Centenary of the Death of Marie-Eugénie Milleret, 1998

John Franck, A.A.

Sermon excerpts....

A March 8 article in the New York Times featured an emerging profession.... "philosopher practitioners." They offer therapy based on the corpus of moral reflections. The American spokesman, Prof. Lou Marinoff, recently said, "Typical clients are refugees from psychotherapy, some seeking deeper truths and others looking for a better way to deal with depression and anxiety."

Wherever this trend may lead, these philosophers have recognized that people are no longer satisfied with facile answers. They are looking for answers that go to the heart of things. This age in which we are living is increasingly complex, creating anxieties over relationships, jobs, personal worth and meaning. New scientific evidence indicates that the universe, once seen as our stable home, is expanding at an immeasurable rate. Biomedical researchers have given birth to Dolly and created opportunities, and dilemmas, at once considered unimaginable. Technology has revolutionized communications. A global economy has produced fundamental political and social changes. Ethnic hatreds have erupted with devastating consequences. People are looking for direction and assurance.

Entering a similar world in transition, Marie-Eugénie was born in 1817. The French Revolution had swept away an older order and ushered in a radically new and unstable one. Religious structures had been fundamentally weakened, if not in some case, entirely destroyed. Industrialization was fostering social and economic upheavals throughout Europe. People wondered: who would offer them answers to their deepest questions?

The corrosive effects of this uncertain world touched Marie-Eugénie personally. She was barely 13, in that catastrophic year of 1830, when her father, a prominent banker and politician, lost everything. Not only did she have to leave her childhood home, but discovered soon thereafter that her parents were to divorce. Economic loss, family disintegration, social dislocation, lack of training in the faith - she knew all this. When she thought that she had experienced more than a teenager could bear, her mother contracted cholera and died suddenly in 1835.

Here she was --- 18 --- alone and with little faith. How would she survive?

Looking back on these days, Marie-Eugénie identified two turning points in her early life. The first: Christmas Day, 1829---she received the Body of Christ for the first time. Although a conventional rite of passage for most, something mysterious happened that day, only understood much later. "I 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." A voice within her said, "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 which you do not know."

The second turning point: Lent 1836. A restless Marie-Eugénie, now 19, extremely bright and hungry to know everything, entered Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to listen to the renowned preacher, Lacordaire. Then and there her vocation took life. She was consumed with a desire to consecrate her life to God with "a new generosity, a faith that nothing would ever be able to make waver again."

One year later, in Lent of 1837, she was again listening to a renowned French cleric, the fiery Combalot. To address the weakness of her education in the Christian faith, she had studied the greatest thinkers of her day. She was becoming acutely aware of the sorry state of European society and the need for change. But she could hardly have known what God had in store for her. Abbé Combalot had always nourished a dream - rather unconventional for his day -a congregation of sisters combining a life of contemplative prayer with the education of women. He wrote, "It is through women that society will be regenerated; yet people give girls only pious practices and don't help them understand Jesus Christ. They don't reveal Christ to them. They don't teach them to relate everything to Jesus Christ, to restore everything in Jesus Christ."

Combalot saw in the 20 year-old Marie-Eugénie something she herself had only experienced as an intuition. She was to be the foundation stone of his dream. He saw in her what a recent biographer called "her intelligence, lively faith, and gentle zeal." Only gradually did she become convinced of Abbé Combalot's proposition.

Early on the faith of this foundress was put to the test. There was opposition from her father, whose hard-nosed practicality left little room for his daughter's quixotic notions. There was a falling out with her mentor, Combalot himself. There were the doubts of her Church-appointed superiors who worried that she was trying to accomplish too much in a new congregation: by insisting on a rigorous course of study for all sisters; by remaining in contact with the political and social realities of the world; by combining an active apostolate with a demanding life of private and common prayer. Was such an open convent advisable for young women? Later, other churchmen, far less sympathetic, would spuriously accuse her of incompetence.. Finally, there was the painful failure of one of her first foundations.

In 1866, while visiting the tomb of Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, she wrote, "Ignatius knew all the pains of a foundation; he learned through experience that it is through suffering that the works of God are born...I myself was the first stone laid by the hand of God...and that was no small task!"

So it was that the new foundation was laid. It took shape and expanded throughout France, to England and Spain. By the time Marie-Eugénie died in 1898, there were 1,100 Sisters, in 29 houses in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. On five continents a century later, they continue to invite seekers to the deeper truths.