For the next few months The Visitation Sisters of the United States will introduce you to some of the Foundresses of our American monasteries whose prayer lives reflect mystical qualities.
This month we feature Mother Mary Agnes Faulhaber VHM who founded the Monastery of the Visitation in Toledo Ohio. http://www.toledovisitation.org/
American Visitandine Mother Mary Agnes Faulhaber was a highly gifted Sister whose talents for leadership shone out wherever she was. Not only was she elected Superior of the Georgetown Visitation Monastery but eventually was inspired to found our Monastery in Toledo in 1915.
Administrative skills, maternal care, the professionalism expected and performed by a Sister elected to such positions, surely influenced Mother’s prayer life.
Let us gently peer into the sentiments of Mother Agnes’s own soul.
Here is an excerpt from Mother M Agnes’s annual retreat in 1923:
“With the assistance of thy grace, my dear Jesus, I shall endeavor to live in complete dependence on thy holy will as made known to me by our rules, constitutions and particularly our Directory. This spirit of dependence is to be directed in a special manner to the loving and gracious acceptance of the surprises thy loving heart has in store for me. To love, honor thee in my neighbor, this being the great desire of thy Sacred Heart, bearing in mind that a thought contrary to charity wounds thee to the very heart. Grant me the grace to henceforth shape my life in such a manner that it may truly be a life of union with thee, a life of action with thee, a life of intention and affection with thee. Mayest thou ever predominate, my sweet Jesus, in my every thought, word and deed and may I truly be extinguished.”
This is clearly a heartfelt prayer of a Visitation Sister who has deeply imbibed the groundwork of the Order into her very being. The key elements of this retreat promise reflect the pinnacle of a fully formed Visitandine: Dependence on God’s Will, complete self-effacement, generous charity, union with God and deep faithfulness in obedience to our Rules and Constitutions
Her openness to God’s surprises in her life reveals an aspect of her personality that stands willing to let go and let God be in control.
She had taken St Francis de Sales as her spiritual guide, meditating his teachings phrase by phrase. His Spiritual Directory http://web1.desales.edu/assets/salesian/PDF/SalesianTextsSpritualDirectory.pdf
and the little book Interior Spirit were her daily bread throughout her life. She loved them!In the next short excerpt of her prayer, Mother focuses on another key aspect of our charism:
“I will endeavor with Thy Grace, O Jesus, my one and only love, to do everything in the spirit of profound, sincere and unfeigned humility, ever realizing my utter nothingness and begging Thee to be my substitute.”
The virtue of humility would be her keynote. Mother’s attitude is one of dependence upon grace to make the effort to grow in this quality and to be focused on the reality of her own status as a Child of God, as one created to love Him above all else.
She would repeat to her Crucified Jesus: “I will say a hundred times a day: This is my hope, the living source of my happiness, the heart of my soul and the soul of my heart. Nothing shall ever separate me from his love since I desire life only that I may become a holocaust of sweetness agreeable to his divine eyes.”
While all of us could repeat this as our own mantra, the unction from the heart of a Superior with often overwhelming responsibilities makes this prayer all the more poignant.
Mother Mary Agnes prayed conscientiously for the community she was elected to head over many terms of office.
“Dear Holy Father and Holy Mother, plead my cause and that of the community before the most Holy Trinity. May we be inundated with the spirit of our Spiritual Directory.”
Her duty as Superior was clearly as spiritual leader of the Sister in community and she also addressed many notes to them during her solitude retreats, gathering them in to her own retreat and sharing it as she went along, with her inspirations. Her letters to her sisters reveal, in an indirect way, her life of prayer and more directly her spiritual leadership as she guided the souls and the prayer life of her community.
“There is something our dear Lord wants of us, dear Sisters. It may be called: Reciprocal Donation, or sacrament of Suffering- as such it is unlimited. He wishes us His spouses to avail ourselves of it repeatedly, day and night. Considered as a Sacrament, it contains the following: the outward sign- all that contradicts nature. The inward grace-more abundant life of Jesus within me. The fruit he so ardently desires- souls, many souls saved from the abyss of sin. These word- gracious- smiling Yes , dear Jesus my only Love.
Will you not, dear Sisters, in the reading of this, make to Jesus an immediate and loving acceptance of every occasion of his good pleasure from now until he calls you to himself in the eternal consummation in unity? This is the reparation and atonement he asks of his chosen souls in the Visitation.”
In her spiritual and motherly guidance, Mother Mary Agnes wove together and promoted a seamless prayer life that would develop the Sisters’ interior union with our Lord, reflect the charism of the Order and serve the ultimate purpose of ministering to other souls. Sacrifice and suffering were not absent from this spiritual garment, but rather its very sacrament. Saving souls in suffering, with a smile and with profound Love was her deep-seated goal.
Mother M Agnes’ had a strong Eucharistic spirituality which reaches a summit of intense beauty as she writes to her Sisters. Listen to this exquisite Eucharistic imagery:
“Jesus has pledged himself to be our Eucharist to the end of time and he in turn calls us to be “living hosts of perpetual sacrifice offered to God on the altar of Calvary to serve unceasingly Jesus Christ crucified. May a spirit of loving atonement and reparation ever animate us to be forever the Eucharist for Jesus. Let us give him liberty, as the great high priest, to consecrate us over and over again whenever and as often as he wishes. (This we will do by loving acquiescence to his holy will in the manifestation of his good pleasure from moment to moment…the watchword, Thy Will, dear Jesus, not mine.)
And, “Oh may our community be indeed a ciborium filled with thirty-six living hosts offered in atonement to our offended God each morning at the Elevation of the Mass. May the gift of prayer be bestowed on you in abundance..This will be my daily prayer for you to the end of my life.
We become Jesus and let Him live in us, we live Jesus, by imitating all the aspects of the life of the Lord, even to His greatest miracle, that of becoming Eucharist for us. Like an exchange of hearts, this is a Eucharistic exchange, He is Host for us, and likewise, we are living hosts for Him, and the needs of all people. Not forgetting the Mount of Calvary on which we are founded, this is spiritually where we make our sacrifice to our High Priest and Lord. The profundity of the thought- to be consecrated not just once, or even with every time we renew our vows, but over and over in loving acceptance of His Will, completes the liturgical image of the perpetual liturgy of life. Mother sealed it with her own promise of this daily prayer throughout her own life, for her beloved daughters.
And finally, Mother states in an intimate fashion,
“..into the Heart of Jesus I have place you individually by name, pleading for each dear Sister to be favored with new unfolding of the secrets of God’s love.”
Beyond her own personal interior growth and sterling response to her own Sisters how did she guide them and herself in praying for the broader world?
Wars, especially World Wars 1 and 2 were the urgent world events that lay outside the cloistered walls of the Toledo Visitation, as well as lesser conflicts, such as the Spanish Civil War. Elected again in 1936, for example, Mother was concerned for the Church in Spain which was suffering. In addition to prayer, the Sisters made sacrifices, and each month practiced a particular virtue to obtain a Catholic victory. Mother Agnes sent generous supplies of clothing for the Spanish Sisters in sympathy and concern for their well-being.
The wars intensified the spiritual and prayer life of the community. The Sisters prayed for the return of peace to the world and the eternal salvation of the combatants. They offered prayers and actions, privations and sacrifices for this intention.
Mother Mary Agnes wrote to her Sisters during World War 2, from her retreat,
“Your Holy Communion of Sunday has been promised to me; another infinite treasure! What better intention can we have for it than that of reparation during these sad days when the poor world is striving hard to obliterate God! O let us dear Sisters in proportion to the world’s wickedness, strive to give our divine Lord an abundant life in our souls by the practice of humility, frequent Consecrations in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with its Elevation at every moment of the day, and pleading for the restoration of an abiding peace throughout the world.
Mother Mary Agnes’ approach was consistent; whether encouraging the Sisters for specific intentions like the end of war, or general for salvation of souls, what predominated was her love of the Eucharist, the virtue of humility, the theme of consecration and faithfulness to the Visitandine way of life.
Finally she encouraged the community in their relationship to the real demands of our world remembering St. Francis de Sales’ counsel to remain in the presence of God.
“The disturbance and terrible unrest of the world today are due to the fiendish efforts of the enemy of the Lord to banish every vestige of God from the hearts and minds of men- to make it a Godless world. Shall we not then, dearest Sisters, make every effort to take God’s part by paying honor glory and reparation to our Lord and master, our divine Spouse? The efforts we will make, aided by his grace, to keep ourselves in the realization of God’s presence will be more pleasing to the Heart of our Lord who will then live, reign and rule in us. The purchase money for this inestimable grace is fidelity to all that our Constitution on religious Modesty requires, and all this will be a most fitting preparation for the days when Jesus will call you to be alone with Him alone.
Mother Mary Agnes served many triennials, but became physically weakened in her later years. Her noble life passed into eternity in 1963.
Source: Sister Mary Teresa, VHM, Purchase Price, The Story of Mother Mary Agnes, Monastery of the Visitation, Toledo, Ohio, 1966