The Life of St. Claude de la Colombiere

Every Catholic knows St. Margaret Mary.
Far fewer know the priest Our Lord sent to stand beside her.

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The priest who believed her. When Our Lord showed His Sacred Heart to a young nun at Paray-le-Monial, hardly anyone believed her. The priests of the town said her visions came from the devil, or from her imagination, or from hypocrisy. She begged God for a guide, and He promised to send her “His faithful servant and friend.” That friend was a Jesuit named Claude de la Colombière. He believed her, defended her, and took up the devotion as his own life’s work. The 1922 preface to this book calls him “her one stay and comfort in the time of her darkest trial, when no one else believed in her.”

In his own words. As a young priest he bound himself by vow to keep every one of his Rules, down to the smallest, and he wrote out his reasons in a private notebook. Those notes are here, along with:

• his retreat resolutions, where he writes about his self-love and daily faults as plainly as about his love for God
• his letters to the souls he directed
• the Offering to the Sacred Heart he wrote in London
• the notes of his thirty-day Spiritual Retreat

A French Jesuit said it is impossible to read them “without saying to oneself, ‘These are the words of a Saint.’”

“The following words never occur to my mind without light, peace, liberty, sweetness, and love entering it together with them: Simplicity, Trust, Humility, Complete Abandonment, No Reserve, the Will of God, my Rules.”

— St. Claude de la Colombière

A confessor of the Faith. He carried the devotion to the Sacred Heart into Protestant England and taught it there “before it had been preached even in France.” When the Titus Oates plot broke out, a young man he had received into the Church betrayed him. He was thrown into the King’s Bench Prison and then banished, and he came home to France coughing blood. His brother Jesuits in Lyons welcomed him as a confessor of the Faith. He died at Paray two years later.

Still in her shadow. The Church has raised him to the altars, yet few know his name. Priests will find in him a model director of souls. Anyone who keeps the First Fridays will find the man who first believed in them.

— ABOUT THE AUTHOR —

Sister Mary Philip was a nun of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Bar Convent, York, the oldest convent in England. Her community had its own bond with St. Claude. Its Sisters in London knew him personally in 1678, and the Bar Convent claims to be the first in England to have publicly enshrined a picture of the Sacred Heart in its chapel. While she wrote, the Postulator of his Cause, Père Zelle, S.J., encouraged her by letter until his sudden death. Her book first appeared in 1922 as A Jesuit at the English Court. Seven years later, Pope Pius XI declared Claude Blessed.

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A paperback of 304 pages, 5½ × 8½ inches,
newly typeset from the 1922 Burns Oates & Washbourne edition.