From deep within heavenly interaction, this Carmelite mystic seems to smile upon us, inviting us to follow her footsteps in the Trinitarian experience on earth and in eternity.
An intelligent child at seven years, with a determined and already contemplative character, Elizabeth was taking part in a family visit with Canon Isidore Angles. At a certain point, the little girl left off her childish games and conversation with her sister and friends, to approach the priest and whisper in his ear:
“Monsieur Angles, I will be a nun. I want to be a nun!”
Alarmed, her mother asked, “What did the little rascal say?”
Keenly intuitive, she had perceived that Elizabeth’s words carried a seriousness beyond her years. She knew her daughter well and suspected that this desire, expressed with such conviction, would be fulfilled. After spending a fretful night, she sought the canon the following day and anxiously asked him if he seriously believed in the veracity of Elizabeth’s vocation. The answer pierced her heart like a sword:
“I believe in it!”
Victory over an irascible temperament
Born on July 18, 1880, in the military encampment of Avord, near Bourges, where her father was a Captain, Marie Elizabeth Catez was baptized four days later. A little girl with a strong, impetuous temperament and fiery eyes, who was energetic, talkative and affectionate, Elizabeth was closely attached to her sister Margaret, three years younger and tranquil by contrast.
At just seven years of age, Elizabeth’s father died in her arms, victim of a heart attack. This event profoundly marked her with the fleetingness of earthly things. A few months later, her widowed mother moved the family to an apartment from where the Carmel of Dijon could be seen, a short distance away.
From her earliest childhood, the girl battled to control her irascibility with an iron will. Her sister testifies: “In the effort to overcome herself, she attained an angelic sweetness. I remember her when she was very small having real outbursts of anger, shouting and stamping her feet… This very difficult little girl transformed herself into a young lady of great serenity.”1
In a letter addressed to her mother, on January 1, 1889, Elizabeth clearly demonstrates this desire to conquer her own temperament: “In wishing you a happy New Year, I have the joy of promising you that I will be well behaved and obedient; that I will no longer give you reason to be angry; I will not cry anymore and I will be an exemplary little girl so that you will be pleased with everything.”2
Months later, in another letter to her mother, she wrote: “I hope to soon have the happiness of making my First Communion; for this reason I will improve my behaviour still more, because I asked Our Lord God to make me better.”3
In fact, on April 19, 1891, the day in which she received the long desired Bread of Angels, young Elizabeth’s temperament changed suddenly and profoundly. After the ceremony, she confided to Marie Louise Hallo, her close friend: “I am not hungry; Jesus has fed me.” 4 That first contact with the hidden Jesus in the Sacred Host was decisive for her spiritual journey. From that moment, “the master took complete possession of her heart,”5 affirms Fr. Philipon.
On that same day, she paid a visit to the Carmel and felt deeply touched when the Prioress, Mother Mary of Jesus, explained to her that the name Elizabeth meant “House of God”. These words indelibly marked the young girl, called to a unique and profound interaction with the Blessed Trinity—with “my Three”, as she would later say—, indwelling in her soul with special intensity.
Elizabeth of the Trinity at 18 years of age
Harmony between mystical and social life
Endowed with special musical gifts, Elizabeth began studying in the Conservatory of Dijon at eight years of age, receiving several awards. At thirteen, she won first prize in piano in a concert that was reported by the local press, making her known in the city as a gifted pianist.
Outside of the Conservatory, she did not attend any school. It was the custom at that time for girls to be educated at home, by teachers hired by the family. Furthermore, her piano studies took much of her time and she was constantly invited to concerts or musical soirées.
Madame Catez and her daughters had a large circle of friends. In nineteenth century France, which still had a lingering note of the doceur de vivre, social relationships provided a wealth of innocent pleasures such as music sessions, tennis matches, picnics and excursions to the mountains or the small and charming French villages. All of these activities kept Elizabeth and her friends constantly occupied, within an atmosphere of joy that is difficult to imagine today.
Thus, Elizabeth took pleasure in the mountains and woods, and the French villages and churches. She also greatly enjoyed the frequent family trips to the south of France. She was happy within a society which did not hinder the practice of virtue or the interior life.
Elizabeth herself narrates a decisive event in her spiritual journey that occurred at this time, shortly before she reached fourteen years of age: “One day, during my thanksgiving, I felt myself irresistibly impelled to choose Jesus as my sole Spouse; and without further delay, I united myself to Him by the vow of virginity. […] My resolution to be all his became even more definitive.”6
The holiday trips over, the first born of the Catez family returned to Dijon happy to be close once again to the Carmel, whose carillon she loved to hear, whose garden she contemplated through her window and whose chapel attracted her thoughts. A mystical impulse transported her to those blessed walls, so close and yet so distant.
Desire for an encounter with the Spouse
After the summer of 1898, having reached 18, Elizabeth firmly resolved to enter Carmel. However, she met with an insurmountable obstacle: her mother’s flat denial which she accepted with resignation despite the tremendous suffering it caused her. Only when she reached 21, the age of majority, was she allowed to accomplish her desire.
The years of waiting served to favour Elizabeth’s spiritual advancement, as she found support in the great masters of Carmel, especially St. Teresa of Jesus, St. John of the Cross and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who had died only a short time before, in 1897. The Story of a Soul, which was already circulating in France, resounded strongly in the soul of this future religious.
During a Redemptorist mission in 1899, the desire to be an expiatory victim awoke in Elizabeth’s heart. She wished to win souls for her Spouse and to help Him carry the Cross. She wrote these intentions in her spiritual diary, on the last day of the mission, concluding with these words: “Oh! My Spouse, my king, my life, my supreme love, always sustain me on this way of the cross that I have chosen to share, since without Thee I can do nothing!”7
In June of this same year, Madame Catez authorized her daughter to visit the Carmelites and Elizabeth presented her request for admission to the Prioress of the Carmel. From then on, she began drawing away from social life. She still attended some gatherings, but her spirit was elsewhere.
At the beginning of 1900, she participated in the Spiritual Exercises preached by a Jesuit, Fr. Hoppenot. On the final day, January 27, she noted in the same spiritual diary: “I surrendered myself in such a way to the good Master and abandoned myself to Him, confiding to Him all my dearest desires. I only want what He wants. I am his victim. May He do with me what He pleases. May He take me in the moment that He wishes, because I am ready and live in this hope.”8
Further obstacles arose to delay the entrance of Elizabeth into Carmel, but finally her desire became reality on August 2, 1901. As a postulant, she felt herself to be a Carmelite and everything in the convent enchanted her. The garden, the cloisters, the rule, the recollection, the silence… everything spoke to her of God in such a way that, as she described it, “Only one thin veil seems to separate us, He is on the verge of appearing.”9
On the feast of the Immaculate Conception of this same year, she received the habit of novice, and less than two years later, on January 11, 1903, she made her religious profession.
shortly before entering Carmel
Purified by suffering
In the novitiate, these springtime graces were withdrawn. The soul of Christ’s bride, offered to Him as a victim of love, began to be purified in suffering and trials. “The radiant sunshine of the postulant was followed by the darkness of an obscure night for Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity,” affirmed the Prioress of the time, Mother Germaine of Jesus. “It is impossible to describe what this innocent daughter—who a short time before was immersed in a peace that seemed inalterable—then suffered.”10
“The divine hand,” Father Philipon explains, “did not spare her the supreme purifications by which God normally introduces heroic souls into the immutable peace of transforming union, and elevates them above all pleasure and all pain.”11
In this way, the cheerful youth who enthusiastically took part in the innocent pleasures of life, learned to accept terrible sufferings with utmost naturality.
The deepest secret
Analyzing the spiritual journey of Elizabeth of the Trinity, this same Dominican theologian, Marie-Michel Philipon, gives a detailed description of the actuation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit within her and affirms that it was wisdom—the most divine of all the gifts—that allowed her to participate, to the highest degree possible on this earth, in the experimental knowledge that God has of Himself in the Word, giving origin to Love.12
Elizabeth felt like the adopted daughter of the Trinity, completely co-natural with Them, so that all of her acts proceeded from her soul and, at the same time, from God. She lived constantly, so to speak, in the very heart of the Trinity and from this indivisible centre her soul contemplated everything in its most sublime and divine sense.
Everything on this earth—including pain and suffering—was on a secondary plane for her. For she possessed “instinctively, the eternal and divine sense of things, and she needed to do violence to herself to descend to the level of trivialities in which numerous souls are immersed, even religious, who call themselves contemplatives, and do not know how to forget their miseries and their nothingness.” 13
This was Elizabeth’s deepest secret, expressed in her life and writings. Her great ambition was “to tell all souls what sources of strength, of peace and of happiness they would find if they would only consent to live in this intimacy” with the divine Persons.14
“Laudem gloriæ”
The Trinitarian spirituality of Sister Elizabeth gave her, as we have seen, a type of anticipated vision of the habits of eternity, filling her with peace and making her life godlike.
However, before reaching the beatific vision, the soul of this privileged Carmelite had one more step to ascend toward perfect union with the Beloved. It began, fortuitously, with a spiritual conversation with another nun about a passage from the Epistles of St. Paul: “ut simus in laudem gloriæ eius”; “to live for the praise of his glory” (Eph 1:12).
In 1903, soon after her religious profession
By a special grace, these words of the Apostle revealed to her the essence of her spirituality and meaning of her mission on this earth. A new phase in her life began, in which the motto Laudem gloriæ became her epithet. Sister Elizabeth even began to use it as a signature, in order to mark this fruitful period characterized by a total surrender to Divine Providence. “To be a praise of glory—she would say—one must be dead to all that is not Him, so as to be moved only by his touch.”15
It is difficult to comprehend, for those not accustomed to the mysteries of mysticism, all the spiritual and theological insight contained in this very brief motto. It reflects a sublime stage of the interior life, in which the soul transcends even the very pursuit of sanctity to concern itself exclusively with divine glory. It is no longer a question of seeking the means to attain Heaven, but already on this earth beginning “the Sanctus in the home of the blessed.” 16
“Janua Cœli”
Within this anticipated experience of Heaven, she would often meditate on the relationship of Mary with the Trinity. She imagined the Father inclining over her, desiring that she be Mother in time of He of whom He is Father in eternity. She visualized the Spirit of Love—who presides all the operations of God—engendering in her the Word Incarnate, from the moment of her Fiat.
She was taken with a desire to be a slave of the Lord, following the example of Our Lady. It was through her intimate union with the Trinity that Mary opened to men the “gate of heaven”—Janua Cœli—bringing the Saviour into the world.
When she was already very ill, Sister Elizabeth asked the most holy Virgin to watch over her departure from Carmel to heaven, just as she had protected her in her entrance into the convent. Mary would be the propitious open door for her ultimate encounter with the Blessed Trinity. “Janua Cœli will let Laudem gloriæ pass through,” they heard her say during the final moments of her agony.17
“I am going to Light, to Love, to Life”
In the spring of 1905, Elizabeth experienced the first symptoms of an incurable illness at that time: Addison’s disease.
Knowing that she was soon to die, she desired to do even more good to souls, uniting them to the Blessed Trinity. Thus, she multiplied her farewell missives and letters of spiritual counsel. At the request of the Prioress, she transcribed some meditations from her last retreat of August 1906, in which the perspective of eternity, where her soul already seemed to be living, is evident: “How beautiful is the creature thus bereft, freed from itself! […] It ascends, rises above the senses and nature; going beyond itself; vanquishes all joy and all sadness, and passes over everything so as only to rest when it has penetrated the interior of He whom it loves.”18
At the end of October of this year, the disease irremediably worsened. She knew the long desired moment of living with “her Three” was approaching, and in the last days of agony, she repeated, “with a captivating voice” these words: “I am going to Light, to Love, to Life…”19
The Superior stayed with her constantly, witnessing how patiently and serenely she endured the separation from this earthly life. Disfigured by pain, she became unrecognizable. On November 9, at five forty-five in the morning, she turned to her right, tilted her head back and became radiant. Her eyes, closed for several days, opened, seeming to discern something above the head of Mother Germaine who, kneeling at her bedside, prayed. Thus she departed to meet with “her Three.”
A month before her death, with the statue that she called “Janua Cœli”
* * *
After her death, Sister Elizabeth continues to be an example of sublime spirituality and Trinitarian life, inviting us to follow her footsteps in the experience of life in God. More than theological teachings, she transmitted for future centuries a rich mystical experience reaching fruition in just a few short years in Carmel and amply related in letters and other writings.
This legacy for the future is described by Pope John Paul II, in the homily for her beatification: “To our disoriented humanity, which does not know how to find God or disfigures Him, and which is seeking some word upon which to base its hope, Elizabeth gives the testimony of perfect openness to the Word of God, which she assimilated to the point of truly nourishing her meditation and prayer on it. She found in Him her reason for living and consecrated herself to the praise of his glory.” 20
Thus her message is spread today with extraordinary prophetic impetus.◊
