Saint Claude
de La
Colombière:
"The Perfect Friend of the Heart of Jesus"
During a period of
her life in which she was discredited and
distressed, Saint Margaret Mary received this promise from Jesus: "I
will send you My faithful servant and perfect friend." What an eloquent
Divine testimony in favor of Father Claude de La Colombière,
the Jesuit priest who became the confidant of Saint Margaret Mary and
the first person to spread the message of Paray-le-Monial. His story is
inseparable from that of the holy Visitation nun. Saint Margaret Mary
was the one who received the requests of the Heart of Jesus; but it is
because Claude de La Colombière
helped her understood the value of the Message, and submitted entirely
to the will of God at the cost of immense sacrifices, that the devotion
to the Heart of Jesus was able to develop for the greater good of
Christendom.
ON
February 2, 1675, in Lyons, France, following. a thirty-day retreat,
Claude de La Colombière made his solemn vows. It was his
thirty-fourth
birthday. He did not know that he had only seven years to live when
obedience sent him to Paray-le-Monial, where he was to be the rector of
a small college, superior of the Jesuit community and extraordinary
confessor of the Visitation nuns, where he would meet Saint Margaret
Mary. She had been a nun for only four years, and Jesus had already
manifested Himself to her several times in extraordinary fashion. Much
indeed could be said about the meeting and the spiritual journeys of
these two Saints. In this article, however, we desire above all to
acquaint our readers with the soul of Father de La Colombière by
means
of his Letters, his Spiritual
Diary,
his Retreat
Notes
and his Sermons.
Conformity
with the Sentiments of the Heart of Jesus
Father
de La
Colombière was influenced by the spiritual current of the French
school. He had a perfect knowledge of the work of Saint Francis de
Sales which had familiarized him, so to speak, with the Heart of Jesus.
Meditating on the Passion and on "the patience of the suffering Jesus,"
he finds in the Divine Heart the perfect school for souls.
May
the Heart of Jesus Christ be our school! Let us make our abode
there . . . Let us study its movements and attempt to conform ours to
them. Yes, O Divine Jesus, I want to live there and pour all my gall
into Your Heart, which will rapidly consume it. I am not afraid that
impatience will come to attack me in that retreat. There I will
practice silence, resignation to Your Divine will, and invincible
constancy. There I will go daily to pray to You and thank You for my
crosses, and to ask Your forgiveness for those who persecute me. [Saint
Claude de La Colombière suffered numerous and painful
contradictions in his efforts to obtain what the Heart of Jesus
desired: propagation of the devotion and the establishment of a special
feast.] There I will labor once and for all at acquiring patience. I
realize that this is not a short task, but it suffices for me to know
that I can attain it by working at it. I ask for Your prayers, O sweet
Jesus; You offered them for Your enemies, so do not refuse them to me,
for I hope to love You, and love even the cross and my enemies for love
of You. [Meditations on the Passion (M.P.), 3]
During
his ministry in
England, on the eve of All Saints' Day in 1678, when a persecution
against priests was looming, Father received a nighttime visitor, a
Franciscan by the name of Father Wall.
"Father,
I am a poor Friar Minor who comes seeking the strength and
counsel of the Heart of Jesus from you; for everywhere in this country
it is known that you are its apostle."
Father
Claude replied, "No one can penetrate into the mysteries of that
Heart without tasting the cup of bitterness that Jesus drank from so
deeply at Gethsemane. Oh, if only I too could win the precious grace
that your English priests are reaping in this 'land of crosses'!"
The
two religious parted at
dawn after celebrating Mass. The following year Father Wall was
imprisoned and Martyred. Speaking of his conversation with Father de La
Colombière, he had said:
I
had previously heard about the famous Jesuit. When I was in his
presence, I felt that I was speaking with Saint John the Evangelist who
had come back to earth to rekindle Divine love with the fire of the
Heart of Jesus. I felt that his attitude was totally the same as what
the Apostle's must have been at the foot of the Cross, when the lance
pierced his Master's side and revealed the tabernacle of His burning
charity.
Father
de La Colombière was
indeed animated with the sentiments of Saint John, and he realized how
necessary purity of heart is to unite oneself to God.
Should
we be surprised if a cluttered soul cannot make room for Your
love, which wants to reign alone? O Jesus, I am sure that when I offer
it to You empty, You will not refuse to fill it up with Your love, come
and abide there Yourself, make it an earthly paradise, and dispose it
for the perfect charity with which it is to burn eternally with the
Seraphim. [M.P. 2]
"Without
Reserve"
The
blue crest with three white doves of the de La
Colombière family bore the motto "SANS RESERVE." Following the
call
that came to him from the Heart of God, Father de La Colombière
decided
to respond in a way that was "without reserve."
God
has loved me too much for me to spare my efforts with Him from now
on. The very thought of it repels me. What! I would not be all for God,
after the mercy He has shown me? I would reserve something for
myself, after all I have received from Him? Never will my heart consent
to that course of action. [Retreats,
37: For the Retreats (R.) and
the Spiritual
Diary (S.D.), the
numbering corresponds to the "Ecrits spirituels" published by Father
André Ravier, S.J., in
the Christus collection (Desclée de
Brouwer-Bellarmin, 1982.]
I can see that I absolutely must belong to Him, and I could never be
able to accept any division. But we will have to see whether in
practice I will have enough strength and constancy to uphold such a
fine sentiment. I am very weak; it is impossible for me to do it by
myself: I sense this truth. If I am faithful, O Lord, You will have all
the glory for it. [R. 71]
He
wrote to his sister, a Visitation nun:
I
pray Our Lord to strengthen your heart and fill it so completely with
His love that you will love Him only and desire to be loved by Him
alone. [Letters, (L.) 2] Pray
to
God so that we may all love Jesus Christ above
all things and that we may love Him only in all things. [L. 6]
Sanctity
is beyond human strength, but those who pursue this goal with
determination can always be certain of having the grace of God.
Once
and for all, tell the world [which is the enemy of the spirit
of God, as the Gospel makes clear,] that you scorn it and renounce it,
and soon you will see that with Our Lord's grace, nothing is impossible
for a soul that has a little love for God. [L. 121]
When
his brother, Joseph de La Colombière, left on mission for
Canada and seemed to have forgotten him, Father Claude wrote:
In his design to
give himself all to God, I am delighted to be the
first one he forgets. I pray Our Lord that He may give him the grace to
forget everything, even himself. When someone has begun to savor God as
he does, there remains little room for creatures in his heart. There
remains little room even in his memory. Everything is occupied, for He
is the One who fills everything completely. [L. 8]
Self-forgetfulness
This
is a theme often found in the writings of Father de La
Colombière.
In his offering to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, he writes:
O Jesus,
teach me perfect self-forgetfulness, since that is the
only
way by
which anyone can enter into You. -----There can be no
peace except
in perfect self-forgetfulness. We must reconcile ourselves to
forgetting even our spiritual interests, in order to seek only God's
pure glory. [R. 143] Sanctity is such an elevated and precious thing
that we cannot purchase it too dearly. [R. 39]
This
declaration by Father
Claude is found both at the beginning and end of his Third Year
Retreat. The offering without reserve is accomplished with time. The
more progress a person makes, the longer he reckons the road still to
be taken.
I have observed that one must take many steps to attain sanctity, and
that with each step you take, you think you have advanced a great deal.
And after having taken it, you see that it is nothing, you have not yet
begun. A man who is going to leave the world regards that action as
something after which there will be nothing left for him to do. But
when he actually enters the religious life, with all his passions . . .
and sees that he is a worldling outside of the world, he realizes that
his efforts are far from over. Then another step to be made presents
itself: to detach himself from objects from which he is not entirely
detached by his state, withdrawing even his heart from the world, and
having no love for any created thing. Withdrawing from the world is one
thing, and becoming a religious is another. Once you have accomplished
that, there is still another step to take: detach yourself from
yourself, seek only God in God Himself . . . For that goal to be
reached, O Lord, it is You who must labor exceedingly. [R. 17]
Father
Claude de La
Colombière considers himself to be far removed from his ideal;
although he is very enlightened in his direction of other souls, he is
somewhat grieved and wonders how he can reach his goal. He opens his
soul to Saint Margaret Mary on this point:
I cannot attain
the self-forgetfulness that will give me
an entry into the Heart of Jesus Christ; consequently, I am far removed
from it. I can see clearly that if God did not have pity on me, I will
die very imperfect. It would be very sweet for me if I could at last,
after so much time spent in the religious life, discover the way to
acquire total self-forgetfulness. Ask our good Master for me that I may
do nothing against His will, and that in everything else He may dispose
of me according to His good pleasure. [L. 50]
One
day he wrote to a Jesuit colleague:
The more knowledge
I acquire, the more convinced I am that
it is a great misfortune for us to amuse ourselves with anything that
might please us here on earth, while we are able to use our time and
our mind to sanctify ourselves by the practice of humility and total
self-detachment.
Self-forgetfulness
is very close to the spirit of childhood so dear to Saint Therese of
Lisieux.
Remember
only to sacrifice your self-will and personal judgment to your
God in all simplicity, stifling all your own thoughts and [totally
human] lights for His love, living like a little child who is unable to
discern what is good for him . . . These words, which are in the
Gospel, are for you: Unless you become like a little child, you will
not enter into the kingdom of Heaven. [St. Matthew 18:3 (L. 97)]
We
are attached to many things and are very often unaware of it.
As
to the counsel you asked me for, I will tell you that since I have
been sick, I have learned nothing else but that we hold to ourselves
with many imperceptible little bonds; that if God did not set His hand
to it, we would never break them, we would not even be aware of them;
that it is up to Him alone to sanctify us; that it is no little thing
to sincerely desire that God do everything that needs to be done for
this purpose. For, personally, we have neither sufficient light, nor
sufficient strength to do it. [L. 49]
 The
Necessity of Prayer
Father
de La
Colombière never composed a treatise on prayer, but his
correspondence and retreats abound in exhortations to have intimate
conversations with God.
Prayer is the only
means of purifying ourselves, uniting
ourselves to God and having God unite Himself to us in order to
accomplish something for His glory. We must pray to obtain the
apostolic virtues. We must pray to make them useful for our neighbor.
We must pray not to lose them in our neighbor's service. The counsel,
or rather the command, Pray always, [St. Luke 18:1] seems
extremely sweet and not at all impossible to me. It contains the
practice of the presence of God. With Our Lord's help, I want to try to
follow it. We
always need God; so we must pray always. The more we pray,
the more we please Him, the more we obtain. [R. 52]
Aridity
and involuntary distractions often make prayer very mortifying, but
then it is all the more pleasing to God.
What
a great illusion -----yet it is such a
common one-----to
imagine that we have little or great virtue according to our few or
many distractions in prayer. I have known nuns who were elevated to a
very high degree of contemplation and were often distracted in their
prayer from start to finish . . . Even if you were ravished in ecstasy
twenty-four times a day and I had twenty-four distractions while saying
one Hail Mary, if I were as humble and mortified as you, I would not
exchange my involuntary distractions for all your ecstasies devoid of
merit. In
a word, I do not know of any devotion in which there is no
mortification.
Do perpetual violence to yourself, especially interiorly, and never let
your nature be the master or let your heart attach itself to anything,
no matter what it may be.
And
I will canonize you, and I will not even ask you how goes your mental
prayer. [L. 74]
You
ask me the reason for the coldness you feel in your spiritual
exercises. It is your too great desire to do them with sensible fervor.
You must love God for Himself alone, with all your heart, and be ready
to be content with His Cross as the only sign of His love. I know this
disposition is difficult, but I implore you to aspire to it and make
your efforts to attain it. [L. 142]
The
Master: Meek and Humble of Heart
"Learn
from Me, for I am meek and humble of Heart,"
[St. Matthew 11:29] said Jesus in the Gospel. It is therefore by
contemplating Him that we can learn true humility.
It
is a great illusion to want all you hear about and all you see in
books, as well as to burden yourself with so many devotional practices.
Read very few books and make a great study of Jesus Christ crucified.
[L. 100]
The
humble soul is never satisfied with itself; it always seeks to do more
for God.
I
do not think there are any souls in the world with whom God is less
happy than those who think they have reasons to be content with
themselves. As soon as someone has begun to know how lovable God is, he
must be very insensitive to prevent himself from loving Him very much.
And when we love Him well, we never think we have done enough for Him.
[L. 102]
The
person who is humble of heart does not dwell on his neighbor's faults.
O my God, what a
sad occupation it is to amuse ourselves
examining the life of others! It would be better to be blind and
simple-minded than to use your mind to consider and judge the actions
of your neighbor. One whose heart is full of the love of God has many
other occupations: he no longer thinks of anything but suffering for
that which he loves, and he loves all those who give him an occasion to
suffer for his Beloved. [L. 104]
Meditation
on the betrayal of Judas alerted Father Claude to the dangers of human
weakness and frailty.
It
should inspire us with so much humility and fear! I could be an
apostle today and a Judas tomorrow! Everything another man may have
done, I can do. I would do still worse than all those whose lives and
actions scandalize me, if You abandoned me for a
single moment. Therefore do not
forsake me, O my God! All my trust is in You. [M.P. 7]
The
humble man does not seek
the approval of mortals. He tries instead to please God, and to this
end he applies himself to living in His presence.
To
acquire scorn for the world, I believe the practice of the presence
of God is very efficacious. Saint Basil says that a man who has a king
and a servant for witnesses of his actions does not even think about
the servant, but only about receiving the approval of the prince. It is
a strange and very unfortunate servitude for a man to seek to please
other men. When will I be able to say, The
world is crucified to me, and I to the world?
[St. Paul, Galatians 6:14] I have fervently asked Jesus Christ
and the Blessed Virgin to grant me this disposition. [R. 48]
Continued
next page.
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