She Is Our Contemporary in the Problems That She Lived with and the Solutions That She

She is our contemporary in the problems that she lived with and the solutions that she attempted to bring to them. (Pope Paul VI)

All of us, we know, are called to be holy. Most of us, however, probably have little idea of what this means in the concrete. How are we to set about it? One answer is that we can do what others have done before us: we have the saints as our models. There are saints for all situations. It is in the belief that Marie Eugenie of Jesus is a saint for us and for our times that this booklet is written. The quotation at the top of the page comes from the Homily given by Pope Paul VI at her Beatification in 1975. At that moment the Church publicly recognised her holiness. Now, at the beginning of this new millennium, she is being canonised. So for us, in our times, the Church is putting Saint Marie Eugenie before us. In her life and in her teaching, all Christians – married and single, clergy and laity, religious men and women – can find inspiration and help in their journey towards the Lord. This little introduction to the life of Marie Eugenie is written in the perspective of her holiness. What made her holy? What message does she have for us?

My vocation dates from Notre Dame (M. Marie Eugenie)

Lent 1836 is a good moment to meet the future Mother Marie Eugenie of Jesus for the first time. She is 19 years old, still called Anne-Eugenie Milleret and she is sitting waiting in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris for the Lenten Sermon to begin. Having a seat meant getting there for the 10 o’clock Mass and staying on till the Sermon began at 1 o’clock. The preacher, Lacordaire, was young and drawing huge crowds. What she thought about as she waited we do not know, but we do know that the sermon itself was a life changing experience for her. Afterwards she wrote to Lacordaire and told him, Your words answered all my thoughts. They completed my understanding of things; they gave me a new generosity, a faith that nothing would be able to make waver again. I was truly converted. To her sisters she would often say: My vocation dates from Notre Dame. But what had brought her to Notre Dame?

Foundations

Each of us starts life as a child in a particular family, speaking a particular language, situated at a given point of the world’s history and geography. We each have our own genes, our own gifts, our own difficulties. Grace, as we know, builds on nature, so if we want to understand the path to holiness of someone like Anne Eugenie we need to have some idea of her background. At first sight her early life seems charmed. The family were in easy circumstances and divided their time between Metz, a town in eastern France, and the country house they owned on the borders of France, Germany and Luxemburg. Her horizons were wide and she grew up learning to speak German and English as well as French. The family were not religious, though they felt the need to keep up appearances, so Anne Eugenie was baptised as a baby and made her first Communion, though rather later than usual and, as she tells us, with very little preparation. She went to school only for a short time and after a bad attack of typhoid fever her mother taught her at home. We know that she read widely and that her mother took a lot of trouble to form her character, taking her daughter with her on visits to the sick and the poor, teaching her the value of self sacrifice and generosity. They were values that Marie Eugenie considered fundamental and later she would say of her childhood that it always seemed to me as Christian as most so-called religious upbringing. Certainly it marked her character and helped form the ideas that she brought to her mission of education.

There was, however, another side to her life. There was the death of her nine year old brother and one year old baby sister, both in the same year when she herself was only 5. Her father, a banker and politician, was often away from home. Then suddenly, as a consequence of the revolution which brought Louis-Philippe to the throne of France in 1830, he went bankrupt. Anne Eugenie was 13. The family split up and she went with her mother to Paris. She enjoyed a short time then when she felt closer to her mother than she had ever done, but it was not to last and in 1832 her mother was taken ill with cholera and died within a few hours. At the age of 15 Anne Eugenie was totally alone.

Her father arranged for her to live with family friends, who could introduce the teenager into polite society: the world of balls and salons and visits. It was a world where what mattered was the colour of the ribbons on a bonnet, witty conversation and social gossip. Outwardly Anne-Eugenie seemed to fit in; she was pretty and intelligent and she appreciated compliments. But inwardly her mind was a mass of questions: I would like to know everything, analyse everything… pursued by some restless need of knowledge and truth that nothing can satisfy. Harder to bear was the solitude: I am alone in the world…when I am with them I am more alone than ever.

At this point her father, ignorant of what his daughter was really suffering, but worried by the frivolous life she was leading, sent her to live with his cousins in Paris, very pious women she tells us, who bored her by their narrow-mindedness. It was while staying with them, because she was expected to attend a Lenten sermon somewhere, that she chose Notre Dame.

The call takes shape

The experience at Notre Dame was decisive. Anne Eugenie had discovered Christ and His Church and a flame of love was lit in her heart. She wanted to consecrate her life to Christ and to give all my strength, or rather all my weakness, to this Church, which, alone, in my eyes, had the secret and the power of Good on this earth. But how? She read and prayed. As she read she was fired by the ideas of the young Catholics who had formed round an intellectual and social reformer called Lammenais. In those years after the French Revolution and in the early days of the industrial revolution, she was aware of both the superficiality of the affluent and the miseries of the poor and her dream was to transform this society. She longed to work for the Kingdom of God in a society where no one would have to endure the oppression of others.

So Anne Eugenie read, but she also prayed, drawn more and more by the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As for all of us, her path to holiness involved reflecting on how God was at work in the events of her life. While she prayed, she reflected on her past life and how God had led her; and as she did so one event that she had almost forgotten and which at the time had not seemed particularly important to her, began to take on a very special significance. This was her first Holy Communion, which she had made on Christmas Day when she was 12 years old. She remembered that coming back from the altar she had had a moment of panic that she would not be able to find her mother in the crowded church and then a voice spoke in her heart, saying, you will lose your mother but I shall be for you more than a mother. A day will come when you will leave everything you love in order to glorify me and serve this Church that you do not know. Then she had felt, a silent separation from everything I had any attachment to, so as to enter, alone, into the immensity of the One whom I possessed for the first time. This experience of the utter greatness of God, which drew her in adoration, marked her profoundly. It contained within it her particular spiritual path and the way she would offer to those who joined her. Adoration, love of Jesus especially in the Eucharist and love of the Church were to be specific marks of the Religious of the Assumption, the Congregation she founded.

Each one of us has a mission on earth (M. Marie Eugenie)

It was in 1837 that Anne Eugenie eventually discovered what her mission was to be when she met Fr. Combalot, a preacher known for his flamboyant style and fiery eloquence. For 12 years he had felt called to found a new religious congregation, under the patronage of Our Lady assumed into heaven. He saw the education of girls, which at the time was very neglected, as a way to re-christianise society. In Anne Eugenie he recognised the foundress with whom he could realise his dream. She was very reticent: she was aware of her ignorance of the faith and of the practicalities of religious life. Her desire was to join a religious congregation, not to found one. I am incapable of founding anything in the Church of God. There was another problem: she was not at all sure that Fr. Combalot had the stability of character that such an enterprise would need. But little by little he overcame her resistance and while he looked for other recruits, she lived as a novice in a Visitation convent and began her formation for this life.

It is Jesus Christ who will be the founder of our Assumption (Fr. Combalot)

On the 30th April 1839 the new community came into being. A life of prayer and silence, of study and housework, of poverty and sharing began. There was a spirit of simplicity and friendship. Anne Eugenie took the new name of Marie Eugenie, to which she added “of Jesus” when she took her vows. In so doing she indicated the whole sense of her life. Henceforth, under the protection of Mary, her life and her being would be completely “of Jesus”. Now she began to pass on to the others what she had learned at the Visitation. Fr. Combalot came every day to give conferences and to oversee the studies. For Advent of that first year he introduced them to the Roman Breviary and the sisters began to recite the Divine Office together. Its beauty and its profundity captivated them. To pray with the Church, to give their voices to Christ so that he could recite the psalms through them, to be united with all the saints who had prayed these same prayers throughout the ages, to intercede with God on behalf of humanity – all this became their passion and the passion of the sisters who have followed them right up to the present day.

The Cross is the sign by which Jesus knows his followers and a storm now swept down on this little community which was hardly on its feet. Marie Eugenie had been right to worry about the volatility and inconsistency of Fr. Combalot. His demands of the young sisters became more and more extraordinary. Marie Eugenie wanted to get advice, but the only priest Fr. Combalot would allow her to contact was one of his old friends, a priest that she had met only once some three years earlier and who lived hundreds of miles away in Nîmes in the south of France. Fr. Emmanuel d’Alzon knew his old friend well and wrote back advising that she should not tolerate anything that would hurt the work.

At this point the Archbishop was also becoming concerned about this group who had no approved rule and no ecclesiastical superior. The suggestion that the Archbishop appoint a priest other than himself was the last straw for Combalot and he decided to move the group out of Paris and re-establish the community in Brittany. He now decided that the work would be better without Marie Eugenie and demanded that the other sisters leave her and follow him to Brittany. But the sisters had by now been living and praying together for two years and they were committed to the vision and to each other. They refused to leave Marie Eugenie and let the community be split up.Combalot left the house in a rage, saying they would never see his face again. The next day he left for Rome, but, to his credit, before leaving he wrote to the Archbishop asking him to take care of the group.

Marie Eugenie was left in deep distress. She was only 23 years old and the work had lost its founder. Yet at the same time her faith was growing stronger and she realised that God never takes anything away without giving Himself more profoundly in its place… He showed that it was He who was accomplishing the work and that he wanted to do it alone.

Our aim as I understand it (M. Marie Eugenie)

Slowly the little community grew and was accepted by the Church authorities. At first the Archbishop could not understand why Marie Eugenie could not go back to the Visitation and the other sisters split up and go to other Congregations. She answered him:

It is fire, passion and ardent love for the Church and this society so far away from God that has given birth to this work. The irreligiousness of three quarters of the people necessitates a work of education… The vocation of a sister of the Visitation has quite other foundations.

Then she had to convince him that the deep contemplative life that the sisters were leading and in particular the recitation of the Divine Office was compatible with the work of education. Your Excellency, she wrote, our vocation is above all to join prayer to action. In the end he gave his blessing.

It is worth pausing and looking in more detail at the way of life of this first community, because it visibly embodies the response that Marie Eugenie and the sisters with her were trying to make to God’s call. In the early years she struggled to find the right words to express her conviction and her experience, but the sisters were already living it. At its heart is an intense love of Jesus Christ, God become man: Jesus who receives everything from the Father and gives everything back to Him in adoration and trust; Jesus who chooses to live in solidarity with humanity and freely gives his life for his brothers and sisters on the Cross; Jesus who remains with his Church always, especially in the Eucharist.

Loving Jesus Christ means adopting his viewpoint, seeing life as He sees it: it means loving as He loved, loving the Father, loving humanity. It means offering our humanity to Christ so that He can live in us and work through us. Such a love grows in lives that are rooted in prayer and this first Assumption community, like all Assumption communities since, had a rhythm of life marked by the celebration of the Eucharist and the Divine Office, as well as long moments of personal prayer and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. It is this love that gives unity to a life which is both deeply contemplative and intensely apostolic. The contemplative life is the source of an active life of faith, of zeal, of liberty of spirit.

The spirit that marked our beginnings (M. Marie Eugenie)

One of the things that attracted people to the new community was the atmosphere of joy, simplicity and enthusiasm that reigned there. And this too is an outward sign of the response they were making to God’s call. They had adopted the Rule of Saint Augustine, which makes the community itself the foundation of a life lived for God. God, Saint Augustine teaches, has drawn them together by his beauty; they are “lovers of divine beauty”. As such they are ready to leave everything else behind to belong to God in poverty; they want nothing else but God.

This was Marie Eugenie’s own experience. She saw that it had also been the experience of Our Lady: who in her repeated ‘Yes’ to God is drawn closer and closer to Him, until in one final leap of joy she is assumed into heaven. The Assumption is a mystery which follows from the Resurrection and the graces which accompany the Risen Lord are joy, peace and forgiveness. It is a mystery more of heaven than of earth and it challenged them to a way of living which they called “joyful detachment”: to rise above earthly things, to make light of difficulties, to be ready to leave the places and even the people they loved whenever God called.

This is the family spirit that has marked the Assumption from the beginning. It can be sensed in the warmth and friendliness, mutual trust and sense of communion, which the sisters consider one of the greatest gifts God has given them. Such a spirit does not arise by chance and it is not maintained by chance. It arises as a response to the grace of God, who is always calling human beings into communion and it is maintained by the on-going choice of the good of others over selfishness. This can be seen clearly in the life of one of Marie Eugenie’s greatest friends and collaborators.