modern system by which the state takes upon itself offices until
recently performed by individuals, is the loss of all that is contained
in the word charity.

It is a word that has lost caste with us. It has joined that
ever-lengthening list of words, all most significantly denoting virtues,
that have been twisted out of their original meaning, sometimes into
their very opposites. Thus candour, which once stood close to its
derivation in sweetness, is now only for the unpleasantly outspoken;
meek, which once meant the same as gracious, has now almost reached the
meaning of its own rhyme in weakness; while nice has broken out of a
fastidious discrimination into a vague, general sound of approval. Last
and saddest of all, charity has become the symbol of a degrading dole by
a superior person, instead of representing the highest form of
love--love of man in and for the love of God, as against the
intellectual loves of the "phil" prefix and the longing loves of Eros.
Who in our present meaning of the word would live on charity, and who in
its true significance would live on anything else?

It was charity which impelled Caterina Adorna to kiss the mouth of the
plague-stricken woman, and it was charity which impelled Louis Martin to
lift the drunken man out of the gutter and arm him home. Charity too was
the impulse of his love for his daughters, for only charity, having
loved them so much, could give them all to God--feeling only pride and
delight when one by one they left him to enter Carmel or the Order of
the Visitation. Without charity parental love can be the most possessive
of all the instincts, just as it can be one of the most foolish, the
most vain and the most blind. Monsieur Martin's love for his daughters
was none of these things. He loved them, yet he made no claims on them;
in his gentle way he ruled his family, but it was a rule of love. Can we
wonder that in Thrse's idea of God love had completely cast out fear?

Instead of fear was a contrition which, motivated by love, became that
perfect act which outstrips penance in the soul's return to grace.
Thrse herself tells of how one day as a very small child she was
"fooling about" on a swing when her father asked her for a kiss and she
refused to give it to him. Her sister Marie at once told her that she
was a naughty little girl, an idea which does not seem to have occurred
to her till then. But immediately she realised how she must have hurt
her father's feelings by what she had done, she was overcome with
sorrow, and as she ran to ask his forgiveness and give him the kiss she
had denied, "the whole house echoed with my screams of penitence".

"Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry and humbly beg pardon for all my sins
. . . ." So begins the familiar Act of Contrition, and St. Rose,
scrupulous and fearful in the shadow of her parents' capricious
ill-treatment, continues with the next phrase: "Because they have
deserved thy dreadful punishments," while St. Catherine embarks on her
four years of penance and reparation, "Because they have crucified My
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." But it is Thrse who has learned from
her father's love to complete and perfect the act with its final phrase:
"But most of all because they have offended thine infinite goodness and
mercy." As she runs through a house echoing with her "screams of
penitence", and throws herself into her father's arms to ask his
forgiveness and make reparation with a kiss, she spontaneously performs
that act which throughout her life will be the pattern of all her
returns to God.



                                   5

"One day God showed me an old tree laden with five lovely fruits about
to ripen, and ordered me to transplant it into my garden. I obeyed and
the fruits ripened one by one; the Child Jesus, as is told in a legend
of the flight into Egypt, passed five times and made a sign; the old
tree bent itself lovingly and each time, without complaint, let one of
its fruits fall into the hands of the Child-God. What a wonderful sight,
this new Abraham! What greatness of soul! We are only pigmies when
compared with that man."

Thus Monsieur Gurin wrote of his brother-in-law's coming to Lisieux,
which happened soon after the death of his wife. He wished to be near
the Gurins and to have their help in the bringing up of his family. He
was not a poor man, and was able to afford himself a pleasant villa on
the outskirts of the town.

Les Buissonets has always been one of the most personal attractions of a
pilgrimage to Lisieux. The very short time that elapsed between the
family's leaving it and Thrse's canonisation has allowed it to be kept
very much as it was in her day. Indeed, in this respect it can be
compared only with the otherwise so-different Haworth Parsonage.
Furniture, pictures, toys remain, and the trim little faade smiles on
the pilgrim as it smiled on Thrse. The place might well have been left
to speak for itself, but alas! has not been allowed to do so. The
statuary group in the homely little garden is a truly dreadful example
of what might be called the meringue complex in French ecclesiastical
art. Thrse and her father might be fashioned out of white sugar,
except that unfortunately they do not melt in the sun; nor do they
appear to have suffered from the bombardment which in the last stages of
the second world war destroyed most of the picturesque and interesting
old town. Their situation makes them even more distressing than the huge
white basilica (also spared) which hits the eye from a neighbouring
hill-top, but will no doubt in time weather down to something no more
unpleasant than the Sacr Coeur on the hill-top of Montmartre.

Thrse from the first was delighted with the garden, wherein she became
remarkably like St. Rose. No more than Rose did she like playing with
dolls--"_Je ne savais pas jouer  la poupe_"--but amused herself by
making tisanes and similar decoctions out of seed-vessels and the bark
of trees. Unlike Rose, however, she did not swallow these herself as a
penance, but gave them to her devoted father, who only pretended to
drink them. She also grew flowers, probably not so expertly as the older
saint, but enough to adorn the little altars that she built in corners
and decorated, much as Rose decorated the cross in her home-made cell.
Thrse was as full of piety as Rose, but her piety expressed itself in
play rather than penance. When the family had gone to evening service,
which she was too young to attend, she would light up her toy altar with
wax-vestas or saved candle-ends and recite the _Memorare_ with the
servant Victoire (the game was to see if you could finish the prayer
before the vestas burned out)--a daylight variant of Rose making and
carrying her wooden cross with the help of the servant Marianna.

Thrse's life may be said to have moved in a groove of piety. Religion
conditioned all that she did, her work, her play, her affections, her
ambitions. The Martins had no existence apart from it. The day started
with prayer and, for the elders, with Mass. In the afternoon Thrse
would go with her father for a walk which always included a visit to the
Blessed Sacrament in one of the town's churches. In the evening a game
of draughts would be followed by a reading from _L'Anne Liturgique_ and
some book which Thrse is anxious to assure us was interesting as well
as instructive. Then all the family went upstairs to pray with the child
before she was put to bed. No doubt they had their recreations--Monsieur
Martin we know was a keen fisherman, and there would be visits to the
Gurins and other members of their small circle, and sometimes
expeditions into the country. But in the main they led a cloistral life
in preparation for the cloister.

One by one the elder girls left their father and their home: first
Pauline, then Marie, both entering the Carmel at Lisieux; then Lonie to
join the Order of the Visitation at Caen, after a trial of the Poor
Clares which failed on account of her health; then Thrse herself for
Carmel, leaving only Cline to take care of the old man who knew that at
his death she would become his last gift to God.

His health had begun to fail some little time before Thrse's admission
to Carmel. He had had a paralytic stroke the year before, and though he
made a good recovery there was a second attack shortly before her
clothing. Whether the struggle to part with this dearest child--his
little queen, he called her--had been too heroic for his declining
strength we do not know. All we do know, because Thrse herself repeats
his words, is that one day on a visit to Alenon he had in the Church of
Notre Dame (the church where he was married) received such graces that
he cried out: "My God, it is too much. I am too happy. It isn't possible
to go to heaven in this way. I want to suffer for you. . . .": a
challenge not unlike that made by Cornelia Connelly in the garden at
Gracemere.

He was well enough to lead his little queen in her bridal dress of white
velvet and swansdown up the aisle of the Carmelite chapel on the day of
her clothing, but subsequent attacks paralysed him completely and veiled
at last the brightness of his clear and ardent mind. For three years he
was in a mental home, though he died at the home of his brother-in-law
who finally took charge of him. On his last visit to Carmel, helpless
and almost speechless, when his daughters bade him "_Au revoir_", he
pointed upwards and after a struggle to find words and then to utter
them, murmured: "_Au ciel_." Of his five daughters only Cline was with
him when he died.



                                   6

By writing her own autobiography, Thrse Martin has robbed the
hagiographers of their prey. _Histoire d'une me_ is written with a most
deceiving artlessness. From the style one might think that any future
biographer would at least have the pleasure of assessing characters and
incidents at their true value, and of giving as it were an adult shape
to the whole. But in fact Thrse has left very little of this to be
done. Not only has she acute powers of observation and a clear,
discriminating memory, but she is quick to interpret past events in the
light of future development, and she is extraordinarily keen-sighted in
regard to her own failings. "I saw that my great longing to make my
final vows was mixed with a great self-love. . . ." cuts away the ground
from under the critic's feet.

Thrse, trained from earliest childhood in the examination of
conscience, knows about herself all and more than anyone else is ever
likely to know. And what is more she is not afraid to say it.

The best approach to her life is to see it as the expression of her
doctrine, for Thrse, like St. Catherine of Genoa, is a saint whose
greatness lies not only in her life but in her teaching. Yet it would be
hard to imagine anything more remote from the _Vita et Dottrina_ than
_Histoire d'une me_. Not only is the latter a first-hand almost
unedited account, whereas the former is the compilation of good people
who were not always accurate or discriminating, but the whole width of
the kingdom of heaven seems to lie between the mysteries of those Hidden
Worlds and the simplicities of that Little Way. St. Catherine was a
mystic and an intellectual, and her life was the vehicle rather than the
expression of her teaching, whereas with Thrse her life _is_ her
doctrine; for that doctrine does not involve a theological or a
philosophical system, but a practical design for living. She calls it a
"little" way to signify its ordinariness, its simplicity, and its
possibility for all.

The word "_petit_" in French is not quite the same as "little" in our
language, and this has led to a certain amount of misunderstanding. Miss
Sackville-West in her sympathetic and illuminating study of the two
Teresas in _The Eagle and the Dove_ is obviously misled by her second
subject's use of diminutives and goes so far as to accuse her of
"_niaiserie_". Certainly if the word had no wider meaning in France than
it has in England the accusation would be justified. But in that country
it stands for a good deal more than size--otherwise should we have a
newspaper called _Le Petit Parisien_, to say nothing of _Le Petit
Paroissien_ in church and _Le Petit Precepteur_ in school? A French
working man will address his companion as "_mon p'tit_", for which the
best translation would be "old man" or "old chap". Indeed it has much
the same function as the English "old" in denoting familiarity and easy,
informal relations. And this I think is what Thrse wishes to convey in
most cases where she uses the word "_petit_". For her it means something
ordinary, something for the rank and file, for the plain man. After all
the dictionary gives "_les petits_" for the English "common people". I
am not suggesting that Thrse's "little" is never the same as ours, but
it certainly is not always so; it is rather her own special reference to
the ordinary ways of holiness as distinct from the extraordinary ways of
such saints as St. Rose and her own namesake in Carmel, St. Teresa of
Avila.

"You know, Mother," she writes in the ninth chapter of her
autobiography, "I have always wanted to be a saint; but alas! I have
always realised when I have compared myself with the saints that there
exists between them and me the same difference that we see in nature
between a mountain of which the summit is lost in the clouds and a grain
of sand which is trodden by the feet of passers-by."

Without measuring the depths and the heights quite as she does, we can
appreciate the difference between her and the "great" saints--the
visionaries, the ecstatics, the miracle-workers, the self-macerators,
the martyrs. Here indeed there is a contrast of great and small. But
"instead of being discouraged, I said to myself: 'God would not inspire
desires that cannot be realised; so I can in spite of my lowness, aspire
to sanctity'." It is notable that many saints besides Thrse have
deliberately set out to be what they are. Neither humility nor modesty
can hold them back from such a vast ambition. "It is for the glory of
God that we should be saints. God wills what is for His glory; therefore
God wills us to be saints. God wills me to be a saint. I will be a
saint. _Therefore I shall be a saint_." So writes Cornelia Connelly, and
if the truth were known most people who love God at all have at one time
had the hope and the desire to be a saint, and the tragedy of many lives
has been the loss of just this hope and just this desire. In a number of
cases the loss is due to discouragement by what should have been its
strongest inspiration. We read the lives of the saints and are
discouraged. We could never rise to anything like this.

It is for such souls as these that Thrse points out a simpler way to
heaven, a way for ordinary, commonplace folk, who have no special gifts
nor in their own opinion anything of what it takes to be a saint. There
are aristocrats in the kingdom of God but there are also the common
people--"_les petits_", in fact. For these she has found a little way to
heaven and provided a map in the story of her life.



                                   7

That map might be compared with a map of her own Normandy countryside--a
homely, friendly landscape, with no unusual features, no high peaks, no
large towns, no dense forests or dark gorges. Beyond Lima tower the
Andes and the Alps are not far from Genoa, but outside Lisieux are only
gently rolling hills and little valleys sheltering farms among their
orchards, a pattern of fields and "_bocages_" no bigger than our Sussex
shaws. It is not so much a contrast of great and small as of the
impressive with the commonplace, the exotic with the homely. So in the
map of Thrse's life we shall not look out for any remarkable
features, for great depths or heights or for anything startling or
strange. But everything is there, suffering, love, endeavour,
renunciation, everything that is required to make a saint.

When we come to look at her sufferings we do not find the rare and
terrible anguish which fell to the lot of Cornelia Connelly, nor the
equally rare and terrible penances self-inflicted by St. Rose. The
earthly sorrows of Thrse are the kind we all have to bear, chiefly the
loss of loved ones, while her spiritual sorrows are the lot of all who
aspire to any degree of holiness--misunderstanding, discouragement,
aridity and "temptations against faith".

Yet she suffered acutely. We cannot measure pain by its causes.
Toothache can be and often is more painful than a mortal disease, and
the loss of a parent or a sister may hurt more than the break-up of a
marriage or the blows of a leaded scourge. Thrse was only four when
her mother died, but the depth of her sorrow can be measured by its
effect on her character. From being a merry, carefree, rather
obstreperous little girl she became a quiet, shy one: "Immediately after
Mamma's death, as you know, Mother, my happy nature changed entirely. I
who used to be so lively and open-hearted became timid and gentle,
sensitive in the extreme; a single look was often enough to make me
dissolve in tears, it was best for no one to notice me; I could not
enjoy the company of strangers and was never merry except in my family
circle." This period of her life was the unhappiest, for she had not yet
found the spiritual strength that was to sustain her under later,
heavier sorrows. She calls it the second period and it lasted until she
was fourteen, prolonged no doubt by a further bereavement on the
departure of her adored sister Pauline for Carmel.

She had not expected this to happen so soon. She had always known that
one day Pauline would become a nun, but no doubt she had not thought she
would leave home before her eldest sister Marie who had the same
ambition. She had moreover misunderstood some words that Pauline had
uttered on the subject of their going away together "into a far
wilderness". She was shocked and grief-stricken when she found that she
had never intended to wait till Thrse was old enough to go with her.

The separation took place and it was as if the little girl had lost her
mother all over again. She fretted to such an extent that she became
ill, and so ill that she very nearly died. We need not regard this
illness as another instance of the "mystery sickness" beloved of the
hagiographers. There is, however, little doubt that pining and grief had
predisposed her to it by reducing her bodily resistance. "My life seemed
to me full of suffering and repeated separations. . . . I knew nothing
then of the joys of sacrifice. I was weak, so weak, that I regard it as
a great grace that I was able to endure without dying a trial well above
my strength."

This may seem exaggerated language. Pauline was not dead. She had only
as it were gone a few yards down the street, to a convent where she
could still be visited by her small sister, who moreover was already
forming in her mind the project of joining her there. But as we have
said before, pain cannot be measured by its causes, and those parlour
interviews did little or nothing to fill the gap in the little girl's
life. They were necessarily short, limited to a few minutes at the end
of the "_parloirs de famille_", and as Thrse owns that she spent most
of this time in tears, they cannot have been very enjoyable to either
party.

Thrse was very ill indeed. By sheer will-power she forced a sufficient
recovery to attend the clothing of her beloved sister, but next day she
had a serious relapse. She became delirious--"My bed seemed to be
surrounded by horrible precipices; certain nails fixed in the walls of
the room took in my eyes the terrifying shapes of great, black
carbonised fingers. . . ." She attributes this to "_le demon_", but
those, and they are many, who have lived through similar experiences and
seen innocent pictures and calendars become horrid shapes of hell, will
recognise as it were the "ordinary" workings of that demon, through a
body poisoned with fever and exhaustion.

All her life Thrse was to remember that illness with terror and its
cure with thankfulness and delight.



                                   8

We have now come to one of the few events in her life which might be
called preternatural. She had by her bedside a small replica of the
statue of Our Lady carved by the eighteenth-century sculptor Bouchardon
for the Church of St. Giles in Paris. It had belonged to her mother and
the whole family was still much attached to it. When the little girl
became ill her father asked for a novena to Our Lady of Victories. The
bedside statue bears no resemblance to that in the famous Paris church,
but the two are linked together both at the beginning and the end of the
story.

On the Sunday of the novena Thrse was so ill that for the first time
she failed to recognise her sister Marie, who had taken her mother's
place ever since Pauline entered Carmel. She lay in bed calling
piteously: "Marie! Marie!" but when her sister entered the room, "though
I perfectly well saw her come in", she was a stranger. Marie knelt down
weeping before the statue and prayed "with the fervour of a mother who
demands, who _will have_ the life of her child". Lonie and Cline who
were there too knelt down and joined in her prayer. "Marie! Marie!" The
sick child and her sisters were all calling the same name.

Then suddenly and wonderfully Thrse was herself again. She recognised
her eldest sister, she smiled, she talked, she cried with joy. All three
girls noticed the change in her, as they had noticed the look on her
face that preceded it. Marie in particular was convinced that not only
had her prayer been heard but that some miraculous favour had been shown
her little sister to account for that almost luminous look of ecstasy.

Perhaps unwisely she determined to find out. Thrse did not want to
tell her, but she was too young to be able to keep a secret from anyone
she loved, and bit by bit in response to Marie's coaxings her story was
told. The Blessed Virgin had smiled at her. Thrse had seen the statue
move, come towards her and smile. At that ravishing smile all her griefs
and sufferings had faded away and she had been filled with a joy that
might have been the joy of heaven.

Poor Thrse! She had not wanted to tell her secret, and now
all her vague fears and reluctances were to be justified. Marie had
asked her permission to tell the nuns on her next visit to Carmel, and
it was they who with what can only be described as pious pawings rubbed
the bloom off that exquisite experience so that "for four years the
memory of that ineffable favour became for me a real grief of soul".

When on her recovery she went to visit Pauline, now Sister Agnes of
Jesus, she found a crowd of nuns assembled with their Reverend Mother to
question her on the miracle. They probed and pried. Some asked her if
the Blessed Virgin was carrying the Holy Child, others if she was
accompanied by angels, and so on. "All these questions confused me and
hurt me; I could make only one answer: 'The Blessed Virgin looked very
beautiful. I saw her move towards me and smile at me.'"

The poor child, seeing her rainbow experience thus translated into the
plaster imagery of the ecclesiastical emporium, failed to recognise it
and thought that she had been lying. "If only I had kept my secret I
should have kept my happiness." She felt painfully humbled and conceived
a real horror of herself, "Oh God, you alone know what I suffered."

Here in my edition of _Histoire d'une me_ comes the footnote: "This
distress could be nothing but the effect of a mysterious permission of
God." Permission--yes, as always. Mysterious--no. It would have been
mysterious if any nature as sensitive and high-toned as Thrse's could
have endured all this spiritual vulgarity without shrinking. She was too
young to fight it, so she succumbed. For four years she was robbed of
what should have been the happiest moment of her life. Her deliverance
came when she was nearly fifteen years old, in that very church of Ntre
Dame des Victoires where the novena for her recovery had been said.
Pausing there at the outset of her pilgrimage to Rome in 1887, she found
graces that reminded her of those that had followed her First Communion,
and "it was there that my Mother the Virgin Mary _told me clearly that
it really had been she herself who had smiled at me and cured me_". At
once all her joy in the memory was restored. The colours flashed once
more on the butterfly's wings and the rainbow spanned the sky.

Was Thrse's cure miraculous in the strict sense of a divine
intervention in the ordinary ways of nature? Her illness was far from
being one for which there was no hope of recovery. As there is no record
of her receiving Extreme Unction she obviously was not considered in
danger of death. It was only the swiftness, the suddenness of the cure
which made it remarkable. This swiftness is a characteristic of all
preternatural cures, where often there is nothing surprising in the
recovery of the patient but in the suddenness with which it takes place.
As for the other circumstances of her recovery, they are allied to the
illness, when nails in the wall appeared as ghastly carbonised fingers.
The change was in herself--horror and hell changed to beauty and heaven
by her soul's contact with supernatural power. I see Our Lady's smile as
Thrse's own personal translation of an experience that in itself was
incommunicable, and all her later unhappiness as the result of her
attempt to communicate it.

Her only other preternatural experience is of a different kind and
consists of one of those apprehensions of the future which are not
uncommon. It is of earlier date than the adventure of the Smiling
Virgin; Thrse was only six years old when looking out of the window
she saw her father (then far away on a visit to Alenon) walking in the
garden. He walked as an old man, with bent and shaking legs, and over
his head hung a veil or cloth that completely hid his face. It is easy
to interpret the vision in the light of what happened later, of the
physical and mental disintegration that preceded his death. At the time
Thrse was bewildered and distressed. In vain kindly grownups told her
that she had seen the maid walking with her apron over her head. She
knew exactly what she had seen and could not forget it.

Afterwards she regarded the episode as a divine revelation of the
"precious cross" that was to come, but added the pertinent question:
"Why did God give this light to a child who if she had understood it
would have died of sorrow?" She was not aware that her experience,
though unusual, was not unique nor necessarily supernatural. Many of us,
not specially gifted spiritually or even psychically, have known what it
is to "dream true". The difference here lies in the fact that the child
was wide awake, and also, more significantly, in the many years that
were to elapse before the dream's fulfilment. Most cases of prevision
extend only a few hours in time, even a lag of days is unusual and here
we have years. Her report, of course, is written some time after both
events, but he would be indeed a sceptic who could doubt Thrse's word.



                                   9

These two contacts with the preternatural are her life's only
contribution to any sort of pious sensationalism, and are on a very
small scale when compared with the exploits of others in the same field.
It might be said that they are out of place in a life that professes to
display nothing out of the ordinary; to which the rejoinder is that most
people, if they are honest with themselves, will acknowledge that they
have experienced something of this nature--an answer to prayer which
verges on the miraculous or some contact, not obviously religious, with
a world existing outside space and time. Our model in such cases must be
Thrse's restraint and delicacy. To neither of her experiences did she
give any exaggerated importance. The change that came over her and
transformed her life is not to be attributed to the cure of her illness
but to something totally different.

Indeed after her recovery she was very much as she had been before, a
quiet, shy, ultra-sensitive girl, devoted to her family but slow to make
friends outside it. She was now fourteen and had been at school some
years, but had no close friends among her school-fellows. Moreover, she
had lately become a victim to scruples. These added to the sensitive
melancholy of her life, and when in her turn Marie left Les Buissonets
for Carmel, her state of mind was critical. Cline was too young to give
her the help and comfort she had found in her eldest sister, so in her
distress she turned to those members of her family who had known only a
few months of earth but must now have reached wisdom's full stature in
paradise. She begged the help of the two "missionaries" who with Hlne
and Melanie were in heaven. The answer came at once and her scruples
troubled her no more. But she was still a prey to that emotional
inflammation which if unchecked might have infected her soul with a
sickness very much more dangerous than that from which her body had just
recovered.

A family love which includes not only the living but the dead is unusual
even among the saints. Next to her love of God it was and remained all
her life Thrse's strongest passion. But at one time it had its
dangers. The youngest of so many adoring sisters, the petted darling of
a doting father, she had no inducement to grow up into a woman, and was
still, though nearly fifteen, obstinately remaining a child.

Her "conversion" is nothing else than the conquest of that debilitating
state of prolonged childhood into which she had fallen. In other words,
by God's grace she made herself grow up. Unlike St. Catherine's
conversion, the battle was fought in entire consciousness and the
victory won by a deliberate effort of the will. The occasion was so
trivial as almost to appear ridiculous. After the midnight Mass of
Christmas it was the custom of the Martin family to watch Thrse
examine with joy and excitement the treasures in the "magic shoes" that
like any other little French girl she had left on the hearth. Her
father's pleasure in her pleasure had lately become the best part of it
and she looked forward to his gaiety even more than to the pretty
trifles he would give her. This Christmas of 1886, as she ran upstairs
to take off her outdoor clothes, she heard him say: "All this is too
childish for a big girl like Thrse, and I hope this will be the last
year of it."

These words, she tells us, pierced her heart, and watching for the
inevitable tears, Cline urged her not to go down immediately: "You
would cry too much." But something had changed in Thrse; she did not
cry. With a violent effort she not only held back her tears but managed
to check the wild beating of her heart. She ran downstairs and went
through with all her old joyfulness the little ceremony now robbed of
all its joy. Her father laughed, Thrse laughed, and what was more for
the rest of her life she hardly ever cried again.

"A small miracle was necessary to make me grow up." Certainly the
Christmas Grace, as she calls it, seems a very small specimen in the way
of conversions, but the change it wrought in her was a big one. Extreme
sensitiveness need not necessarily be a sin but it can be a most
degrading imperfection, and Thrse confesses that hers had made her
"positively unbearable". From this event she dates the third period of
her life, the one most filled with graces. "In one moment the work that
I had been trying in vain to do for years was done. Jesus did it,
contenting himself with my goodwill. 'Lord, I have fished all night and
have caught nothing.' Even more merciful to me than he was to his
disciples, Jesus himself took the net and cast it, and drew it out full
of fish; he made me a fisher of souls."

She caught her own first fish very soon afterwards. Having discovered
God's power with her she was next to discover her power with God. We
know that Thrse was not allowed to read the newspapers, a prohibition
which we find mildly surprising when we realise that Monsieur Martin's
daily paper was _La Croix_, but the common talk of Lisieux had told her
about the multi-murderer Pranzini, now in prison awaiting execution.
Prominent in all the gossip that she heard was his impenitence. He
obstinately refused to make his peace with God, and Thrse was filled
with the fear that his soul would be lost. It is worth noticing that she
saw this soul not so much as that of a fellow creature in peril as the
precious treasure of her Saviour of which he was about to be robbed. As
far as Pranzini was concerned, Christ would have died in vain, and the
thought appalled her.

She determined to obtain the murderer's salvation. No milder statement
covers her prayer, and she felt convinced that it would be heard.
Nevertheless she asked for a sign. "Oh God, I am quite sure that you
will forgive poor Pranzini; I would believe it even if he did not
confess himself or show any sign of contrition, so much do I trust your
infinite mercy. But he is my first sinner, and because of that I ask
only a sign of repentance for my own consolation."

On the day after the execution she juggled delicately with her
conscience and opened the forbidden _La Croix_. Pranzini had indeed gone
to his death without confession or absolution, but at the very last
moment, when the executioners were dragging him towards the _bascule_,
he turned round, seized the crucifix which the priest was holding up,
and kissed three times the sacred wounds. The sign had been given.


                                  10

"My first sinner" . . . There is a touching innocence about those words
with which Thrse inaugurates a mission that is still in action nearly
sixty years after her death. From the moment when she knew that her
prayers had saved a murderer whose soul would otherwise almost certainly
have been lost, the longing to save souls fused with her earlier, vaguer
longing to enter Carmel. When later on, at her religious profession, she
was solemnly asked her reasons for leaving the world, she replied, "I
have come to save souls and above all to pray for priests."

Those who know little of the religious life often imagine a convent as a
place where timid men and women take refuge from the trials of the
world. I will not say that such a world-fleeing emotion is never the
basis of a vocation, but it is not likely to produce the best type of
religious, who enters a convent to work, either actively in some
Christian enterprise such as nursing or education, or spiritually with
tools of penance and prayer. No matter what may sometimes have happened
in the past, there is nothing in modern conventual life to encourage the
fearful or the lazy. The Carmelite order is one of the oldest and the
most austere. The convents for women are strictly enclosed and the
ordinary routine is a discipline of the utmost severity.

Thrse longed to enter Carmel, and to enter as soon as possible. She
was now fourteen and a half, and her life ever since the Christmas Grace
had taken on fresh tones of spiritual quality. She was like a fledgling
bird that is losing its down and sees every day a gay new adult feather.
Soon it will spread its wings and fly, and Thrse longed to fly, even
from her darling father.

In a scene that has been so perfectly described by herself that no one
would presume to describe it again she won his consent to enter Carmel
as soon as she was fifteen, if the necessary permission could be
obtained. This included the permission of her uncle, Monsieur Gurin,
and when Thrse had attached the little white flower her father gave
her to a picture of Our Lady of Victories, she set about obtaining it,
and did so at last, after a bad start in a downright refusal. She then
addressed herself to the even more intractable Church authorities.

Their answer can be guessed. What she asked was quite impossible.
Sixteen is the lowest age at which a girl can be accepted by a religious
order, and in the case of a very severe order like the Carmelites, the
age required is twenty-one. In vain Monsieur Martin took her for a
personal interview with the Bishop of Bayeux. The bishop was very kind
and fatherly, but he would make no promises. Before anything could
happen there would have to be an interview with the Superior of the
Carmelites, the mere thought of which brought to her eyes and cheeks the
tears that had now become so rare. Monsieur Martin had planned to take
his two younger daughters on a pilgrimage to Rome, and the bishop
considered this would be a very good test of her vocation. It was her
father who then told him that she would not hesitate to attack the Pope
himself on the subject if she had not already obtained the permission
she was asking.

So had they hatched this scheme together, or was a mere joke of Monsieur
Martin's responsible for his daughter's personal assault on His Holiness
Pope Leo XIII? This is perhaps the most startling episode in her life.
We can hardly compare her with a debutante in the British Court
accompanying her curtsy with a personal appeal to the Queen, for there
is an admixture of homeliness in the magnificence of the Vatican which
has no parallel in this country. But it was certainly a proceeding very
much out of order, and we are surprised that Thrse was able to get so
far as an argument with His Holiness before being forcibly removed by
the attendants.

The pilgrims approached the audience throne singly, and each knelt down
to kiss the Pope's foot and hand before passing on into an adjoining
room. The priest conductor of the pilgrimage, the Abb Rvrony, had
given orders that no one was to speak a word, but this did not make
Thrse falter by more than a look at Cline, who murmured: "Speak." She
spoke.

"Holy Father, I have a favour to ask of you. . . ."

The eagle head with its piercing eyes bent swiftly to her as she
repeated--

"Holy Father, in honour of your jubilee, allow me to enter Carmel at
fifteen."

At this the indignant vicar general of Bayeux interjected:

"Holy Father, this child wants to be a Carmelite, the question is being
examined at this moment by her superiors."

"Well, my child," said the Pope, "do what your superiors decide."

But Thrse now had her clasped hands on his knees.

"Oh, Holy Father, if you say yes, everyone will agree."

Still gazing at her fixedly he slowly pronounced these words:

"_Allons. . . allons . . . . vous entrerez si le bon Dieu le veut_."

Thrse, who seems completely to have forgotten her surroundings, would
have continued the argument. But things had now gone too far and the
spectators intervened. Two members of the Noble Guard took her by the
arms to lift her up, but required the help of the Abb Rvrony before
they could release her grip of the papal knees. Just as she was being
taken away, the Pope gently put his hand over her lips, which he may
have seen parting for further speech, then lifted it in blessing.

Poor little Thrse. No doubt she had embarrassed a number of exalted
personages, while she herself was humbled and disappointed by what I
hope I shall not be called irreverent for describing as an
ecclesiastical example of "passing the buck"--the final recipient being
_le bon Dieu_. It was in these last words of His Holiness that the only
comfort lay for her ardent spirituality. She still trusted in God.




                                  11

She was not disappointed--not in that last issue, though there were
lesser disappointments which show how much she was still a child.
Without the smallest regard for probabilities, she had set her heart on
being admitted to Carmel on the first anniversary of the Christmas
Grace, even at the very hour. She would not be fifteen till January the
second, but the anniversary meant everything to her, and she was
bitterly disappointed when the necessary permission (which in her
simplicity she had never doubted, in spite of all discouragements)
failed to arrive. It came on New Year's Day, which one would have
thought soon enough, but brought with it a further disappointment, for
Mre Marie de Gonzague, the Mother Superior, refused to admit her till
after Lent.

"I could not restrain my tears at such a long delay." One is tempted to
ask: "Why in such a hurry?" She could surely have waited three months
beyond her fifteenth birthday to start a life which might have lasted
another sixty years. Had she a presentiment that the years would not be
more than ten? In her eagerness we may see a twofold inspiration. One
part is the surviving child in her, for to a child three months can seem
eternity; the other and the strongest is her consuming desire to give
herself entirely to God. The sooner she gives herself the more she
gives, and she suffers all the thwarted generosity of a lover who longs
to give all but is compelled to hold something back--three months of
eating and drinking, of sleeping and waking, of walking and talking, of
reading and resting and praying and playing, three months of daily
experience, three months of life, three months of Thrse.

It was also no doubt discouraging to have this last prohibition come
from the convent itself, from the Mother Superior on whose goodwill and
good understanding her religious future, under God, depended. She might
have expected that Reverend Mother whom she had known from a child would
be delighted to receive her and would welcome her most kindly. A great
deal has been written about Mre Marie de Gonzague which suggests that
she did not really like Thrse Martin. Thrse herself tells us that
she treated her very severely. "I could never meet her without being
blamed for something," and it was before the entire community that she
made the remark: "_On voit bien que nos clotres sont balays par une
enfant de quinze ans_." Possibly she did not want to receive Thrse,
and did so only under pressure from her superiors; probably she thought
her too young and not improbably she considered two daughters from one
family enough for any convent. When Thrse entered there would be three
Martin girls and later possibly four. It looked as if the cloister might
well become a family affair.

Perhaps we ourselves may wonder how much family affection had to do with
Thrse's eagerness and haste. From very early childhood she had known
that Pauline would one day become a nun and had planned to go with her
when she left home for Carmel. When she found that Pauline would not
wait for her, the shock and disappointment were enough to make her ill,
and Marie's departure a few years later brought almost as debilitating a
sorrow. Was it not likely that such a warm-hearted, sensitive,
highly-strung girl as Thrse should be unable to face life without the
comfort and protection of her sisters and should take the shortest way
to be with them again?

We could of course argue that she left behind her as much as she went to
join--Cline, the sister next her in age and her closest companion, and
above all her adored and adoring father. No sister, however kind or
wise, could take his place, and from him the separation (which with
Cline might be ended by her own admission) must be life-long and
complete. But it is almost certain that her early longings for Carmel
contained a large admixture of her love for Pauline and Marie. After
all, was there ever such a thing as an absolutely pure motive? "Who
shall be found willing to serve God for naught?" I can think of only one
thus willing and he was the victim of a monstrous error--James Weller
when he said amen to his own damnation. One of the wonders of free grace
is the use that it can make of motives and instincts that are in
themselves only just worthy. In Thrse's case it had to work upon that
which in itself was good; and as fine materials lend themselves to finer
achievements than what is shoddy or defective, we have in her life the
rare sight of a truly supernatural family affection.

Her love for her sisters in Carmel need have caused Mother Marie no
apprehension, for it passed without apparent pain or struggle into the
paradisal world which St. John of the Cross describes when he writes to
Donna Juana de Pedraga: "All that is wanting now is that I should forget
you. But consider how that is forgotten which is ever present in the
soul." Thrse's letters to her loved ones outside Carmel and the notes
that passed between her and the loved ones within all express an
affection "as pure as it was particular . . . . fully accepted and
willed and acknowledged to its immediate object".[1] They are brimming
with family love transformed into heavenly love, a transformation which
does not prevent terms of endearment, nicknames or family jokes. The
type of convent where these freedoms are forbidden seems unsure of
itself in the supernatural field. With Thrse they are celestial
coinage, small change, but new-minted, clean and shining. Never is there
the slightest evidence of the Martins becoming an enclave within the
cloister, even after their number has been augmented by the admission of
their cousin Marie Gurin. During the last years of Thrse's life it
could have been said that the whole family was in heaven, some one side
of death and some the other but all equally supernaturalised citizens of
the kingdom of God.


[1] Von Hgel, _The Mystical Element of Religion_.



                                  12

With her entry into Carmel Thrse ends _L'Histoire Printanire d'une
Petite Fleur Blanche_ which makes up the larger part of _Histoire d'une
me_, the part written expressly for her sister Pauline. At that time
Pauline, otherwise Mere Agnes de Jesu, was Prioress of Carmel and had as
it were commissioned the work. But two more chapters were added later at
the behest of Mre Marie de Gonzague during her next term of office.
Mre Chrie becomes Mre Vnre, and the tone of the writing is
altogether more restrained and remote.

But Mre Marie was no longer the dragon guarding the treasure of
Thrse's first weeks in Carmel. The girl's humility and perseverence
had ended in removing her superior's distrust. There is little doubt but
that much of Mre Marie's severity was deliberately intended to
discourage a faltering vocation. If Thrse had entered Carmel on the
spur of her longing to be with her sisters or of a romantic infatuation
for convent life, the sooner she was taught to realise her mistake the
better. A child of fifteen is, humanly speaking, too young to know her
own mind, and in charity to her as well as the community, enlightenment
should come before she has made any irrevocable decision. So Mere Marie
de Gonzague scolded--"On the rare occasions I was with her for an hour I
was scolded almost all the time"--and postponed her profession eight
months (which was certainly not a sin against prudence), and though she
suffered much, in the end Thrse completely understood her and even
thanked her.

Apart from the scolding of Mre Marie, she found no difficulty in
adapting herself to convent life. She was entirely without romantic
illusions and must besides have been well informed by her sisters.
Anyway, "I found the religious life just what I had imagined, no
sacrifice surprised me." Yet it would be difficult to picture a greater
change from her comfortable life at Les Buissonets. It is true that she
had spent the last three months in training, but such mortifications as
she practised were entirely of the spirit. "Far from being like those
beautiful souls who from their childhood practise all sorts of
macerations, I made mine consist only of breaking my will, of refusing
to answer back, of doing little services without letting them be
noticed, and a thousand other things of this kind. By the practice of
these nothings I prepared myself."

She was wise indeed; yet one would have thought that some sort of
physical training was necessary for a life in which the body had to take
its full share of penance. In Carmel a rigorous fast was observed during
the most trying months of the year, the discipline was in regular use,
the beds were so hard that one would hardly imagine that sleep could be
found on them, and the corridors and cells were entirely unheated. Yet
Thrse accepted it all without flinching and almost without
comment--all except the cold.

This she considered one of the greatest trials of her religious life,
especially since she could not feel that it was willed by God, but was
due to an exaggerated rigorism in the interpretation of the Carmelite
rule--in her own words: "permitted by him, but not willed by him." We
have suggested that Cornelia Connelly found the bitterest of her
sufferings in the thought that as they originated in her husband's sin,
they could not be according to God's will, and here we have a situation
not unlike hers, though typically reduced in scale. Thrse could not
believe that a rule originally made in Spain where heating might rightly
be considered a luxury, or at least not a necessity, should be
rigorously enforced in the north of France through winters of rain and
snow. "Not to take into account differences in climate and diversities
of constitutions, was to tempt God and sin against prudence." St. Teresa
allowed heating only in the common room, where Thrse, having spent the
day "_transie de froid_", would warm herself for a few minutes before
making her long way to her cell through open cloisters and down a
freezing corridor, to arrive at last in an icy room where the only
warmth was provided by two thin coverlets.

One may well be amazed at the conservatism which refused to adapt to
such conditions a rule obviously intended to be no more than austere.
The explanation belongs, perhaps, less to the spirit of the cloister
than to the spirit which for several hundred years has kept so much
unchanged in our public schools. Knowing what she thought about it all,
we may wonder that Thrse did not complain till she was on her
deathbed--she could have obtained certain reliefs from the novice
mistress--but she wished to accept this penance without complaint,
recognising it as an important feature of her Little Way. The regular
penances of the religious life are not for "_les petits_" and though
naturally Thrse performed them according to the rule, she never seems
to have attached much importance to them and she would have very little
to do with corporal penances that the rule did not require. Once, having
injured herself with a sharp cross she had been wearing, she said: "It
would not have happened to me for such a trifle if God had not wanted me
to realise that the macerations of the saints are not for me, nor for
those 'little' souls who will follow the same way of spiritual
childhood."

But the cold is a mortification for all, however lowly; indeed it is for
many, for most, a penance that must be accepted rather than sought. It
is the penance of "_les petits_", of the poor, of the common man. So
Thrse endured it for nine winters without complaint. As a child she
had loved the snow. "What a delicate attention!" she cried when it fell
unexpectedly on the day of her clothing. But as the years wore on and
her health wore down under the fierce rule, she felt the cold more and
more until it became a thing of absolute dread. Yet it was not till she
lay dying of its effects that she protested.

She did not protest in vain. Authority has since intervened and ordered
that at least the corridors of a Carmel shall be heated where the
climate requires it. But for her, and for others, the concession came
too late. No doubt it was a divine inspiration that made her endure in
silence till the enemy had done its work, for Thrse's effective
ministry did not begin till she had left this earth. If she had not died
in 1897 she would possibly now be still alive, for she would not yet
have reached the age of eighty, an unknown nun in the Carmel of an
unknown town in France. How much of her Little Way would she have been
able to carry through a long life? Might not the inevitable changes of
growth and experience have removed at least some of the bloom of her
"spiritual childhood"? These are idle questions, for obviously no one
can answer them. But if it was heaven's will that she should die young
in order that her life and teaching should become effective, we can see
in her uncomplaining endurance of an almost intolerable situation the
weapon which our weak human nature is sometimes allowed to put into the
hand of God.



                                  13

Thrse's attitude to death is that of the saints. Just as St. Catherine
of Genoa loved everything that reminded her of death, so Thrse
rejoiced when a sudden haemorrhage announced the presence of a disease
that might be fatal. Such an attitude is entirely logical in one to whom
death is not the closing but the opening of a door. She did not see
death as the end of all she had accomplished and enjoyed in life, but as
the introduction to new powers and sweeter joys.

From material things she was completely detached, though not with the
negative detachment that comes of renunciation. She is a glowing example
of St. John of the Cross's "Spiritual Man", who "has greater joy and
comfort in creatures if he detaches himself from them; and he can have
no joy in them if he considers them as his. He . . . rejoices in their
truth . . . . in their best conditions . . . . in their substantial
worth." So Thrse, living in a strictly enclosed convent, continued to
love her family, to appreciate her food, to draw and paint and write
verses and letters to her friends, remaining all the while not only
detached from these things but from those far more subtle attachments of
the religious life which can be just as strong and just as dangerous as
the attachments of the most hardened sensualist.

Her attachments were not of this earth, and death meant nothing but her
removal to where her treasure was. She had always thought that she would
die young, and "the hope of going to heaven gave me transports of
happiness". But it was no selfish happiness, for just as she foretold
her early death--"I will die soon," she had said in the April of 1895,
while still in perfect health, "I don't mean in a few months, but in two
or three years at the most; I know it by what is happening in my
soul"--so she foretold her intention to spend her time in heaven doing
good upon earth. The conviction of this post-mortem activity is one of
the most remarkable aspects of her last illness. "I feel that my mission
is about to begin, my mission to make God loved as I love Him, to give
my Little Way to souls . . . . No, I could not take any rest until the
end of the world."

The simplicity and directness of this belief robs it of any shade of
presumption. Thrse spoke as she _knew_, and there is something of a
child's trust and innocence in her "_vous verrez--tout le monde
m'aimera_". Her conviction that she was going to heaven by a very humble
way, that because she was too small to walk up so many stairs she had to
be picked up and carried, would prevent any feelings of pride. Hers is a
very humble boast, which as such has been abundantly fulfilled.

Nor did her readiness to die make her either morbid or insensitive in
the face of death. She collaborated joyfully with all the efforts, both
medical and spiritual, made towards her recovery. Indeed, during a
period when summer and a more generous diet had greatly improved her
health, she was filled with the hope that she might be well enough to go
out to the Carmel at Hanoi, for she had always longed to be actually in
the mission field. But when a novena to the venerable Thophane Vnard
(the missionary priest and martyr to whom she had a special devotion)
ended only in a relapse she became convinced that a longer journey lay
ahead of her than the trip to China.

It was while thus poised between earth and heaven that she gave her
novices the doctrine of her Little Way. For some time now she had been
novice mistress, a post that would normally be given to a mature and
seasoned nun. Her holiness and strength of character had at last removed
the reproach of her youth. She was no longer the child who did not even
know how to sweep a floor, but one sufficiently grown in wisdom to be
trusted with the training of others in the most difficult of all lives.

She must have been a welcome guide during those first testing months.
Not only had she herself suffered as a novice, but her natural sweetness
of manner would be honey for the bitterest pill of rebuke. Not for her
the scolding of Mre Marie de Gonzague, but a delicate, unobtrusive
study of her pupil's character. Nor had she any unstretchable rules or
insatiable ideals. She aimed at the sanctification rather than the
renunciation of natural tendencies and affections. "I do not understand
saints who do not love their families" was a pronouncement which must
have been balm to many a homesick girl half-ashamed of the agonies of
her first separation.

She is also one of the few saints who have shown definite signs of a
sense of humour. To a novice who was always melting into tears, she
suddenly held out the little mussel-shell which is part of the equipment
of a Carmelite drawing-table. "There!--if you must cry, cry into that."
The girl began to laugh, but Thrse continued: "In future I allow you
to cry as much as you like, as long as you catch all your tears in that
shell." A week before her death, almost unable to speak, she managed to
gasp out to this same novice: "You've been crying--_was it into the
shell?_" The joke was also sound psychology, for the girl found that the
business of moving "_l'impitoyable instrument_" from one eye to the
other quickly enough to catch every tear entirely distracted her mind
from whatever was making her cry, so that before long she was completely
cured of her weakness.

The matter as well as the manner of Thrse's instructions must also
have been a surprise to many. No doubt some of her novices had entered
Carmel tensed for a life of holiness on the grand scale, and to such the
homely diet she offered may have been something in the nature of a
disappointment. It was no doubt to such as these that she said very
shortly before her death: "If I have led you into error with my Little
Way, I shall soon appear to tell you to take another road; but if I
don't come back believe in the truth of my words."



                                  14

What is this Little Way that is now known to thousands outside the
novitiate at Lisieux? Thrse herself calls it "the way of spiritual
childhood, the path of confidence and total surrender". As always with
the child of Louis Martin, the father conception of God is the
strongest. Like St. Catherine she can talk of her Love and like St. Rose
of her Bridegroom, but it is a secondary and specialised image. First of
all she is God's child, dependent on him for everything and trusting him
in everything, unable to repay his goodness except with her love, but
comforted by the thought that ultimately that is all he asks of anyone.

The wives of Giuliano Adorno and Pierce Connelly, the daughters of Maria
de Flores and Louis Martin . . . . My shadow quartet has played its part
in making saints, but there is only one whom I can confidently picture
as sharing the glory he has made. The holiness of Caterina Adorna, of
Corneria Connelly, of Rosa de Flores, is like a spark struck from the
hard flint of their relatives' insensibility. Monsieur Martin alone has
offered the kindling flame that sets another soul alight. It was as his
child that Thrse learned to be the child of God.

A child cannot run very fast, take long strides or overcome great
obstacles. In order to please its elders, it depends on their loving
kindness rather than anything really useful and effective that it is
able to do. So "small souls" can take only small steps on the way to
heaven and do small things to please "_papa le bon Dieu_" whose earthly
model is not far to seek. "I want to show them little ways of pleasing
God that have been completely successful in my case. . . . In my Little
Way there are only very ordinary things."

Elsewhere she elaborates the nature of those ordinary things. They are
indeed so small as often to be invisible to all save God. At the same
time they are not without their cost. Who does not know the strain of
performing some tiresome task that a little intelligence would have made
unnecessary? But, "there is no merit in doing what is reasonable." And
how many of us have enough heroism to endure a bore? Yet, "if you are
telling one of your sisters what seems to you an interesting story and
she interrupts you to tell you something else, listen to her with
interest, even though she does not interest you in the least, and do not
try to go on with what you were first saying." One may well believe her
when she tells her novices that at recreation above all they will find
occasion to practise virtue.

She had a Frenchwoman's sensitive palate and almost moral appreciation
of good cooking, yet she not only accepted the worst food without
complaint, but ate with every appearance of grateful enjoyment dishes
prepared by another sister who wished specially to please her but had in
doing so consulted only her own taste. We may feel sure that if Thrse
had ever been in the same situation as St. Rose she would not have
rubbed pepper on her eyelids to save herself from paying visits with her
mother. On the contrary, we can see her going through the whole boring
process with gentleness and gaiety. Every bit as much as St. Rose she
would rather have stayed at home, but she would have seen no intrinsic
virtue in silence and solitude if they were the states that she herself
preferred. Her virtue would have lain in helping to give a pleasant
morning to her mother and her mother's friends, never showing how the
stiffness, stodginess and fatuity of it all bored and exhausted her very
soul.

Yet Thrse never criticises another saint's way of holiness. On the
contrary, her attitude towards all "_ces belles mes_" as she calls the
saints in the grand manner, is one of admiration and humility. In
recommending her small wine as more likely to agree with the average
digestion than the great vintages, she is certainly not belittling or
decrying the latter. They are the fine and the right thing for those who
can stomach them, but she cannot; nor can most people. Yet God must be
loved, and it would be sad indeed if anyone were to be prevented from
loving him because they think they cannot love him enough.

The paradox of this saint is that though she taught the way of spiritual
childhood she herself is neither mentally nor emotionally a child. Hence
the special significance of her conversion--"_le petit miracle_" of the
Christmas Grace. For by virtue of it she did not change suddenly from a
sinner to a saint, but from a child to a grown-up person. She uses the
language and analogies of childhood and there is a deceptive artlessness
about her writing which conceals a mind and judgment essentially mature.
A psychologist faced with St. Thrse and St. Rose would not be long in
deciding which of the two was the child. Thrse's objective view of her
own character, her honest and clear appraisal of the faults and the
virtues of others, her delicate sense of balance between the important
and the unimportant in the spiritual life (so conspicuous in St.
Catherine, so lacking in St. Rose) are all gifts of maturity and take
her far from childhood except in her relation to God.

St. Rose could not understand those who were unlike herself, and her
attitude towards evil resembles a child's shapeless fear of the dark.
St. Thrse saw her way to heaven as only one, and that the humblest,
among many, while though she acknowledges that at one time she dreaded
evil, that was because she knew very little about it. "I had not
experienced that . . . the simple and upright soul sees evil in nothing,
since evil exists only in unclean hearts and not in things (_objets
insensibles_)."

In her balance and integration of character she resembles Cornelia
Connelly. Like her, too, she had a very low threshold of consciousness,
so that her Little Way, like the _Book of Studies_, does not come as a
"revelation", but through the sober medium of her own conscious thought.

In one respect, however, she is unlike her, indeed unlike any other
member of our quartet. It may have been because in her own family she
could always find sympathy and advice in spiritual matters that
throughout her life she depended so little on priestly direction. We
cannot even compare her with St. Catherine, for though for many years
this saint was without a director and went only very rarely to
confession, during the last period of her life she was glad to turn and
find rest in the comforting simplicity of Don Marabotto. Cornelia
Connelly, we know, never took any important step without consulting her
confessor, while St. Rose had no less than eleven directors in the
course of her life.

Thrse is perfectly frank. She found but little comfort or
encouragement in the counsels of those who should have advised and
supported her. "The keepers have taken my cloak" is her sorrowful
commentary on this side of her spiritual life. She practised confession,
of course, at regular intervals, according to the rule of Carmel, and
received sacramental grace, but for direction she had learned (no doubt
painfully) not to depend on man. "But here I suffer no lack, for Our
Lord himself is my director."

Wise indeed were those who appointed her to guide young souls in their
first steps along the difficult ways of the religious life. It is
notable that her wisdom was all spiritually acquired. She had spent the
first part of her life in a small, confined circle, and the rest in a
strictly enclosed community, yet she shows a depth of wisdom that has
not been equalled by many who have ranged the world. It is a depth which
forcibly makes good any lack of breadth there may be. Indeed breadth is
only too often associated with shallowness and stagnation. But depth
without breadth can call to other deeps and enlarge itself among the
hidden rocks. . . . "Deep calleth on deep, at the noise of thy
flood-gates. All thy heights and thy billows have passed over me."

There is in the Bernese Oberland, at the end of the Lauterbrnnen
Valley, a narrow subterranean stream called the Trummelbach. It runs or
rather roars through the towering darkness of cliffs thousands of feet
high, to the base of which through countless millenniums it has carved
its way. It has cut a bed so deep that the sky is hidden as in a cave
and so narrow that the sides are never more than a few feet apart. No
voice can be heard "because of the noise of thy flood-gates", as the
torrent hurtles on, its cascades springing rather than falling from the
angles of the rock, while the pools thunder with the current roaring
through them.

If these waters had been wider they would not have cut through the solid
rock like cheese, even in ten thousand times ten thousand years. It was
their constriction that made them a knife to carve a mountain. There
must always be narrowness in the lives of the saints. We may deplore it,
we may regard it as one of the effects of Adam's fall which, like the
cold Carmel, God allows but does not approve. But we shall almost always
find it, even if in some cases, such as St. Francis de Sales, only in
part. In Thrse the enclosure is complete, "a garden enclosed is my
sister, my spouse. . . ." Yet I prefer the analogy of the rushing
torrent, for the whole nature of narrowness in the lives of the saints
is dynamic--as dynamic as dynamite, since it dissolves the rock. Take
away this compelling force and the stream is only a gutter where things
decay.

A question naturally arises. Why did Thrse teach her Little Way, her
low road to heaven, from the high road indeed for most of us the
inaccessible heights--of Carmel? The drinkers of small wine surely have
no rights in that exalted vineyard. Not only are the majority of
ordinary men and women without a vocation to the religious life, but
where vocations occur they are likely to be to orders that are less
rigorous, less aspiring. Surely to live the life and keep the rule of
Carmel is to proclaim oneself a "_belle me_" and to belong no more to
the legion of "_les petits_".

Her answer to this, I think, would be that her doctrine of spiritual
childhood is even more necessary in the cloister than in the world. In
convents no doubt there are many "_belles mes_", but there is also a
place for "_les petits_". The call to perfection in the religious life
is "leave all and follow me," and it is comparatively unimportant
whether that all be much or little. When the bridegroom says to the
bride "with all my worldly goods I thee endow" he may be speaking of
many thousands a year or only of this week's wages. So it is with those
who enter even Carmel, and doubtless Thrse was aware that vocations
have been lost through a mistaken idea that more will be required of the
soul than it has to give. Hence she taught her Little Way first of all
to her novices. There is a place for children in the cloister as well as
by the hearth.

Another reason, which is not however one that I believe she herself
would give, is the same as that which sets the dancing mistress on a
platform in front of her pupils. She must be in a certain degree beyond
them and above them so that they can hear her voice and observe her
steps more clearly. To drop all similes--how much should we have heard
of Thrse and her Little Way if she had not entered Carmel but had
spent her life either as Mademoiselle Martin, given to good works in the
parish, or as the busy wife of some citizen of Lisieux? We cannot
picture her setting the town alight, like St. Rose, from a cell in her
father's garden, nor is it likely that she would have thought of writing
the story of her soul. She might have just been as holy, just as dear to
God, she might have taught her Little Way to her catechism class or to
her own children. But we ourselves would probably have been none the
wiser nor the better for it.

She wrote _Histoire d'une me_ at the order of her religious superiors,
and it was they who published it after her death. I will not say that
but for that book she would have been unknown, for the scenes at her
funeral, decorous as they were compared with those at St. Rose's,
suggest that the rumour of her holiness had spread into the town. But it
was her book that carried it like a forest fire through the whole land
of France and finally throughout the world.

Thrse, in spite of her obscure life and early death, was canonised by
popular acclamation. The decree of Pope Urban VIII which has been
haunting us all through this book was set aside in her favour. Fifty
years is the decreed minimum, but Thrse was canonised in 1925, less
than thirty years after her death of pulmonary tuberculosis in the
Carmel of Lisieux.

The special time concession made in her case was no doubt partly due to
the war of 1914-18, which established her firmly as a wonder-worker.
When we think of this little girl, and remember the sheltered obscurity
of her life, it is difficult not to smile when we realise that the most
vocal, indeed vociferous, of her clients were the rank and file of the
French army, whose protector through innumerable dangers, whose adviser
in situations well beyond her earthly ken, or indeed imagination, she
became--"_petite Soeur Thrse_," the _poilu's_ friend.

But it was not only the army. From convents throughout the world, from
the mission field, from the hospitals, from countless families came the
tale of her favours. "After my death I will let fall a shower of roses."
Those words were spoken in sober conviction and have been fulfilled in
sober fact. There is no doubt whatever that the dying Thrse was
convinced that she had a mission in the world which could be carried out
only after her death. She was completely and innocently confident. "In
heaven God will do everything I wish." There with her last breath speaks
the loving, trustful child of Louis Martin.

Her reputation as a wonder-worker might well have brought her into that
dim, unhealthy borderland where religion fringes off into superstition.
She herself would seem to be aware of this and to protect herself (and
her clients) by bestowing favours that are mainly spiritual. It is true
that many remarkable cures are said to be due to her intercession, also
escapes from danger and death. But the fish in her net are mostly those
whose lives have been changed either by her doctrine or by some more
personal contact with her power, converts from heresy and schism, from
paganism, from sin, from indifference, wandering souls brought by her
into the Father's house. She herself while on earth had not much
patience with those who indulged in spiritual sensation. Once when a
rapturous novice told her that "the most beautiful angels clothed in
white robes, with shining joyful faces" would carry her soul to heaven,
she tartly reminded her that "God and the angels are pure spirit and no
one can see them with bodily eyes". She would, one feels sure, have very
little sympathy with Christians who regard heaven as a departmental
store and the saints as universal providers; and already it has been
rumoured that if asked too persistently for material benefits she will
bestow instead what amounts to a sharp rap.

In another respect, too, she has protected herself. _Histoire d'une
me_, besides being both a spiritual and a human document, is also a
defence against the hagiographers. Impossible for them to distort or
emasculate the human base on which divine grace has worked its wonders
or to exaggerate or solidify that grace's spiritual effects. Admittedly
the work has been edited here and there, but that is mainly for reasons
of discretion, since so recent was her earthly life that even now it
involves the names of many people still living. We have her own story,
every word of which bears the stamp of modesty and truth.

I wish I could say the same of the illustrations. Obviously, whether
photographs or reproductions of paintings, they have been worked upon
and "improved" out of accuracy if not veracity. "The Servant of God," we
are told, "would when posing sometimes lose the natural repose of her
features." This very human characteristic has, unfortunately, been made
good by a most unnatural repose, indeed by a "very conscientious
synthesis" of the "best elements" of all the photographs. Those who have
the good fortune to possess an untouched photograph of St. Thrse will
turn with relief from the smooth, simpering smugness of the synthesis to
the cheerful little round French face with its dark laughing eyes and
only just not laughing mouth. As for the statues . . . . we can only say
that the hagiographers having lost their chance in prose, have seized it
in plaster.

But none of this really matters, and for the sake of Thrse's spirit
and her word we will gladly face all the horrors of her cultus. She
comes with a special message for an age that badly needs new
inspiration. It is an age that has lost its aristocracy, its kings, its
geniuses, its great men. It is an age of mass production, of mediocrity,
of democracy, the rank and file, the common man. Submerging equally the
depths and the heights spreads the great ocean of the average. But even
on the face of those dreary waters the Spirit of God can move and call
forth life. Thrse's call is to the average man, who in our day exists
for the first time as a real person instead of a statistical
calculation. She calls even him to be a saint.





_Some Notes on the Nature of Sanctity_



                                   1

It is significant that the word "holiness" derives from the same root as
"wholeness", the Anglo-Saxon _halig_, whole or healthy, leaving us with
the conception of the holy man as the only whole man, the perfect man of
God's creative idea. Following that tendency which we have to twist
words off their roots, holiness has come to mean for most of us almost
the opposite of wholeness or completeness. It suggests rather a man of
one idea, a single-track mind, an outlook narrowed by religion till it
excludes half the activities of normal humanity. Whereas the holy man is
really the only kind of man in which the type is fully realised.

As we look down the scale of life we see what appears to be an
ever-increasing wastefulness, so that in order to produce the perfect
type of, say, a fish, millions of incomplete, imperfect types are made
and rejected by what we call Nature. In the birds and animals the waste
is much less, and in man the tendency of science and civilisation has
been to reduce it to almost nothing. But the question arises: Would a
whole nation of healthy, intelligent men and women realise the idea in
the mind of God when he said "Let us make man in our own image"?

The answer which Christianity gives to this question is unhesitatingly:
No. Apart from the consideration that few human beings really enjoy
perfect health in mind and body, the central fact of Christian teaching
is the fall of man in Adam from God's idea of him and his restoration in
the second Adam to at least the potentialities of that idea.

Treading warily and restraining our words lest we should babble, we
pause to contemplate the first man lifting up his eyes to heaven. In
that upward look is his whole significance as man. Mentally and
spiritually, Adam is a child--a child at ease as children are with forms
of life below him, yet looking with desire and expectation to forms of
life above, forms of which his vision, though remote, is unclouded, for
he is the truly clean of heart who can see God.

Adam is the primal innocent. But as the oak is in the acorn, so in him
is the complete, full-grown man of God's desire. Growing up directly
under the hand of God, in a world of ordered tranquillity, human nature
should have attained its fulfilment in the supernatural as simply and
painlessly as the acorn attains fulfilment in the oak. But the process
was deflected by a will seduced in its turn by pride and the love of
things-in-themselves, so that the natural lost its power of growth and
harmony with the supernatural, and can attain it only in conflict, in
harshness, in hammering. The tree has become the cross.

This is the cross which no human soul can escape, no matter how he
blasphemes it or denies it. The impenitent thief hung on the cross as
long and as agonisedly as the good Dismas. The rift between the natural
and the supernatural is one that affects us all. The merely natural man
cannot take his ease comfortably and happily in the natural, because of
that supernatural cross-beam to which willy-nilly his hands are raised.
While the natural holds fast by the feet the supernatural man who longs
to escape and tread the sky. This is the bed that we have made, and we
must lie on it because we are nailed to it. Only the fact that the Son
of Man who is also the Son of God was also nailed to this antinomy gives
us the hope that one day we may be with him in paradise, where the cross
once more becomes the tree--the Tree of Life.



                                   2

The word supernatural as I use it here does not necessarily involve the
preternatural. It is a word which common use has shrivelled into a
fragment of its true meaning. If we were to see the title _Tales of the
Supernatural_, most of us would expect a volume of ghost stories rather
than lives of the saints. Now a ghost can rightly be called
preternatural or beyond the ordinary course of nature, but it is not
likely to be supernatural or above it. Whereas a saint is a human being
raised to a supernatural level by the grace of God. He may also have
certain preternatural powers, but such powers are not the inevitable
accompaniment of sanctity and can in fact exist where it is not, or even
apart from Christianity itself. Their appearance in some of the saints
is part of an individual reaction to spiritual contacts which in a
different human being would find a different expression.

We have seen how even in the supposed darkness of the sixteenth century,
the committee of theologians appointed to investigate the spiritual life
of St. Rose told her that her visions were "imaginary", that is
projections of that image-making faculty which we all possess, but which
in most of us functions only in our dreams. In saying this they cast no
doubt on the reality of the experience which the image more or less
symbolically (as in a dream) expressed. It was only the translation of
that experience into visual terms which was the work of her own special
mind and temperament.

The mind naturally takes and shapes in its own colours an experience
which is properly speaking incommunicable in any shape or colour. Even
the words, the message, of the vision can be edited by the transmitting
mind, hence the Church's refusal to guarantee the supernatural origin of
any "private revelation".

"We certainly are and contain far more than we can deliberately become
aware of at any given moment. Is it possible that among these
presentations which we cannot recapture in reflex knowledge there are
flashes of the infinite? That we cannot recapture them does not prove
that they have not come to us. On the other hand, they can hardly come
without leaving some traces behind. Other presentations will have been
affected; something deeper than the activity of reflex knowledge will
have been modified in such a way as to qualify the whole content of
reflex knowledge; if there has been indeed a divine touch our sinew will
have shrunk."

I quote this passage from Mr. Algar Thordd's introduction to _Readings
from Friedrich von Hgel_, because it expresses this double
experience--the divine touch which is supernatural and its human
transmission which may be preternatural but more often is entirely
natural. We are bound to realise that the realm of nature is steadily
enlarging itself. Much that was thought to be outside it is now known to
be well within, and it is possible that our not very remote descendants
may see the swallowing up by nature of a whole realm which we have
hitherto considered beyond it.

The state of mind which is responsible for having loaded up the
miraculous with so much that is merely abnormal cannot be attributed
entirely to religious obscurantism. Science has been to blame in its
refusal in investigate alleged preternatural happenings on the simple
assumption that they do not happen. The rank and file of
nineteenth-century scientists (though certain of their leaders were less
dogmatic) rejected out of hand such phenomena as telepathy and even
hypnotism. As a result there was nothing for those who had direct
personal experience of them to do, if they did not attribute them to
fraud or doubt the evidence of their senses, but regard them as
miraculous.

It is not till quite recently that Dr. J. B. Rhine's experiments at Duke
University, North Carolina, have made not only telepathy but
clairvoyance and prevision scientifically respectable. They have proved
that extra-sensory perceptions exist in most people, probably in all.
Certainly the field investigated is very narrow, but it is no longer
possible to deny out of hand that human beings have been able to
foretell the future, know what is happening at distance, or even produce
certain visible effects on inanimate objects.

It is however just as difficult to maintain that these powers are
supernatural. They seem to be latent in us all; and it is merely a
question as to whether they are newly-discovered faculties awaiting
development or atrophying vestiges of powers we have lost. Dr. Rhine
inclines to the former view. Certainly many of the saints have displayed
remarkable gifts of extrasensory perception, and though the possession
of such gifts does not make them saints, I do not think we can say they
have no connection with sanctity. Indeed we may well believe that
certain spiritual impacts have such a stimulating and enlarging effect
that the whole man, including these latent natural powers, is brought
into action. In this way we come back to the idea of the holy man as the
whole man, and may speculate as to whether the loss or rather latency of
our extrasensory powers is not just another of the effects of the Fall.
But even so we must not regard these powers as in themselves
supernatural or indeed more capable of being supernatural than our so
ordinary powers of eating and drinking and growing and loving which God
has made the basis of his sacraments.

Another direction in which the natural has enlarged itself and swallowed
the preternatural is in psychology. Here it has made rapid progress and
even if it may be said to have gobbled its fare and will have later on
to disgorge some of it, the fact remains that many things which used to
be considered supernatural must now be regarded as unusual but perfectly
natural activities of the human mind. We have no cause to feel superior
to those who with the limited means of investigation at their disposal
were misled by certain appearances; on the other hand it would be
unpardonable of us to be misled in the same way. We can no longer
regard, for instance, the appearance of stigmata as miraculous, since we
now know that similar phenomena can be produced apparently at will by
certain hysteric subjects. There still remains all the difference in
heaven and earth between St. Francis of Assisi and a patient at the
Salpetrire, but that difference must now be looked for in causes rather
than in effects.

We cannot altogether withhold our sympathy from the popular craving for
the miraculous. A God shut up in his own creation as in a box is not
really "large enough to wear the garment of the universe". Nevertheless
that credulous, avid, and (as Von Hgel calls it) unethical acceptance
of miracle stories can be just as shocking as the closed mind that
insists on equally poor evidence that miracles do not happen. It is
certainly contrary to the mind of the Church, which declares as "of
faith" only the miracles of Scripture and the canonisation miracles of
the saints. The latter are post-mortem signals from another world--Holy
Church knows only too well the tricks our minds and bodies can play us
in this.

For we must face the fact that a certain type of holiness is often,
indeed usually, associated with some kind of psychophysical disturbance.
Is it possible to imagine that the perfectly fitting, smoothly running
mind responds less readily to inspirations of a certain order than one
which is a little out of gear? "Unhinged" we say . . . . and we can
picture the Divine Thief passing down the street between all the snug,
sleeping, shuttered houses, till he comes to one where a window is
broken or a door swinging loose, so that he can effect an entry. There
we must drop the simile, for he comes not to take but to give.

Von Hgel offers the alternative suggestion that certain impacts of the
supernatural are too weighty for the delicately adjusted mechanisms of
the human mind, and that "those who have enjoyed a full mystical
experience, i.e. a direct experience of God's presence, have also
suffered from some kind of nervous or mental illness". [2] This
certainly applies to our two mystics, St. Catherine and St. Rose,
neither of whom can be considered psychologically normal, while our two
non-mystical subjects, Cornelia Connelly and St. Thrse, are not only
without pathological symptoms but would seem to have minds of
exceptional integrity and stability. Perhaps it is the directness of the
mystical contact which overbalances the psyche; the supernatural is not
mediated through the natural, but pours straight into the unconscious
mind, and there it may create various disturbances before it enters the
narrower channels of consciousness.

[2] _The Life of Friedrich von Hgel_ by Michael de la Bedoyere, p. 109.

It must be remembered, however, that both St. Catherine and St. Rose
showed abnormal symptoms apart from religion. Indeed St. Catherine had
lived twenty-seven years before her first mystical experience, during
which time her mental condition had steadily deteriorated, so that the
supernatural impact was in her case not an overbalancing but the
recovery of a balance lost. But for it she might have become a hopeless
neurotic. St. Rose too shows throughout her life the spiritualising of
abnormal impulses which without religion might have become unhealthy and
repulsive.

It is remarkable that both our mystics were women who apart from their
visions, fasts and ecstasies, led lives full of active works of charity.
Catherine was for years the matron of a large hospital, and risked her
life nursing the plague-stricken, while Rose not only nursed the sick in
her own home and visited them in theirs but worked hard to support her
family. The mystical element seems to demand its own active expression
in the outer material world, which makes an important difference between
the genuine mystic and the psychopath whose impulses not only arise but
end within the self.

Comparing the mystical and non-mystical types of holiness, it would be
presumptuous to say which more nearly approaches the whole man of God's
intention. The mystic would seem to have powers which the non-mystical
saint has not, but he pays the price in psycho-physical imperfections.
The non-mystical saint, on the other hand, usually shows exceptional
depth and stability of mind, while he is without those more impressive
manifestations which attract while they also discourage the ordinary
Christian. There is not, of course, always the clear-cut division
between the types that we have in my quartet. Had I included, for
instance, St. Francis of Assisi or St. John Vianney, or St. John Bosco
or St. Frances of Rome, outlines would have been more blurred.

One might indeed imagine that the perfect realisation of the type is not
the work of any one saint. Our human nature has perhaps been too badly
damaged in its fall to be able to fulfil God's purpose individually. So
the Whole Man becomes the corporate effect of a corporate holiness, of
the Communion of Saints, and our hope lies in that fullness which the
virtues and merits and intercessions of the saints, together with the
best impulses, thoughts, words and works of every one of us, the body of
the Head, shall build up one day into the measure of the stature of the
fullness of Christ.



                                   3

It may still be possible, however, to make out of all the multiplicity
and variety of holiness which has accompanied the history of the Church,
at least a rough sketch of that whole man of God's intention. We have
hazarded the guess that with such a man the supernatural instead of
being a disruptive, crucifying force would be a normal part of his daily
life, like Adam's walk with God in "the afternoon air".

In turn we may guess at a very different relation with the natural,
created world from the struggling uneasiness which is our portion now.
This would include our relation to our own bodies, which is obviously
not that of paradise. Sickness and pain, like death, are the fruit of
"man's first disobedience": and the lack of harmony between soul and
body, the warfare of the spirit and the flesh, is another example of the
tree become the cross.

It is a cross which the greatest, the most spiritual, of the saints have
had to bear. But every now and then we find among them glimpses of the
tree--of a soul asserting its power not only to subdue but to strengthen
and vivify the body. The fasts undertaken by St. Catherine of Genoa and
St. Rose of Lima not only exceeded the powers of average humanity, but
instead of reducing them to weakness increased their vitality and
physical health. St. Francis of Assisi, too, was able to follow the
example of Our Lord's perfect human nature and fast throughout the forty
days of Lent, though out of humility he broke the fast midway, in case
he should seem presumptuously to emulate his Master. And if we should
think such instances belong only to an earlier, tougher generation,
there is the recent case of Father Kolbe, a victim of chronic lung
disease, whom nevertheless the Nazis failed to starve in a concentration
camp but had to slaughter with an injection. It would seem as if much of
the slowness and stumbling of Brother Ass were due to insufficient
practice and skill on the part of his rider.

Another extension of the soul's power over the body is the gift of
healing. No matter how much we may wish to avoid sensationalism and
miracle-mongering, we cannot deny its existence, though we may think
that healing would have had no place in a world where sickness and
suffering did not exist, and that the gift of healing must be the
diversion of a power originally intended for another purpose for the
maintenance, let us say, of our physical integrity rather than of its
restoration. It is as it were a little model of redemption, and in Our
Lord's constant, compassionate use of it we can see the reflected image
of that far greater act by which he restored the world from death to
life.

He promised his followers that they too should have this power: "These
signs shall follow them that believe . . . . they shall lay hands on the
sick and they shall recover"; and the history of the Church, from the
earliest times down to the present day, is full of instances of natural
health restored by supernatural grace and the body made whole by the
spirit. The circumstances may vary from personal contacts during their
earthly lives with such saints as Rose of Lima or Pope Pius X, to power
transmitted from another world in the after-death miracles of
innumerable saints and _beati_ or manifested at certain shrines of Our
Lady, such as Lourdes. I am writing of cures that are far removed from
ordinary faith-healing, cures of organic disease that have stood the
test of medical examination. It would not be profitable here to enter
into the physical mechanics of spiritual healing, but it is interesting
to note that the cures seem to depart no whit from the normal, natural
course--the site of an ulcer, for instance, will be marked by "scar
tissue"--except in the matter of time, which is enormously expedited.
There is nothing abnormal in the cures (to choose modern examples) of
the Abb Fiammia's varicose veins and Madame Augault's fibroid tumour
except the suddenness with which they took place. It is also worth
noting that a cure of this nature seems first to happen in the mind,
which becomes overwhelmingly convinced of the body's wellbeing and
indeed sometimes (as in the case of Jack Trayner) temporarily forgets
the illness that had incapacitated it for years. Once again we find that
the supernatural touch is on the unconscious, where it possibly
organises resources that later are passed into consciousness and finally
into action. It was Mr. C. S. Lewis who suggested that but for the Fall
the whole of our unconscious would be available to us at will, instead
of being shut off in subliminal darkness, from which it often frightens
us with ghostly noises.

Another, rarer, aspect of the saint's relation to the natural world, one
with which it would seem that the unconscious has little to do, is the
terms on which he lives with those whom God put there before him. Adam
entered a world already well-furnished and well-organised. It was like
arriving at a house which the servants had made ready for comfortable
occupation. There is a passage in Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_
which describes the servants' delight when the long-expected family at
last arrives at the cottage they have been preparing for them. Is it
fanciful to picture a similar feeling of joyful relief throughout the
world when at long last, after all the successive ages of its history,
the master of the house appeared?

Alas! events did not bear out the promise of that coming. If the master
of the house did not actually, like the bad steward in the parable, beat
the manservants and the maidservants, he nevertheless failed to give
them the help and comfort they looked for. We are of course only groping
our way through dark sayings, but it seems possible, indeed probable,
that God gave man a task to perform for the "other ranks" of nature, a
task which he has not fulfilled. We are told that God "gave" Adam the
plants and beasts and birds, and we cannot imagine that such a gift
would have been for his selfish enjoyment only. His perfection according
to God's plan would also have included theirs, for though none but man
is made in God's immortal image, the supernatural order is not for him
alone. But man has denied Nature her baptism, leaving her "with his salt
in her mouth to thirst after him".

This primal guilt is upon us as well as our many later conscious abuses
of creatures and breaches of natural law, so it is not surprising that
the world around us, apart from certain individuals that we have tamed,
seems aloof and indifferent to our joys and sorrows. The friendship of
Nature is one of the joys of heaven, a part of the doctrine of the
resurrection of the body, just as her undying resentment is one of the
pains of hell, so it is fitting that those whose lives are heavenly
should have a foretaste of this joy. We do not find, perhaps, so many
instances of it in the lives of the saints as we find of preternatural
happenings, but this may be partly due to the relative unimportance such
a relationship would have in the eyes of their chroniclers. St. Francis
of Assisi is of course the classic example, but in our quartet we have
another just as impressive in St. Rose. Indeed her communion with Nature
had a wider base than his since it included not only conscious living
creatures but unconscious plants and flowers. She loved trees and bushes
and flowers as she loved all things God had made, even mosquitoes, and
had over them the power of love. With them she blessed God for their
life: "O all ye green things upon the earth, bless ye the Lord--all ye
birds of the air, all ye wild beasts and tame, bless ye the Lord, praise
and exalt Him above all for ever."

At a first glance no other member of our quartet seems to feel the same
closeness with humble created things. Then we recall a sentence from
_Histoire d'une me_ and realise that St. Thrse too felt their
kinship, and felt it with that most independent and least sympathetic of
all natural manifestations, the weather. "In all the circumstances of my
life, Nature was the reflection of my soul. When I cried the heavens
cried with me, when I rejoiced not a cloud would darken the blue sky."
Then as if she heard us murmur "the pathetic fallacy", she tells how for
the whole of three days, when her hopes of Carmel were in suspense
because of her uncle's opposition, "the sun did not show a single gleam
and the rain fell in torrents". But when at last she had won Monsieur
Gurin's consent, "I walked back to Les Buissonets under a blue sky from
which the clouds had totally disappeared". And yet again, after her
appeal to the Pope had apparently failed, "the sun did not dare to shine
and the beautiful Italian sky, burdened with heavy clouds, did not cease
to weep for me".

A cynic migho suggest that this meteorological sympathy was in gratitude
for the pleasure she took in kinds of weather which are not generally
found pleasing. As a child she had delighted in thunderstorms that
scared her elders, and there is: "Mother, did I ever tell you of my
predilection for the snow?" She attributed this to her being born in
winter and having the snow among her very first impressions of the
world. We have already seen the fall of snow that graced the day of her
clothing. Like her birthday it was in winter and she had wanted to see
Nature clothed like herself in white. But through January the weather
was mild, and she gave up all hope of a snowfall until, on entering the
enclosure after the ceremony, she looked round and saw the courtyard of
the convent white with snow. "O ye ice and snow, bless ye the Lord . . .
O ye cold and winter, bless ye the Lord. . . ." It was winter's icy
sword that pierced her lungs and brought her where even the weather and
the seasons have their share in the redemption of our body.

It is not only piety or poetry which calls upon the whole order of
created things, including the winds and the rain and the frost and the
snow and the thunder, to join in the priest's thanksgiving after Mass.
The benefits of calvary are not for man alone, and in the perpetuation
of that sacrifice Nature has already ceased her groaning and has entered
with us into the paradise of the Second Adam. "_Benedicite omnia opera_.
. . . O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise him and
magnify him for ever." The three Young Men in the furnace sang their
song of unity and kinship in the heart of man's greatest natural enemy,
devouring fire, which as they walked to and fro in its midst with the
Son of God, had been transformed into the friendly likeness of "a wind
that bringeth dew".



                                   4

So far we have considered those qualities which are as it were scattered
among the saints but are by no means to be found in all of them.
Preternatural powers and a new relationship with the created world are
not essential to sanctity, since many saints are without one or the
other or either, and we have suggested that the Whole Man of holiness
may indeed be a composite figure, represented by the entire Communion of
Saints rather than by any individual.

But there are certain fundamental qualities which no saint can be
without, because it is they which make him a saint. The others are
indeed more than decorations, but they are not indispensable; that is
they are not indispensable in this world--they may be gifts that will be
supplied later. But none of us can get to heaven at all without at least
a pinch of two qualities which in the saints are present to a heroic
degree--the qualities of love and suffering.

There has, of course, never been a saint who has not loved God. "The
good man without God" has existed in the past and doubtless still does
so to a diminishing extent, but his title is a misnomer, for however
consciously or conscientiously he may ally himself with unbelief, his
goodness, if not the afterglow of a Christian upbringing, is at least
the reflection of a Christian civilisation. As it is possible to receive
the Baptism of Desire without even having heard of the Sacrament, so it
is possible to love God without consciously believing in him. But such a
love is not likely to exist in the heroic degree demanded by sanctity.
The saint's love of God is not the tranquil adaptation that passes for
love with so many Christians, but a complete self-giving, a consuming
passion that makes a holocaust of the entire life.

That is why such a vast proportion of saints have either joined or
founded religious orders, parting with all they possessed and loved on
earth in order to follow Our Lord more closely in a life wholly given to
perfection. Others who for various reasons have not entered the
cloister, have like St. Catherine of Genoa lived a life of voluntary
poverty and chastity in their own homes. Others, yet again, like St.
Turribius, St. Francis Xavier and many more heroic missionaries, have
braved exile and sickness and danger to carry God's name to regions
where it is unknown; and many have offered the supreme sacrifice of life
itself for the sake of his truth and his glory.

All these acts of renunciation, whether of goods or love or freedom or
of life, are changed from negative to positive by the consuming love
that offers them. The entering of little Thrse Martin into Carmel at
fifteen can never be seen as a negative act of withdrawal, because it is
so obviously the expression of a love which cannot wait till it has
given all. Little Rose de Flores, of a more fearful disposition, seems
at first to have taken a negative flight from sin into her garden; but
love has changed flight to fight with deeds of heroic penance, by which
she makes reparation for the sins of the New World. Cornelia Connelly's
cry of love in that other garden at Gracemere, "Oh God, if all this
happiness be not for thy glory, take it from me," starts a life not of
mere passive endurance but of heroic achievement crowned by that
mysterious _magnum opus_ (the spiritual fulfilment of the alchemists'
age-long quest) by which the base metal of sin itself is transformed
into the pure gold of God's glory.

But love is a two-edged sword and no man who ever loved God did not love
his neighbour. Most of us find one easier than the other, but each is
meaningless without the other. In the saints the love of God has
produced an overflowing measure of love for man. The history of their
service and affection would run into almost endless lists of good works.
St. Vincent de Paul, St. Jerome Aemilian, St. Peter Nolasco, St. John
Baptist de la Salle, St. Peter Claver, St. John Bosco, to say nothing of
Santa Claus (St. Nicholas of Myra) . . . one could go on adding to these
till the list of philanthropists is nearly as long as the list of
martyrs. These founded schools, hospitals, and orphanages, started
societies for the redemption of captives for the support of foundlings,
for the care of the dying, and so on and so on till almost every need of
man is covered, as well as ministering with their own hands to slaves,
to the sick and plague-stricken, to the old, to the lonely and the poor.

In our own quartet we find a saint even as solitary and withdrawn as St.
Catherine becoming the active heart of a large hospital, working long
hours in the wards with her prayers upon her like a veil, ready for the
dying with a kiss. St. Rose comes straight from her visions of the
sinless Son of God and his ever-virgin Mother to minister to the
diseased bodies and souls of prostitutes. Cornelia Connelly enlarged her
love of her own lost family into the love of countless children from
other homes, to whom she brought the gift of a wise and enlightened
education. The last member of our quartet might seem at first to have
done no work in her neighbour's house. But in order to see the fullness
of St. Thrse's love for mankind we must look beyond her death into
that heavenly life which she declared she would spend in doing good upon
earth. Seen from that angle she is certainly not among the least of the
servants of mankind.



                                   5

The quality of love is one which all men, even those for whom religion
has no special meaning, expect to find in sanctity. The average man may
appreciate it most when it is expressed in good works for the neighbour,
but none would ever imagine a saint without some form of it. The
presence of suffering in a saint's life is something quite different,
for it is a state which the mass of humanity regards as evil, as a thing
to be shunned, or if present to be at once removed. If it cannot be
removed it often becomes a stumbling block to faith.

The saints, says the average man, should be joyful. The Church says the
same, and it might surprise the average man to know that a saint cannot
be canonised without having shown in his life the quality of joy.
Apparently one can achieve beatification without a smile, but the saint
must positively rejoice. The point, however, is not that he rejoices
when things go well with him (he would be an ungrateful churl if he did
not) but that he does so at those probably more frequent times when they
go badly. I am not of course thinking here of that dismal cheeriness
which sails over troubles on the floating planks of clichs and forced
smiles, and is as much out of place in a saint's life as the
grin-and-bear-it of the stoics, but of that deep-keeled joy which leaves
its wake upon waters that can never overwhelm it and are indeed its
stormy way to heaven.

Suffering is a part of the mystery of evil and any attempt to explain it
is to risk the fate of those who rush in where angels fear to tread. All
we dare say for certain is that it is due to sin and therefore in its
present form makes no part of that Whole Man of God's intention. I say
"in its present form", because Von Hgel has suggested that something
akin to suffering, though profoundly different from it as we know it
now, _may_ have been a part of God's creative plan and _may_ be present
even in heaven.

Pre Louis Bouyer in his most exciting book _Le Mystre Pascal_ makes it
clear that the immolation of a victim is not an essential part of
sacrifice and is made necessary only by sin. The sacrifice that God
originally intended was a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving from all
his creatures, a eucharist of joy. It is this sacrifice which finds its
liturgical fulfilment in the Sanctus of the Mass. "Therefore with angels
and archangels, thrones and dominations and all the warriors of the
heavenly array, we sing an endless hymn in praise of thee, saying: Holy,
Holy, Holy Lord God of Hosts. Thy glory fills all heaven and earth.
Hosanna in high heaven!"

It was man's sin and God's mercy which wrote between them the _Qui
pridie_ and all that follows. Without sin there would have been no
immolation, no death on Calvary, such as are re-presented bloodlessly on
our altars and bloodily foreshadowed in the holocausts of the Jewish
Law. Sin requires death, so sacrifice has come to imply the destruction
of the victim, and the human life which should have been a
natural-supernatural act of love and joy, becomes instead an immolation,
and the closer the union of the man with God the greater his share in
the sufferings of Christ.

"What would be the use?" asked St. Rose of those who begged her to
invoke her powerful patron St. Catherine of Siena to relieve her
sufferings, "she'd only ask me if I imagined I could get to heaven any
other way."

The cross is as it were the skeleton of sanctity, the hard frame hidden
in the kindness, the love and the power; and suffering is not merely
important but essential in the lives of all the saints, though its
prominence varies according to the particular build and constitution of
the man or woman concerned. In our own quartet we find that with two it
is cushioned under softer qualities, while in the other two it is the
very shape of their lives. St. Catherine may be said to have suffered
more _before_ her conversion than afterwards, because then her suffering
was hopeless and fruitless, whereas later she was to make it an
instrument of penitence and a source of ever-growing purification.
However, when her four years of penance and reparation were at an end,
she continued to practise poverty and self-denial and to endure
conditions of mind and body that must have been a humiliation to her
soaring spirit. Nevertheless both she and St. Thrse are less striking
examples in this field than St. Rose and Mother Connelly; she because
she seems to be living already half in another world, Thrse because in
keeping with her vocation as the saint of "_les petits_", she suffered
as it were in a small way from afflictions that are common to us all,
instead of treading the high ground of anguish, either of self-inflicted
penance with St. Rose or of Mother Connelly's devoted endurance of
another's scourge.

But the sufferings of the saints are only leading us straight into the
thickets of another wood, another mystery. They show us suffering as a
vicarious condition in which the innocent suffer for the guilty. This
may not be so difficult to accept in a case like that of St. Rose (with
her male counterpart, St. Aloysius of Gonzaga), where a creature almost
without sin is impelled by her horror of it to inflict suffering on
herself. The stumbling block lies in the involuntary, unsought
sufferings of the innocent, of children and animals, and of good men who
have deserved nothing but good. But, just as the victim of the Mosaic
holocaust had to be "without blemish", so there is a mysterious efficacy
in unmerited pain. The agonies of the impenitent thief brought no one,
not even himself, any spiritual good, while those of St. Dismas may well
have done penance only for his own sins. The supreme alliance between
suffering and innocence is once again to be found in the sinless figure
on the central cross, the immaculate Lamb of God whose death has taken
away the sins of the whole world.

One may picture suffering as, potentially at least, a force existing to
repair the ravages of sin, just as there are bodily forces whose
function is to repair bodily injury-phagocytes that the bloodstream
carries to the site of the damage to conflict with invading microbes and
injurious substances, setting up conditions of resistance and cure that
involve pain and inflammation. Where the blood is itself impure in any
way the cure will not be so swift or so certain as where it is healthy.
So the blood of the living organism, the Body of Christ, carries the
repairing force to the seat of the infection. . . . But we had better
extricate ourselves from this analogy before it has involved us any
further, and take one which is an analogy God himself has used.

Throughout the scriptures we constantly find suffering symbolised by
wine, either in its drinking or making, the chalice or the wine-press.
The prophet sees the Beautiful One on his way from Edom "with garments
deep dyed", and asks, "Why dost thou go clad like the men who tread out
the wine-press?" to be answered: "None other has trodden the wine-press
but I only." Our Lord cries to his apostles: "Can ye drink of the cup
that I shall drink of?" and to his Father he cries: "Father, if it be
possible, let this chalice pass from me." While at the very end and
sealing of the scriptures, among the clouds of the Apocalypse, the
champion of Edom rides out again, faithful and true, clothed with a
garment dipped in blood, to tread the wine-press of the wrath of God
Almighty.

The process of wine-making, by which the grape is trodden underfoot or
crushed in the press until its juice runs out like blood suggests the
expiatory aspect of suffering, the amends made to God's justice, the
shedding of blood without which there is no remission of sin. No doubt
the resemblance of wine to blood inspired this symbolism, and according
to Hebrew doctrine "the blood is the life". But the life-blood of the
grape, even after all the waste matter of crushed skin and pips has been
strained away, has not yet become the draught in the chalice. Suffering
in itself can achieve nothing and it is only when it as it were ferments
within the soul that the cup can be filled. A period of mysterious but
intense activity has followed that of passivity in the wine-press, the
nature of the thing is changing--disintegrating, re-forming. In
wine-growing districts it is possible even to hear the murmuring
movements of the wine in the vats as it changes into itself. So in the
minds and hearts of the saints and all who would be like them suffering
is an activity that in the end produces a new creature. The crushed and
beaten fruit has become wine and the chalice is full of that which is
mysteriously the symbol not only of pain and sorrow but of health and
joy. This is the final mystery and paradox.



                                   6

Before ending these notes on the saintly character it might be
interesting to consider two qualities that seem to be absent from it, as
if, much as we value them in human nature, they form no essential part
of that whole, supernatural man of God's intention. The saints generally
speaking (there are, of course, exceptions) seem to be lacking in a
sense of humour and in a sense of artistic beauty.

The first need not perhaps surprise us. A sense of humour as we
understand it now in the ability to laugh at ourselves and in the light
handling of our daily lives in general and particularly of awkward and
dangerous situations, the laughter of the air-raid shelter and the
battle-field, is a comparatively recent growth. The early humour of a
civilisation is not unlike the early humour of the individual, an affair
of clowning and noisy laughter at the misfortunes of other people, the
antics of the tumblers, the jesters, the coloured comics, Shakespeare's
clowns and the broker's men in pantomime. There is a softened,
Christianised version of all this in the _Fioretti_ of St. Francis,
where Brother Juniper becomes as it were the jester of the little court
of friars, but we can well believe that buffoonery has no part in the
lives of the saints. The Renaissance brought wit to courts and
universities and gave us at least one witty saint in St. Thomas More,
but public laughter still remained noisy, vulgar and often cruel. So it
is not surprising to find that only the two more modern of our quartet
can smile.

Von Hgel laments that St. Catherine had not a vestige of humour, and in
St. Rose its presence is doubtful, though I am inclined to believe that
her instructions to those visitors who objected to being stung by her
pet mosquitoes are not entirely "straight". Cornelia Connelly on the
other hand considered gaiety indispensable to holiness, and blamed
herself for "misplaced gravity" during those first dreary days at the
Trinit dei Monti; and though gaiety is not necessarily humour there is
certainly a humorous strength in her face as the photographer has given
it to us--humour in the wide, expressive mouth and even in the pleading
eyes. But I would be prepared to say that it was a quality that came to
her comparatively late in life, and born, as humour so often is, of her
sorrows. Had she had it in any effectual abundance during the early
years of her marriage, would she have allowed Pierce to dominate her so
heavily? I think that he, as well as herself, would have escaped much
suffering had he in his younger days sometimes been laughed at. Instead
of which he was always deferred to and obeyed from a bleeding heart. A
more practised sense of humour in his wife might have spared him the
consequences of its total absence in himself.

Indeed the only one of my quartet who truly and obviously has this
useful gift is little Thrse. It is not of a particularly brilliant or
subtle kind, but only someone with a sense of humour would have held a
mussel-shell under the eyes of a weeping novice to catch her silly
tears. I also suspect humour in her appraisement of the convent's
cookery when, on being given a thoroughly bad dinner, she abandoned her
custom of offering the various dishes to the different members of the
Holy Family, saying instead: "_Aujourd'hui, ma petite fille, tout cela
c'est pour toi_."

But on the whole we must acknowledge that humour is not prominent in the
lives of the saints, nor in spite of the fact that the Church was
founded with a pun can we see in it any great affinity with the
supernatural. Its main psychological function is the release of
inhibitions and it is also a sort of cushion between ourselves and the
hard realities of life. Instinctively we laugh at what shocks us--how
well we know the loud, nervous laugh that rings through the theatre at a
"blue" joke--and this explains the primitive tendency to laugh at other
people's misfortunes, as well as the more subtle grace of laughing at
our own. But however much we may need it here and now and may suffer
from its absence or its loss, we cannot regard it as one of the eternal
gifts of God. It is something quite apart from the joy which we know the
saints must display if they are to be recognised as such by the Church;
indeed it has its roots in frustration and sorrow. It is a this-world
quality, a solace on the way, and though no doubt the saints of the
modern world will continue to show it increasingly, its absence in
others need not disappoint us as if it were the absence of a virtue. All
they are without is a comfort they may not need.

But the case is altered when we come to beauty, for here we have no
travellers' joy but a value we believe to be eternal, an attribute of
God himself. How can it be that so many saints and holy people seem to
regard it with indifference, even with distrust. St. Rose hated and
defaced her own beauty, and St. Thrse, wise and alert in most of her
appraisements, combines her spiritual efficiency with a most inadequate
performance in the fields of poetry and art. No doubt it is only a few
who are scandalised by the fact that so many who live close to God in
every other way should either ignore his beauty or translate it into the
language of the second-rate. But such a scandal exists, and one can only
wish to spread it as one sees on every side the degradation of beauty in
the very quarters which should exalt it--indeed wherein it was once
exalted.

For a period of history religion and beauty seemed to walk hand in hand,
as the former expressed itself in the world's masterpieces of
architecture, painting and poetry. It was not till the Renaissance that
beauty was allowed, like learning, to forget her baptism and become a
part, indeed a privilege, of the "profane" world. Since then her
relations with holiness have been strained, expressing themselves in
little more than repetitions and imitations of the glorious past; she
seems to find no spontaneous, new expression. On the other hand her
association with secularism and indifferentism has roused in religious
circles a certain distrust--a distrust confined by no means to
Protestant Puritans.

For even in Catholic circles the idea persists that beauty is of
secondary, moreover of secular, importance. Whoever thought of putting
sins against beauty in his confession? Yet beauty is, we repeat, an
attribute of God, equally with wisdom, love and power. What is more, it
has in comparison with morality (which all forms of religion exalt and
cherish) the same eternal value as charity in comparison with faith and
hope. For the moral law is as it were camp hygiene, a necessity of
transit, a law like the law of Moses made necessary by sin. When the
wilderness is far behind us and our wills are perfect and sin is no
more, there will be no more need for the moral law than there was for
the law of Moses once the kingdom of God had come.

We may perhaps conjecture that but for the Fall man would have grown in
the knowledge of Divine Beauty as he would have grown in the knowledge
of Divine Wisdom and Divine Love. But having broken off his own
spiritual education he was left groping for beauty as for other things.
Sometimes he has held it in flashes and reflections, but its true nature
has always eluded him. Therefore there can be no sin against beauty,
since knowledge is lacking. We do not know what beauty really is. Most
of us are at least roughly agreed on the subject of natural beauty, but
beauty in art is always arguable and changing fashions constantly
proclaim its contingency.

At the beginning of this section I qualified the saints' deficiency with
the word "artistic", without which it would have been altogether too
sweeping. For no doubt all or nearly all the saints have appreciated
beauty in nature. St. Rose, though she hated her own lovely face,
delighted in flowers and embroidered them so ravishingly on silk and
damask that many thought her work was supernatural; while St. Thrse,
who could pass by all the artistic treasures of Rome, Naples, Florence,
Venice and Milan without a word of admiration except for the tombstones
in the Campo Santo, bursts into eloquence at the sight of the Swiss
mountains. Cornelia Connelly and St. Catherine of Genoa, both women of
more culture and education than the two unmarried saints, seem to have
had besides their love of natural beauty a degree of artistic
appreciation. Mother Connelly studied art in Rome and has left at least
some of her own achievement in a picture which perhaps displays more
supernatural than natural inspiration. St. Catherine of Genoa, living in
an age when art was natural, was in the enviable position of having
almost everything she used in daily life an object of simple beauty.
That she appreciated and valued these objects is shown by the
testamentary care with which she disposed of them in her various wills.

But we shall make out a very poor case for our quartet's sense of beauty
if we limit beauty to nature and art. There is another beauty which
perhaps the saints did not see, but which they certainly showed. There
is surely beauty in Catherine of Genoa's welcome home without reproach
of the husband who had caused her so much misery, in the kiss with which
she took the plague from the mouth of a dying woman, and in that final
going forth in a deep night of stars to join her Love. There is beauty
again in the innocence of little Rose de Flores as she plays at penance
with a wooden cross and then with a young brother's help builds her
garden cell of boughs, to go there every morning through the grey-white
dusk to pray and play with the Holy Child and spend her day serving the
sick of soul and body and worshipping God with all created things. While
who shall say there is no beauty in Cornelia Connelly's love of all God
gave her and in that greater love which gave it all back to God, And
though the beauty of Thrse Martin's life may be of the same homely
order as the _jolie petite cruche_ which she tried not to regret in
Carmel, it certainly shines in the love which carried her family right
up to heaven and thence brought down the fatherhood of God to countless
humble souls.

This beauty in act, in life, in soul, may be a clearer, steadier
reflection of beauty itself than all that is loveliest in nature and
art. We are probably wrong in identifying beauty with aesthetics; these
represent only the phenomenal side of it, the side that passes away,
beauty _in via_. They are temporal and partial reflections of an eternal
reality. In holiness the image is clearer and more complete, hence the
apparent indifference of the saints to its smaller flashes in art. I
repeat that we do not know what beauty really is, what man shall find in
the day he truly sees it in the Godhead; but when we contemplate its
reflection in holiness we have at least some idea of its ultimate
reality, beauty _in patria_.


The End


