St. Elizabeth of the Trinity – November 8 – Carmelite Saints
Summary:
Elizabeth Catez of the Trinity was born in 1880 in the diocese of Bourges. In 1901, she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery of Dijon. There, she made her profession of vows in 1903, and in 1906 the Divine Spouse called her “to light, to love, and to life.” A faithful adorer in spirit and in truth, her life was a “praise of glory” of the Most Blessed Trinity, present in her soul and loved amidst interior darkness and excruciating illness. In the mystery of divine inhabitation, she found her “heaven on earth,” her special charism, and her mission for the Church.
History:
Elizabeth Catez was born on July 18, 1880, in the military camp of Avord, near Bourges, France, to Captain Joseph Catez and Marie Rolland. Four days later, on the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, she was baptized in the camp chapel, a fact she treasured. The older of two sisters, she was born to a father who was a veteran and POW of the Franco-Prussian War. Her mother had a conversion experience before marriage and was zealous to live a pious life. Though perhaps a little too fearful and scrupulous, she was deeply loving and devoted to her daughters. After eighteen months, the family settled in Dijon, where their younger daughter, Marguerite, was later born.
When Elizabeth was only 7 years old, her father died suddenly in her arms on October 2, 1887. After his death, the family moved from their house to a smaller second-story flat a few blocks from Saint-Michel parish church, just across from the Carmelite Monastery Elizabeth would someday join. There, the sound of the convent bells and the nuns’ garden strongly appealed to her. Elizabeth and Marguerite were very close to each other and to their mother, who homeschooled them and involved them in piano lessons and parish life.
Elizabeth was an intelligent, affectionate, sociable, and lively child, but also quick-tempered. At age 7, she made her first Confession and discovered that her Father in heaven was merciful. Although proud and hot-tempered, she began to change after Confession. At 8, Elizabeth’s mother enrolled her in the Dijon Conservatory of Music, where she quickly showed exceptional piano talent. Her soul was sensitive to music and nature, beautiful things that always reminded her of God and in which she saw reflected the harmony of their creator. She often played in concerts, and at thirteen, she won first prize. She could undoubtedly have become a concert pianist, but God had other plans for her.
From age 8, Elizabeth said her love for God and prayer grew so strong that she could not imagine her future without consecrating herself entirely to Him. She renewed this resolution at 10, at her First Communion, and confirmed it definitively at 14 with her perpetual vow of virginity.
From a very early age, she tried to conquer her temperament. On the day of her First Communion, April 19, 1891, she felt she no longer had hunger, as Jesus had fed her. That same afternoon, she made her first visit to Carmel, and the prioress explained the significance of her name in Hebrew: Elizabeth means “a house of God.” This deeply affected the young girl, who understood the profundity of these words. From then on, she was determined to make God’s dwelling place in her life by controlling her temperament and forgetting herself. The Eucharist became the center of Elizabeth’s life, giving her the strength and determination she needed to overcome her rages. She also became actively involved in her parish, visiting the sick, singing in the church choir, and teaching religion to children working in factories. She received Confirmation at Notre-Dame the following year, on June 8.
Around the time of her 14th birthday, Elizabeth made a vow of virginity as an act of total self-offering to God. She wanted to be a Carmelite, but her mother forbade it. When she read St. Teresa, she felt deeply in harmony with her. She understood that contemplation meant letting God act, that mortification had to be interior, and that friendship means putting other people’s interests before one’s own. Elizabeth had a natural gift for contemplative prayer; people remarked on her total stillness and said that she seemed ‘Lost in God.’ She was also greatly helped by reading The Story of a Soul, in which the recently deceased St. Therese of Lisieux inspired her with her little way of trust in God.
She lived her contemplative ideal as a young laywoman, socially engaged and fond of traveling throughout France: an acclaimed pianist, attentive to others' needs, and an active apostle in her parish. She had a gift for friendship and was popular with her peers, yet God remained at the center of everything. She said that when she played the piano, she forgot the audience and played only for Him.
Her devotion to the Holy Trinity grew, and she often referred to the Trinity as "my Three," emphasizing her intimate relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From age 17, Elizabeth showed unconditional adherence to God's concrete will and, until entering Carmel, sought a continuous union with Jesus, present in the "cell of her heart," "the Heaven of her soul." As a mystic of the Trinitarian presence in her soul, Elizabeth is a true daughter of the most genuine spirit that animates Carmel. She wrote in her diary:
"I feel as if I have found my heaven on earth, because heaven is God and God is in my soul. The day I understood this, everything within me was illuminated, and I would like to whisper this secret to those I love."
On her 21st birthday, she finally received her mother’s blessing to enter Carmel. Elizabeth entered the Carmel of Dijon on August 2, 1901, and on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, she was clothed in the Carmelite habit. She took the name Sr. Elizabeth of the Trinity. As a postulant, Elizabeth was full of joy. She said, "I find Him everywhere while doing the wash as well as while praying." She loved the silence of her cell, where she could listen to Him speak to her in the Scriptures. Her novitiate year was difficult, as her desire for perfection led her to struggle with scruples. Still, Elizabeth lived in pure faith, and this purification strengthened her and gave her courage. She made her profession on January 11, 1903.
Elizabeth lived a completely ordinary life of faith, without revelations or ecstasies. Yet she immediately attracted the community’s attention with her faithfulness and commitment. She immersed herself in reading and deepening her understanding of Scripture, chiefly St. Paul and St. John of the Cross. Through their guidance, she found her own interior way, and her faith matured. Reading St. Paul, she felt a deep call to praise the Glory of the Triune God by living every moment of the day in constant thanksgiving. She came to identify so fully with this ideal that, at the end of her life, she signed some letters with the name “Laudem Gloriae.”
Elizabeth also had a strong awareness of the Trinity's indwelling. She lived her ideal with strength and perseverance, later expressing it in the prayer: "O my God, Trinity whom I adore," which circulated worldwide immediately after her death and was widely cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. She saw her life as an “anticipated heaven” and time as “eternity begun and still in progress.” She lived under the constant gaze of her beloved, who had put the timeless into her heart, and felt herself plunged into a love so immense and unfathomable she could not help but praise Him and become a song of praise herself, dissolved into Him.
During her five years in Carmel, Elizabeth wrote her diaries, letters, poems, and some prayers. She also wrote Heaven in Faith; The Greatness of Our Vocation; Last Retreat; and Let Yourself be Love, dedicated to her prioress.
Elizabeth shared in her sister’s joy when she married. She wrote “Heaven in Faith” for her sister, who, at the time, was a young mother at home with two small children. Marguerite would have nine children, one of whom would enter Carmel. Elizabeth did not see motherhood as an excuse to avoid the depths of contemplative prayer right where she was, in the midst of her vocation. Instead, she urges mothers not to neglect the depths of their heart. God waits for us there. She doesn’t want anyone to delay finding Him in the deepest part of themselves, abiding with Him there, in the interior quiet created through prayer, even amid chaos. In other words, holiness, which is extraordinary love and the flowering of baptismal grace, is for everyone. We can all live as contemplatives in our approach to life.
Seeing her sister so happy and devoted to her husband led Elizabeth to reflect on her role as Christ's spouse. She wanted to love Him with an undivided heart, remain in deep communion with Him, share in His redemptive suffering and prayer, and become fruitful by nourishing others and drawing them to Him. As she pondered the scriptures, her horizons expanded, and she felt she was being transformed into another humanity for Christ, an idea she developed from Paul’s text, ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.’ She had an intuitive grasp of the ‘universal call to holiness’ long before it was named in the Church.
Her passion for music led her to use the analogy of music to describe the spiritual life and how God seeks to attune us to his song of love. She wrote:
“A praise of glory is a soul of silence that remains like a lyre under the mysterious touch of the Holy Spirit so that he may draw from it divine harmonies; it knows that suffering is a string that produces still more beautiful sounds” (Heaven in Faith).
For Elizabeth, conversion means attuning ourselves to the harmonies of God’s life within us, and holiness means living in joyful melody with the dynamics of divine love.
“Each incident,” Elizabeth explained, ” each event, each suffering, as well as each joy, is a sacrament which God gives to (the soul); so it no longer makes a distinction between these things; it surmounts them, goes beyond them to rest in its Master, above all things.”
In a letter to Mother Germaine, prioress of the convent at the time, she writes to her:
“If you faithfully believe that He is still working, that He is loving you just the same, and even more: because His love is free and that is how He wants to be magnified in you; and you will let yourself be loved.”
The phrase, “let yourself be loved,” speaks to the temptation not to allow ourselves to be loved by God or to fully accept the gift of God’s infinite affection. And when we fall victim to this, trouble always ensues. We begin to seek fulfillment in things that can’t provide it; we become vulnerable to dependency on people’s approval and affection. This leaves us unfree and happens when we are not grounded and rooted in the ultimate approval and affection of God alone. Letting ourselves be loved means allowing God to fill us with Himself, to become like Himself so that we can offer Him joyfully to the world.
St. Elizabeth encourages us to occupy ourselves with the love of the Holy Trinity – to recognize and to ponder the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a bosom of eternal love and, at the same time, our true home, the place where we are meant to dwell. Such an awareness of a personal relationship with the Trinity requires mindfulness of the purpose for which we are made. For her, we are created to welcome God's excessive love and allow Him to satisfy His desire to love us. She did not believe the reality of heaven was simply in the future of Christian existence, but already present in this moment. God’s love comes to us in ever new ways through Christ Jesus, the Word of the Father, whom the Father continually sends into our hearts with the Fire of the Holy Spirit. With this dynamic view of the Trinity in each moment of life, she believed everything was a sacrament that gave us God.
In Lent 1904, Elizabeth became ill. Stricken by Addison's disease, then incurable and very painful, Elizabeth slowly declined. Her devotion to Christ moved her to involve herself in the faith life and everyday struggles of her friends and family. As her death grew closer, the more lovingly aware she became of their need for a deeper encounter with the Lord. She promised that it would increase her joy in heaven if her friends asked for her help, and she was convinced that her mission was to help souls grow into a transforming union with God.
Just eleven days before her death, Elizabeth wrote:
“I think that in Heaven my mission will be to draw souls by helping them to go out of themselves in order to cling to God by a wholly simple and loving movement and to keep them in this great silence within which will allow God to communicate Himself to them and to transform them into Himself.”
Two days later, her family would gather around her, expecting to say goodbye. Instead, after a painful and long sickness, she died nine days later, on November 9, 1906, at the age of 26. Her last words were, “I am going to Light, to Love, to Life.”
The cause for Elizabeth of the Trinity’s beatification and canonization began in Dijon in 1931. In 1964-65, the process was conducted in Dijon regarding the miracle concerning the healing of a priest from "genitourinary tuberculosis with hydronephrosis, right renal tuberculosis, right nephrectomy, in a patient with progressive Pott's disease." The Church promulgated the miracle on February 17, 1984. On November 25, 1984, Pope St. John Paul II proclaimed her Blessed. During the beatification, John Paul II called her "a luminous witness to the joy of being rooted and grounded in love… With Blessed Elizabeth, a new light shines for us, a new, certain and sure guide presents herself in our world, so full of uncertainty and darkness, to show us, in the name of the Trinitarian mystery, the path to salvation and the means to achieve it."
The second miracle needed for canonization was investigated in the miraculous healing of a woman suffering from “Sjøgren’s Syndrome,” with dry saliva (xerostomia), which prevented her from eating solid foods, a neurogenic bladder that prevented her from urinating normally, and motor impediments. The woman had a strong devotion to Elizabeth of the Trinity. During a pilgrimage in July 2002 to Flavignerot, where the nuns of the Discalced Carmelite monastery of Dijon had moved to several decades ago, she suddenly felt freed from her illness. She was able to instantly resume the normal vital functions that had been prevented.
On March 3, 2016, Pope Francis approved the second healing as a miracle attributed to Elizabeth's intercession and thus approved her canonization as a saint. The Church celebrated her canonization on October 16, 2016. The Carmelite Order celebrates her feast day on November 8. She is the patron saint of the sick, those who have lost a parent, and those facing illness.
Prayer:
O God of bountiful mercy,
you revealed to Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity
the mystery of your secret presence
in the hearts of those who love you,
and you chose her to adore you in spirit and in truth.
Through her intercession
may we also abide in the love of Christ,
that we may merit to be transformed
into temples of your life-giving Spirit
to the praise of your glory.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
God, forever and ever.
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