June 2

Spiritual Bouquet: Unless you do penance, you will all perish. St. Luke 13:3

SAINT MARY of the INCARNATION
Widow, Ursuline nun
(1599-1672)

Marie Guyart Martin, fourth child in a family of seven children, was born in Tours, France. When very young, she had a dream that moved her profoundly. “I was about seven years old,” she wrote. “In my sleep one night, it seemed to me that I was in a schoolyard... Suddenly the skies opened, and Our Lord emerged, advancing toward me! When Jesus neared me, I stretched out my arms to embrace Him. Jesus embraced me affectionately and asked me: ‘Do you want to belong to Me?’ I answered, ‘Yes.’ ” She was unceasingly to repeat that “yes,” the key to her entire life, amid joys and afflictions.

When Mary was eighteen, her parents believed she was ready to get married. She obeyed and married Claude Martin, a master silk worker. In 1619 she gave birth to a son, who was one day to become Dom Claude Martin. Six months later, the Lord marked her with the seal of His predilection: she was visited by the cross of widowhood, with all its trials. Mary of the Incarnation felt strongly attracted to the religious life, be she realized that God’s hour had not yet struck.

Several very difficult years ensued. Having found employment in her sister’s house, she became the slave of the servants of the household. In this harsh situation, our Saint practiced the virtues of humility, charity, patience and total self-forgetfulness to the point of heroism. She remained constantly in the holy presence of God, even amid the most absorbing occupations.

At the age of twenty-one, though still in the lay state, she made the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In 1625, God gratified her with a vision of the Holy Trinity.

When Madame Martin was thirty-one, the call of God to leave everything echoed imperiously in her soul. On January 25, 1631, she bid farewell to her elderly father, and overcoming the pangs of her maternal heart, she entrusted her eleven-year-old son to her sister’s care. This absolute detachment, which makes her a model for parents, was one of the most heroic and sublime acts in the life of Saint Mary of the Incarnation. The courageous mother told her child, “God wills it, my son. If we love Him, we should will it, too. It is up to Him to command, and up to us to obey.” With a broken heart, she was finally able to enter the Ursuline Novitiate in Tours.

Eight years later, when she had reached the age of forty, Mary of the Incarnation embarked at Dieppe with some companions on a ship headed for Canada. She is among the very first nuns to have come to America. At the time, such a missionary adventure was regarded as an innovation. There was no room for anything less than heroism for these pioneers of the Church of New France, who united the cloistered life to the missionary life. Mary of the Incarnation wrote, “Here we encounter a kind of necessity to become saints. We must either die or fully consent to it.”

She studied the extremely difficult Indian languages and wrote an Algonquin-French dictionary, as well as an Iroquois dictionary and catechism. Her work of predilection consisted in teaching little Indian girls, whom she called “the delight of my heart” and “the most beautiful jewels in my crown.”

Sickness, humiliation and persecution arising from respectable persons, endless interior sufferings and crosses of all sorts abound in the life of our Saint. They bear a striking testimony to the spirit of holiness that reigned in her soul, which was totally surrendered to the love of God. The highest summits of contemplation to which the Holy Spirit drew her did not prevent Mary of the Incarnation from being an extraordinary woman of action, gifted with incomparable common sense.

She gave up her beautiful soul to God at the age of 72. As a result of the successive vocations to which God called her, this admirable soul remains a model for spouses, parents, lay apostles and religious alike. Mary of the Incarnation has very rightly been named “the Teresa of New France.” She is ranked among the greatest glories of Canada and regarded as the true Mother of the country.

Sources: O.D.M. article; bi-monthly magazine Univers, July-August 1980, No. 4, p. 6.

ST. POTHINUS
Bishop
STS. SANCTUS, ATTALUS, BLANDINA
and FORTY-EIGHT OTHER MARTYRS OF LYONS
(†177)

After a miraculous victory obtained by the prayers of a Christian legion under Marcus Aurelius in 174, the Church was enjoying a kind of peace, which was nonetheless often disturbed in various places by popular commotions, or by the superstitious fury of pagan governors. These factors become evident in the persecution which was raised at Vienne and Lyons in 177, three years after the victory of the legion. Saint Pothinus was then Bishop of Lyons, and Saint Irenaeus, still a young priest, had recently come to Lyons with several other Christians, sent from Asia Minor by Saint Polycarp; soon Irenaeus would replace Saint Pothinus.

The Christians of the region were forbidden to frequent the baths and the forum, and they were tracked everywhere, becoming the subject of popular uprisings, stonings, outrages and imprisonments. A justly famous letter attributed to Saint Irenaeus, addressed by the churches of Lyons and Vienne to their mother-church in Asia, narrates in detail the martyrdom of these heroic Christians. The citations which follow are from that letter.

Many of the principal Christians were brought before the Roman governor. “Saint Pothinus himself was ninety years old, weak and infirm; in fact he could scarcely talk, but his zeal and desire for martyrdom sustained him. He was taken, or rather carried, to the tribunal amidst insults... The governor asked him who the god of the Christians was: “You will know Him if you are worthy of it,” he replied. The multitude became furious; those around him struck him with their hands and feet, showing no respect for his age; those farther away threw at him everything they could find, imagining they were avenging their gods. The holy bishop scarcely had a breath of life left when he was thrown into prison, where he expired soon afterwards.”

With Attalus, a deacon “who was always the pillar and support of our church,” three martyrs were subjected to cruel torture for two days in the amphitheatre, as “a diversion for the people.” One was a young slave, Blandina; her mistress, also a Christian, feared she would lack strength to brave the torture. But when she was tormented, suspended from a cross, tossed about by a bull, she bore it all with joy, until the executioners gave up, confessing themselves outdone. She was the last one to die after a glorious combat. The letter says: “Like a generous mother who, having inspired her children during the combat, has sent them victorious ahead of her to the King of Glory, she was rejoicing at being about to join them in the heavens. She bore the series of tortures with so radiant a joy, that one would have said she was invited to a wedding feast rather than condemned to the lions...”

“Human language could not describe the tortures that the Saints were made to endure, in the hope of making them admit the impious things we were charged with.” They had been accused of eating human flesh. Red-hot plates were held to the sides of Sanctus, a deacon of Vienne, until his body became one great sore, and he no longer looked like a man; but amidst his tortures he said to his tormentors that it was such torments which consumed human flesh, whereas Christians did no harm to their fellow men. The letter says he was “strengthened by the stream of heavenly water which flows from the side of Christ.”

In the meantime, many confessors were kept in prison, and among them were some who had been terrified into apostasy. Even the pagans could perceive in the Christians the joy of martyrdom, contrasting with the misery of the apostates. But the faithful confessors brought back all but one of those who had fallen, and the Church rejoiced when she saw her children live again in Christ. Some died in prison, the rest were martyred one by one, giving their God their blood in loving exchange for His.

Sources: Les Petits Bollandistes: Vies des Saints, by Msgr. Paul Guérin (Bloud et Barral: Paris, 1882), Vol. 6; Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints, a compilation based on Butler’s Lives of the Saints, and other sources by John Gilmary Shea (Benziger Brothers: New York, 1894).