Closing of the diocesan trial of Léonie :
Sister Françoise Thérèse
Caen – Visitation February 22, 2020
From the poor Leonie to the good Leonie
A life, nothing but a life … The one of Leonie: A simple drop of water that has become a stream. It was a childhood tossed by a thousand sobs but one day offered to God. From the ocean, she now knows the waves. But then what exactly can change her life in this way?
If medicine can transform a face, only love can transfigure it. This is what “the poor Leonie”, as her mother called her, would like to tell us, and who one day became Sister Françoise Therese here at the Visitation. Her life was not a long quiet river. It was harder than the one she dreamed of at 8 years old but it was a hundred times more beautiful. Because God always writes straight with the curved lines of our history.
Divine grace, of course, doesn’t suppress the nature but transfigures it. Leonie would like to tell us, that we only learn one thing from life: we learn how to love and the only thing that will be left of our life will be the love that we have put in it. She even made of religion a love following her younger sister Therese. As her mum said before she died : “I hope the good seed will come out someday.” And her father was right to call her “the good Leonie”. He had perceived through his daughter a heart of gold.
Leonie was 14 years old when Zelie, her mother, died. When we look at the photos of this teenager, we are struck by this puffy face marked by eczema and anxiety. Remembering this period, Leonie would talk about a terrible childhood. She went from failure to failure. Her undisciplined character and a supposedly limited intelligence had her fired from all boarding schools. “She is covered with faults like a coat” her mother would say when she happened to despair of Leonie. Leonie wrote: “My childhood and my first youth were spent in suffering, in the most bitter trials. “Her older sister, Marie du Sacré Coeur, writing her memories added:” Leonie was an absolutely undisciplined child. Nobody could cope with her. Only fear could make her go. She wasn’t well anywhere. As soon as, she was given a little freedom, she took the opportunity for bringing disorder everywhere or some accident happened. You could never be quiet about her. “She couldn’t find her place in her own family. We could say she was the ugly duckling family.Her sisters were beautiful, admired for their charm and intelligence. Leonie had the impression that nobody liked her or was interested in her. The death of little Hélène at the age of 5 further deepened Leonie’s distress. Hélène was born a year after her and it is not surprising that Leonie’s health deteriorated a little more.
But what her parents didn’t know was that Leonie was the victim of Louise, the servant who mistreated her. So much so that at the time of her death in 1941, Leonie who had become Sister Françoise Therese, forgave her whom she called: “Her persecutor.” “We can therefore speak of a difficult childhood and a battered youth. “I suffered a lot from my inferiority,” she said. I deeply felt the isolation of the heart, of everything. “It was only at the age of 35 that she finally found her way, after an attempt at religious life in Alençon and 3 attempts here at the Visitation. It is after the death of little Therese that everything could start. Therese had promised her to pray for her. Before her death at the Carmel of Lisieux, Therese had said to her sister Marie : “After my death, I will bring Leonie to the Visitation of Caen and she will persevere there”. It is then that began her path of religious life, a path made of humility and confidence, of gentleness and patience following Saint François de Sales. At the time of her monastic vows, she asked for forgiveness from her Carmelite sisters by writing: “Let me reiterate all my regrets and I asked for your forgiveness for the innumerable and great sorrows that I have caused you because I cannot forget that I had an hateful childhood!”
All of this should have led Leonie to depression, isolation or a bad temper. Quite the opposite actually : She led a life consecrated to God, full of Jesus’s love for each of her sisters to such an extent that one can say: love itself! It is an image of love that we are allowed to contemplate, a reflection of God’s love at the heart of our world. She could have said like her sister Therese: “The more I love Jesus, the more I love my sisters! “
Little sister Françoise Therese or the little violet of the Good Lord.
During her childhood, her visitandine aunt in Le Mans whom she loved very much and admired had marked Leonie. She had said she wanted to become a nun like her aunt. “How can you imagine Leonie as a noon, her hands joined, calm and obedient really? ” her mum wrote to her visitandine sister. Zélie
Martin was forgetting that Grace does not necessarily change nature, but it can transfigure it. A human being who knows he is loved and who in return feels this call to love, is transfigured. She could not imagine that Leonie would become a disciple of Therese and put into practice “the Little Way of Trust”, but in her own way. But if Therese was the rose, Leonie wanted to be the little violet hidden under the leaves of the rose bush. She put into practice the advice of Saint François de Sales: “The brightness of the ladies of the Visitation is that they have no brightness. Their greatness is their smallness”. At the time of his death on June 17, 1941, Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris and former Bishop of Bayeux-Lisieux wrote to the Visitandine community here in Caen: «Sister Françoise Therese was among you the humble violet who embalmed the monastery with holiness».
Leonie reminds us of little Bernadette in Lourdes who said that the Blessed Virgin had picked her up like a pebble. Leonie liked to compare herself to an anonymous log of wood and that Jesus would kindle with the fire of his Holly Spirit. She often told her sisters her desire to be forgotten. This would be so true that the Bishop of the diocese in 1937 at the Basilica of Lisieux would mention the sisters of Teresa as a gift for the diocese forgetting to name Leonie. Even the Popes who willingly spoke of the Sisters of Teresa at the Carmel without even naming Leonie really forgot her.
She wanted to remain small so that Jesus would take her in his arms and lead her on the path of life. “I want to be so small that Jesus be forced to keep me in his arms,” she wrote. As Saint François says again: «The strong, God takes them by the hand. The weak, God takes them in his arms». In fact, Leonie makes us discover that the path of holiness to which we are all invited in the name of our Baptism consists in the offering of our weakness and poverty.
Leonie reconciled herself with her weaknesses and the wounds of life. She made it a way of offering to God. As Bernanos wrote at the end of the Diary of a Parish Priest: “It is easier than one thinks to hate oneself. Grace is forgetting oneself. But if all pride had died in us, the grace of grace would be to love ourselves humbly, like any suffering member of Jesus Christ”. And he added in another text: “The poor, the little ones will save the world but unawares, because they will let God save it through them”.
When weakness appears!
In our society, you have to look strong; you have to be IBM, that is to say: Intelligent, Beautiful and Mobile. These are the 3 main criteria for success. But Jesus in the Gospel tells us that we are WaW, that is : Weeds and Wheat. There are not only flowers in our lives, there is weed like in our gardens. Life is like a bouquet of roses: there are beautiful the roses and the thorns. You have to take it all. But what can we with the thorns?
When weakness appears in our life, it hurts us and sometimes humiliates us. It has a thousand ways of presenting itself to us: there is physical, moral, emotional, relational, and even spiritual weakness. The ideal image that we have of ourselves is shattered.
When we are weak, fragile, limited, we become worried and helpless in a more or less brutal way. Fragility hurts in us the dream of perfection, of power, which lies deep within us. We first hide this weakness and sometimes we deny it before accepting it. Humiliation is being hurt in our pride. As nature abhors vacuum, we fill that vacuum with a thirst for good or with an overflowing activism. Weakness can cause us to become depressed.
Some people would then close in and break any relations with anyone. Weakness is no doubt one of the most difficult human realities to deal with. It is difficult to go from humiliation to humility. And yet, as Teresa of Avila said: “we have to go through a lot of humiliations in order to acquire a little humility”! Humility is on the side of reconciliation with the “humus” that is in us, with that part of fragility that inhabits us. Our poverty, our weakness then become places of encounter with the Lord and with our brothers. Let us remember that it is from the wounded side of Christ, from the side of the Pierced Heart, that is to say from the humiliated Love, that the Grace of God springs forth. Let us remember that it is always through the faults of history that God inscribes his presence. When we feel weak and fragile let us turn to the Virgin Mary called the “humble handmaid” and the model of humility.
Saint Paul lamented on his failures, his weaknesses. He took communion at the Cross of Christ. He reminded the communities of Corinth that the cross might have been foolishness in their eyes, but that it was salvation for the Christians. He showed them that weakness is the way God has chosen to reach men. My
Grace is enough for you,” said the Lord to Paul, “for my power is unfolded in weakness. (2 Cor. 12:9)
Conclusion
The path of holiness to which we are all called is not a path of perfection as we imagine it to be. It would be called stoicism. No one on this earth is perfectly balanced and let us never put anyone on a pedestal, be it a Bishop or a Priest. We can see the consequences of this in our Church.
We all have disabilities and life injuries. The path of holiness to which Jesus calls us consists in offering our poverty to God. He is able to turn the weeds into a beautiful ear of wheat. As St. Augustine says: “It is better to stumble on the road than to walk out of the road”.
This is what God did with Sister Françoise Therese’s life. O good Leonie, you who were indwelled by the Goodness of God, spread into our hearts these treasures of Goodness. Your life was only a drop of water. One day it became a stream. Of the ocean God made you know the waves on which the boats sail. Yes, my life, your life, dear friends, is but a drop of water. Amen.
- Jean Claude Boulanger (Bishop)
Evêque de Bayeux-Lisieux