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| Saint Charles de Foucauld is on the left |
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”—Matthew 5:4
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 7:10, “For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death.”
...The comfort that Jesus offers to all who mourn with a godly sorrow is that the sin that they repent over can come to an end in their lives.
http://activechristianity.org/blessed-are-those-who-mourn
—“Blessed are those who mourn,” ActiveChristianity
There are two types of conversion—initial and ongoing.
“In initial conversion, we come to know Jesus and begin to experience the blessings of being members of his body, the church. …Ongoing conversion is the process of pursuing habits that lead to holiness and rooting out those habits that separate us from Jesus.”
—“Going Further with God,” The Word Among Us, Volume 23, Number 10 (October 2004), pages 16-17
https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2021/05/placeholder-4-of-4.html
Those who mourn over their sins are indeed blessed, because the door of heaven opens only for those who repent of their sins. They are consoled when they receive the mercy of God.
By the inscrutable will of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary is sinless…John the Baptist, possibly as well, Joseph, Mary’s husband, too…however, short of any official teaching of the Church, we don’t know with certainty.
It is profoundly consoling to learn of souls just like us whose lives are transformed by the grace of conversion. They inspire in the faithful hope and fortitude.
We consider here four amazing stories close to our present time.
Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916)
Saint Charles de Foucauld—he was canonized on May 15, 2022—is a remarkable story of conversion. Not only did he turn away from a life of dissipation, vice, and immorality to become a religious and afterwards a priest, his life ended in martyrdom, and after his death he became the founding inspiration for a spiritual family of lay and religious institutions in the Church, all according to the rule he wrote for the “Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” a religious order that he envisioned but that never got off the ground. Besides saints and candidates for canonization, martyrs and spiritual “founders” officially recognized by the Church are rare.
His dissolute early life recapitulates a pattern familiar in the lives of notable saints.
“…Charles rejected the Faith as a teenager. Still, he was sent to a boarding school run by the Jesuits. Unfortunately, having lost his faith, Charles rebelled against the discipline of the school which he felt was imposing upon him a way of life that forced religious observance among other ascetic practices.
“In a letter he wrote to a friend, he said he found the boarding school to be ‘detestable.’ In this same letter he wrote:
“‘I lived the way it is possible to live once the last spark of faith has been extinguished. I am bored to death.’
“Declaring himself a ‘freethinker,’ Charles later said, ‘I was so free, so young. There remained not a trace of faith in my soul.’
“After obtaining his degree and leaving school, he hungered for adventure and thought he might find it in the military life. So he passed the entrance exams for the Saint-Cyr military school and replaced the boarding school life with a military one.
“When his grandfather had passed away he had received a large inheritance and, even while in school, he lived lavishly, enjoying food, parties, and expensive cigars. While in the army, he made friends with others who also enjoyed a lavish lifestyle.
“In what became an ‘ambiguous’ relationship with the army, Charles was sent to serve under a captain who was known for his intense discipline. The captain gave him poor reports, once writing:
“‘Being very young, this officer lacks firmness and enthusiasm. Of undeveloped character, he has much work ahead before he can perform at the level expected.’
“Finally, after being sent to Algeria, he was dismissed from his unit because he had brought with him a mistress. In 1882, he resigned from the army.”
https://www.goodcatholic.com/a-saint-for-sinners-charles-de-foucauld/
—“A Saint For Sinners: Charles De Foucauld,” Good Catholic
His pious and ascetic life following his conversion is exemplary.
“He undertook a risky exploration of Morocco (1883-1884). Seeing the way Muslims expressed their faith questioned him and he began repeating, ‘My God, if you exist, let me come to know you.’
“On his return to France, the warm, respectful welcome he received from his deeply Christian family made him continue his search. Under the guidance of Fr. Huvelin he rediscovered God in October 1886. He was then 28 years old. ‘As soon as I believed in God, I understood that I could not do otherwise than to live for him alone.’
“A pilgrimage to the Holy Land revealed his vocation to him: to follow Jesus in his life at Nazareth. He spent [seven] years as a Trappist, first in France and then at Akbès in Syria. Later he began to lead a life of prayer and adoration, alone, near a convent of Poor Clares in Nazareth.
“Ordained a priest at 43 (1901) he left for the Sahara, living at first in Beni Abbès and later at Tamanrasset among the Tuaregs of the Hoggar. He wanted to be among those who were, ‘the furthest removed, the most abandoned.’ He wanted all who drew close to him to find in him a brother, ‘a universal brother.’ In a great respect for the culture and faith of those among whom he lived, his desire was to ‘shout the Gospel with his life.’ ‘I would like to be sufficiently good that people would say, “If such is the servant, what must the Master be like?”’”
https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20051113_de-foucauld_en.html
—“Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916),” The Holy See
Charles de Foucauld’s martyrdom is touched by controversy. He was killed by bandits of the Hoggar tribe, among others, shot fatally in the head by one of the raiders fearful of two French Camel Corps soldiers who had suddenly appeared upon the scene. During the assault on the fort in which Charles de Foucauld had been residing, there had been a preexisting call to holy war issued by leaders of the Muslim Senoussiya sect to clear the locality of Christians. Khaoucen, a leader belonging to this same sect, enlisted the bandits who conducted the raid.
Given the context of explicit religiously motivated hostility against the Christians in the area—basically, French colonialists—Charles de Foucauld became the victim of a botched kidnapping attempt. According to this understanding, he was killed in odium fidei and is thereby a martyr. He might be denoted an accidental martyr or even an inadvertent saint.
See “Saint Charles de Foucauld: Martyr of the Faith,” The Catholic Counter-Reformation:
Prayer of Abandonment by Saint Charles de Foucauld
Father, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands, without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father. Amen.
https://www.goodcatholic.com/a-saint-for-sinners-charles-de-foucauld/
—“A Saint For Sinners: Charles De Foucauld,” Good Catholic
The saint’s life gives shining witness to this prayer.
Matt Talbot (1856-1925)
Matt Talbot’s is a remarkable story because of the radical turnaround in his life. His alcohol addiction began at an early age and degenerated to serious illness lasting for well over a decade.
“His father was a heavy drinker and, as a result, the family grew up in poverty. Typical of his era, Matt spent just one year at school. There was no compulsory education and he was unable to read or write. He entered the workforce at age twelve, employed by E & J Burke, a firm which bottled beer. His drinking began with taking the dregs from the bottom of bottles, which had been returned. Within two years, he graduated to whiskey and by the time he was sixteen, he came home drunk regularly.
“By the time he was in his twenties…as far as the neighbors in that area of Dublin were concerned, Matt Talbot was a habitual drunk. …Drink had become Matt’s only interest in life. When his wages were spent, he borrowed and scrounged for money. He pawned his clothes and boots. He supplemented his wages by doing extra work after hours. Among other things he minded horses outside a tavern, while the owners enjoyed themselves inside. The tips he received bought him more drink. He became a thief, once stealing a fiddle from a blind man. On Saturday he would come home with just a shilling from his wages for his mother. His life had become unmanageable.”
https://www.ballinteerparish.ie/matt-talbot-story.htm
—“Life Story of Matt Talbot,” St. John the Evangelist Church, Ballinteer Parish, Dublin
His conversion to perfect abstinence was complete and lasting. In no small measure he succeeded because he turned to God in prayer. He was hard on himself and adopted a severe ascetical regimen recapitulating the saints.
“By the time he was twenty-eight, he was well on the road to self-destruction, when a traumatic incident changed his life. On a Saturday morning in 1884, he waited outside O'Meara’s [Pub] without a penny in his pocket. He had been unemployed that week. His problem, he told himself, would be quickly solved. When he had money, he shared it generously with his drinking friends. Therefore, he reasoned, they would not reject him in his misfortune. But they did. One by one, they passed him. Some greeted him; others ignored him. …Matt Talbot was stunned and shocked. Years later, he said that he was ‘cut to the heart.’ …it was a moment of grace. …He made his way home slowly. His mother was preparing the mid-day meal when he arrived. In nineteenth century Ireland it was common for someone who wished to stop drinking to take a solemn pledge before a priest to abstain for a period of time. ‘Ma, I’m going to take the pledge for life,’ he said. He headed off to a nearby seminary where the priest persuaded him that he should take the pledge for ninety days only.
“Those three months were sheer hell. …But he had an iron will, a rock-like stubbornness that stood him well down through the years. …Matt went for a walk every evening after work. During one of those walks his resolution almost broke. He passed Bushe’s Public House about a mile from his home just as it opened. …That evening he made another resolution, never to carry money with him. He kept that resolution for the rest of his life.
“…To find the strength to remain sober he decided to attend Mass every morning before work and to receive Holy Communion. This was very unusual in the 1880’s when the average good layman went to Mass just on Sunday and received Holy Communion only at Easter and Christmas. At the end of three months, Matt took the pledge to abstain from alcohol for six months and finally took it for life.
“…The strict ascetical life of the early Irish monks attracted him. Their love of prayer with the emphasis on penance and humility, and manual labour dedicated to God, appealed to him. …He allowed himself just four or five hours sleep at night and arose about 5 a.m. to prepare for early Mass. Then he would return home for breakfast. …He was a conscientious worker. …Since he was a member of many religious associations, he attended a meeting almost every evening. When he came home about 9 p.m. or 10 p.m., it was time for his spiritual reading. His spiritual reading ended about 1 a.m., and he retired for four hours rest before beginning his daily routine again.”
—Ibid.
On Sundays he would pray in church, attending the first Mass at 6:00 am and leaving at 12:00 pm.
Matt Talbot’s exemplary spirituality all came together in the public eye when he collapsed on the way to daily Mass and died of heart failure. He was found wearing three loose chains in his practice of the devotion known as slavery to Mary. It required wearing only a single chain.
This Jubilee Year of Hope, Matt Talbot’s witness reminds us that there is hope in the life of grace for everyone.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
Dorothy Day (1897-1980)
In Dorothy Day’s life we witness her conversion from a fervent espousal of communism, an intemperate series of affairs, an abortion, and an out-of-wedlock child, to baptism in the Roman Catholic Church.
Her life in the Roman Catholic faith was marked by growing and deep spirituality concluding in notable Christian example. Together with Peter Maurin, she founded The Catholic Worker Movement, beginning with the publication of Catholic Worker on May 1, 1933, both for which she is best known.
On March 13, 2000 the application of the Archdiocese of New York under Cardinal John J. O’Connor to open her cause for canonization was approved by John Paul II. Her cause proceeds apace, even if somewhat controversial.
The following excerpt is taken from the chapter on Dorothy Day in Thomas Bokenkotter, Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1998), pages 403 to 451.
Dorothy Day was born November 8, 1897, in Brooklyn Heights, the third of five children of John and Grace Slaterlee Day. John was a newspaperman, a religious skeptic, fond of horse-racing and whiskey. “We children did not know him very well,” Dorothy recounted in her autobiography, “so stood in awe of him, only learning to talk to him after we had left home and he began to treat us as friends—casual friends, it is true, since he was always impatient with our ideas and hated the radical movement which both my sister and I were involved in later…But he was a good man and a happy man in his own circle and he enjoyed life greatly.” Dorothy’s mother “had a temperament which helped her through much hardship and uncertainty. She refused to worry when things were going badly and when the family had its periods of poverty…Whenever mother had extra troubles or a specially hard day’s work behind her, she used to bathe and dress with particular care as though she were going to a dinner party. She reigned over the supper table as a queen and had as much interest in entertaining her…children as if we were all adult friends in for a party.”
…On March 21, 1917 at Madison Square Garden, in the words of William Miller, Dorothy joined with thousands in reliving the first days of the revolt in Russia. “I felt the exultation, the joyous sense of victory of the masses as they sang…the workers’ hymn of Russia,” described in The Call as a “mystic, gripping melody of struggle, a cry for world peace and human brotherhood.”
…Beginning to feel the emptiness of the bohemian life, Dorothy sought a new way to serve the poor and the suffering. She took a job as a hospital orderly cleaning bedpans, giving baths and rubs, and changing bedsheets and dressings. The flu epidemic of 1919 was raging and the hospital was crowded with dying patients. An orderly named Lionel Moise worked with her, undressing longshoremen and helping to cart dead bodies down to the morgue. Moise was a macho, a drifter who had seen a lot of the world while working in all sorts of jobs—deckhand on a freighter, movie cameraman in Latin America. Currently he was working off a hospital bill he had incurred after being mugged and brought in unconscious. Dorothy fell insanely in love with him, moved into his apartment, and waited on him like a slave. When they quarreled and broke up she apparently tried suicide but survived and resumed the affair. Dorothy then discovered she was pregnant. Fearful that Moise would leave her if she had the child, she made the agonized decision to have an abortion. Moise took off anyway, leaving some money and a farewell note.
Her next move was “marriage on the rebound’ to Barkeley Tobey, a wealthy man twenty years her senior. During a trip abroad she spent six months on the isle of Capri and forever associated it with the smell of spaghetti and red wine. The marriage lasted only a year but it gave her the leisure to write a novel, The Eleventh Virgin. After leaving Tobey she headed for Chicago hoping to resume her affair with Moise. She ended up in jail after being arrested in the famous Palmer raids on the pretext that the rooming house she stayed at was in fact a brothel….
Upon her release she once more got a job as a reporter and rented a room owned by three Catholic women….
Finally managing to disconnect from Moise, and after a stint down South as a reporter for the New Orleans Item, Dorothy’s fortunes changed dramatically when she received a windfall from the sale of The Eleventh Virgin to Hollywood….
Realizing that she needed peace and quiet if she was to write, Dorothy bought a beach house on Staten Island. Thus began the four most joy-filled years of her life. Once again she fell in love, this time with a marine biologist, anarchist, and gifted fisherman, Forster Batterham. They agreed to live together on weekends and Dorothy had the rest of the time to herself to enjoy the sounds of the sea, the cries of the gulls, and the noise of children at play. She loved Forster madly “in every way, as a wife, as a mother even. I loved his lean and cold body as he got into bed smelling of the sea and I loved his integrity and stubborn pride.” It pained her that he was so against marriage and had no desire to bring children into what he saw as a heartless and cruel world. Nor could she understand how he could deny God’s existence when the world was so full of beauty. She found herself praying more frequently, the rosary especially, and took special delight in praying before a statue of Mary.
Having long assumed that she was unable to have a child because of her abortion, she was stupefied one day to find she was pregnant. It was bad news to Forster, but Dorothy was delirious with joy. Tamar Theresa was born on March 3, 1927. Dorothy had to record her experience on paper; her article “On Having a Baby” was printed in The New Masses and was highly praised in the radical press around the world.
The overwhelming joy she felt turned her even closer to God. “No human creature,” she said, “could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore. I heard many say they did not need a Church to praise Him but my very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to associate myself with others, with the masses, in praising and adoring God.” The only way Dorothy could really express the depth of her feeling at the birth of the child was to have Tamar baptized….
Forster reacted predictably and tension began to build. In spite of his first reaction, however, Forster was delighted with his little daughter, and Dorothy began to hope that he might change his mind about marriage too. But it was not to be. At this time, too, the immigrant Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for murder after a trial that riveted the attention of the nation and the world. Forster and Dorothy were both griefstricken at what they saw as a horrible miscarriage of justice. Forster saw it also as an indictment of the Church, which had stood by unprotesting. The differences between the two finally exploded and Forster left, slamming the door. For Dorothy, it was the moment of truth. She called the parish priest and made arrangements to be received into the Church. Later she recalled how little joy she had felt on the day of her baptism and how divided were her thoughts. Was she betraying the victims of injustice and oppression by entering a Church whose priests so often ignored the poor and said nary a word about social justice? As Dorothy later remembered, “I felt that charity was a word to choke over.”
…Always ready to admit her own failings, she was much embarrassed by the increasing number of accolades that came her way in her later years. The Jesuit magazine America devoted a special issue to her as an individual who best symbolized “the aspiration and action of the American Church community during the past forty years.” In bestowing on her the Laetare medal, Notre Dame University lauded her as one “who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.” And when Cardinal Cooke came to visit her, bringing a message from the pope, she was “overwhelmed.”
As she neared eighty she more and more felt captive to her frail body and “sick, weak heart” and was often confined to her room, where from her window she could see “a sycamore tree with a few little seed balls hanging from it, the pigeons flying and squirrels on the roof edge, the sky a cloudless blue.” At Easter 1979 Cesar Chavez came for a visit, and in June, Mother Teresa.
Except for an occasional visitor, her day was broken up by recitation of the divine office and Psalms, times of silent prayer, reading, meals, radio and television….
The column
she continued to write for the Catholic Worker began to make only sporadic
appearances and by 1980 was reduced to one- to two-sentence diary notes. She
heard of the Workers’ week-long vigil at the Pentagon and longed for one more
time on the picket line. Her final written words spoke of the “beautiful statue
of the Madonna behind the altar in the Maryhouse chapel” carved by her
sister-in-law. On November 29 Tamar came to see her late in the afternoon.
Dorothy asked her for a cup of tea. As she sipped the tea she remarked how good
life can be at certain times and held Tamar’s hand. At 5:30 P.M., with Tamar at
her bedside, Dorothy’s great heart simply stopped beating and death came gently
and peacefully.
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