From: rich <
richarra@gmail.com>
May 8th =E2=80=93 Catherine Simon de Longpr=C3=A9, Mystic, Missionary
(1632-1668)
A young future missionary to New France, Catherine de Longpr=C3=A9, in
religion Sister Marie-Catherine of Saint Augustine, was a nursing nun
in the community of the Hospitaler Sisters of Saint Augustine in
Evreux. Born in France in 1632, she went to Quebec at the age of 16.
Having offered her life for the sick and the sanctification of souls,
she found in Quebec City a newly-established and very poor hospital,
where she would labor for 20 years with unfailing devotion and
courage.
Blessed Catherine's physical and moral sufferings increased to a
measure which few Saints have surpassed; she was chosen as a victim by
God for the expiation of sins, in this territory which He destined for
Himself in a particular way. To sustain her in the terrible obsessions
which she endured, to preserve other souls who could not have
withstood hell's assaults, she was given for her heavenly spiritual
director, Saint John de Brebeuf, the North American martyr who had
died not long before, in what is now Ontario. The entire history of
her interior life was written by her confessor, the Jesuit Paul
Ragueneau, who had been a friend of the great Martyr and had labored
with him. Father Ragueneau recognized as authentic his fellow Jesuit=E2=80= =99s
spiritual role in the life of this remarkable religious.
The sale of alcoholic beverages to the Indians in exchange for furs
was a grievous abuse which the saintly first bishop of Quebec,
Monsignor Francis Montmorency de Laval, was striving to abolish; sins
of the tongue, immodesty and impiety were rampant in the city and
surroundings. Monsignor de Laval recognized in Sister Catherine a soul
of predilection, and he often asked her intercession for particular
persons, for the colony and the Indians, whose souls were his great
concern, as they were also of his clergy and missionaries. She, for
her part, complied by her prayers and sacrifices, and saw in a vision
how the demons of hell were working for the ruin of the colony, in
various places and in various ways. A spiritual battle of great
proportions was underway, to win Canada for Christ.
Blessed Catherine died at the age of 36, saying shortly before she
expired: =E2=80=9CMy God, I adore Your divine perfections; I adore Your div= ine
Justice; I abandon myself to it with my whole heart.=E2=80=9D One of the gr= eat
mystics of the Church, her life remains a prodigy of sacrifice and
love, a gold mine of doctrine for those who seek understanding of
God's ways with His Saints and His people.
Source: Fr. Paul Ragueneau, S.J., La vie de la M=C3=A8re Catherine de Saint Augustin, (F. Lambert: Paris, 1671). Reprinted in Quebec City, 1923,
by the Augustinian nuns.
=C2 Bible Quote:
26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For
as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there
is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29
And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, =
heirs
according to promise. [Galatians 3:26-29:] (RSVCE)
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The bread of life
Jesus said to the people: "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to
me shall never hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst."
He did not say "the bread of bodily nourishment," but "the bread of
life." For when everything had been reduced to a condition of
spiritual death, the Lord gave us life through himself, who is bread
because, as we believe, the leaven in the dough of our humanity was
baked through and through by the fire of his divinity. He is the bread
not of this ordinary life, but of a very different kind of life which
death will never cut short.
Whoever believes in this bread will never hunger, will never be
famished for want of hearing the word of God; nor will such a person
be parched by spiritual thirst through lack of the waters of baptism
and the consecration imparted by the Spirit. The unbaptized, deprived
of the refreshment afforded by the sacred water, suffer thirst and
great aridity. The baptized, on the other hand, being possessed of the
Spirit, enjoy its continual consolation.
--Theophylact of Ochrida
(Theophylact (1050 - 1109), archbishop of Ochrida, theologian and
language scholar, taught rhetoric and was tutor to the imperial heir presumptive. He wrote commentaries on many books of the bible.)
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