Blessed Mary of the Angels

This is what happened on that occasion. The doctors having declared the illness of this admirable child incurable, the Countess, her mother, at the solicitation of a Franciscan friar, made a vow for her healing in honor of the Immaculate Conception, and, at the very moment of a crisis that had reduced her to the last extremity, she had her say: Mary, come to my aid. Instantly, the ailment disappeared as if by enchantment: and consoled at the same time by a supernatural apparition of the Mother of Mercy holding her divine Son in her arms, she who had just been at the gates of the tomb rose, full of life and health, amidst the joy impossible to describe of her family and friends.

This miracle was for her a new motive to excite herself to virtue and to redouble above all her love for Our Lord Jesus Christ and his most holy Mother. The ardent desire she had for the divine Eucharist also increased, and there was no kind of entreaty she did not make, either to her confessor or to her mother, to be authorized to make her first communion. She was eleven years and eight months old when this happiness was finally granted to her, and despite her age, her confessor, who knew pertinently that in her piety had outpaced her years, permitted her from then on to approach the Holy Table three times a week.

A year later, having been taken by her mother to Saluzzo to attend the taking of the habit of one of her sisters who had been received by the Cistercians of the monastery of Saint Mary of the Star, she believed the occasion favorable to execute the plan she had formed long ago to leave the world. Therefore, a few minutes before the ceremony, she obtained permission from the Abbess to enter the choir, under the pretext of seeing the details of the clothing more easily and attentively, and when it was time for her to leave the convent, she signified to her mother with such firmness and energy her firm resolution to consecrate herself to God in the cloister, that the latter had to subscribe to her vow and return all alone to Turin. God, however, was not calling her to the Cistercian profession. After a year, a serious indisposition forced her to leave the monastery of Saluzzo, to the great dissatisfaction of the nuns whom she was edifying, and she returned to her mother, whom the death of the Count of Baldissero, her husband, had just left a widow.

In the meantime, the solemn exposition of the Holy Shroud took p lace in Turi Saint Suaire Shroud of Christ preserved in Turin. n, in which Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Our Lord upon His descent from the Cross, a precious relic which, after having been given in 1148 by the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes to Count Amadeus III of Savoy, was venerated successively in Burgundy, Chambéry, Vercelli, and Nice.

Our Blessed one, who was spending the time of her family's mourning in the countryside, wished to return to her native city to satisfy, in the presence of such a remarkable monument to the sufferings of the God-Man, her devotion to the sorrowful Passion of this adorable Savior. During the procession that took place on this occasion, she found herself on the same balcony as two Discalced Carmelites, one of whom, Father François-Antoine de Saint-André, was rightly considered a great servant of God.

No sooner had this holy religious caught sight of the young lady than he discovered, with the help of God's grace, the treasures of virtue contained in her beautiful soul and the high perfection to which heaven was calling her. He immediately entered into conversation with her; he questioned her about her future plans, and after learning from her own lips the circumstances of her departure from the monastery of Saluzzo, he suggested the i dea of presenting herself to t Carmélites de Sainte-Christine Carmelite convent in Turin where the saint made her profession. hat of the Carmelites of Saint-Christine, in the city of Turin itself. It took no more than that to determine her to embrace the austerities of the reformed Carmel; thus, a few days after this meeting, evidently arranged by divine Providence, she hastened to write to the Cistercians of Saluzzo to take leave of them, to thank them for their kindness, and to show them the finger of God in the great matter of her vocation. She signed her letter with the words Sister Mary, unworthy Carmelite, just as if she had already made her profession among the daughters of Saint Teresa.

From that moment on, she thought only of subduing her body, of mortifying it, of reducing it to servitude. Disciplines, hair shirts, fasts, nothing discouraged her; and although she saw herself obliged, because of her rare dexterity in the administration of worldly affairs, to substitute for her mother in the care of her brothers and sisters and in the management of her house, she nevertheless applied herself to becoming, even in the midst of the world, a consummate Carmelite.

And she succeeded so well that in 1676, when, after having settled all her family affairs, refused several significant marriage proposals, and overcome all the oppositions of tenderness and friendship, she donned the coarse habit of Carmel at Saint-Christine, she found nothing surprising or new behind the cloister grilles. She was accustomed to all penances, she was made for all mortifications, and the slightest prescriptions of the Rule were as familiar to her as if she had spent years in the convent.

Amidst the rigors of religious life, *in claustro rigidioris observantiae*, as one of the papal decrees preparatory to her beatification states, she went each day from virtue to virtue. We shall not pause to recount the heroic acts by which she distinguished herself among her virtuous companions. One knows what the life of Carmelites is here below, of those angels who live on earth as if they were not of it and whose entire conversation is in the heavens; it suffices, therefore, to repeat that Mary of the Angels walked with giant strides, following the seraphic Teresa, in that path of sacrifice that had just been traversed, with the double halo of holiness and miracles, by the noble, illustrious, and great Madame Acarie, that path which was then illustrated by her glorious penance, under the name of Louise of Mercy, by the famous Mlle de La Vall ière, and upon whic Mlle de La Vallière Former favorite of Louis XIV who became a Carmelite nun. h, finally, a few years later, the very daughter of our kings, Madame Louise of France, was to cast the incomparable brilliance of her birth and the even greater luster of her virtues.

As fervent in the service of the Lord as their sisters in France, Spain, and Italy, and like those industrious bees who distill without respite, within their hidden cells, the fragrant nectar of flowers, the Carmelites of the convent of Saint-Christine gathered each day in the secret of their solitude treasures for eternity; and yet, one can say of our heroine, as of the strong woman of Scripture, that she surpassed them all. Obedient to the annihilation of her own will, poor to the point of the most complete destitution of her person, chaste to the point of refusing in her illnesses the assistance of the nurse herself, she did not for a single instant belie the reputation for humility that her entry into religion had earned her, nor the remarkable marks of piety she had shown in the world. The book of the Rule of Carmel was everything to her: her main occupation consisted of making efforts not to deviate by a jot from the letter and the spirit of the constitutions of her Order; thus she deserved that, as early as the year 1778, Pope Pius VI, of glorious memory, declared with certain knowledge that she had practiced the theological and cardinal virtues to a high heroic degree.

God, however, was pleased to test her in every way: He sent her crosses in abundance. Illness fell upon her several times; she was long a prey to pangs of conscience, and the devil, not content with tormenting her with frightful temptations, appeared visibly to her eyes more than once. Purified in this way by the crucible of suffering, like gold in the furnace, she arrived at the highest perfection, and God, to reward her for her fidelity in the day of tribulation, graced her with His most extraordinary favors: the gift of prayer, the gift of prophecy, the gift of penetration into the depths of hearts, the gift of ecstasy, the gift of miracles; she had all graces as her share, even that of the frequent apparition of the most holy Virgin and her divine Son. She had, moreover, so much devotion toward the Passion of this adorable Savior, toward the Sacrament of His love, and toward His August Mother, that it seems it was justice that she should receive from their visits, even here below, a foretaste of the joys of Paradise. She also honored in a very special way Saint Joseph, Saint Teresa, Saint Francis Xavier, and especially the Archangel Saint Raphael, whose cult she strove to propagate by all possible means.

We cannot remain silent here regarding the charity with which her heart, so compassionate toward her neighbor, and the unfortunate neighbor, burned throughout her life. The noise of men usually expires at the threshold of a Carmelite monastery: the grille, all bristling with iron spikes, is there a barrier most often impassable between the world and the cloister, and the pious solitaries only remember that they are still on the land of the living to offer themselves as a holocaust to the Lord in order to appease His anger and disarm His arm raised over sinners. However, the Blessed Mary of the Angels had not, upon entering the convent, lost the memory of those she had known in the world, and they, for their part, could not forget that the most accomplished young person of Turinese society had escaped their admiration to hide and annihilate herself in religious humility. This is why people very often came to knock at the door of her monastery.

It is impossible to say how many people had recourse to her in person or in writing, either to obtain spiritual consolations from her piety or to seek the advice of her prudence. The sick, the unfortunate, and the destitute received from her hands, or through her powerful intercession, the help that their misfortune demanded; poor girls were married through her care, or, if they preferred to give themselves to God, they saw themselves, upon her pressing recommendations, admitted into the monasteries of their choice. Sinners were also the object of her solicitude; not only did she pray and have others pray for them, but she also employed for their conversion all the means that the high position she had left and the acquaintances with whom she had not had to break could provide her.

It is not even the prisoners who did not feel the effects of her immense charity. It is said that having asked her sovereign in vain for the pardon of a soldier condemned to death for the crime of desertion, she threw herself at the foot of an image representing Our Lord in the Garden of Olives: "O my sweet Savior," she cried, "if I had addressed myself to You, You would not have failed to grant my prayer; ah! I see it well, one must not put one's trust in the princes of the earth." Scarcely had she finished these words when they came to announce to her that at last her prayer had been heard and that her protégé would not be torn from his numerous and unfortunate family.

She also worked so effectively for the relief of the souls in Purgatory that, at the trial of her Beatification, it is related that those members of the suffering Church whom she had delivered by her prayers from the expiatory flames came visibly to thank her, before flying off to heaven.

She also obtained through her tears at the foot of her crucifix the removal of a pestilential epidemic with which the justice of God was threatening Piedmont, and it is certain that she also procured the cessation of the sterility of Anne of Orléa ns, wife of King Vic roi Victor-Amédée II Duke of Savoy, later King of Sicily and Sardinia. tor Amadeus II, for whom she further obtained from heaven, at the Treaty of Utrecht, the royal crown of Sicily. But four years later, in 1717, this prince exchanged Sicily for Sardinia.

However, our Blessed one was ripe for heaven: the Angels, whose name she did not bear in vain, envied her beautiful soul for the earth, and the immaculate Lamb called her to the chaste delights of the eternal wedding. She was about to complete the fifty-seventh year of her life, when a burning fever came to take her in seven days from the love of her sisters.

She expired on December 16, 1717, around eleven o'clock before midnight. It is said, and one of the decrees of her beatification attests to it, that, a few moments before breathing her last, she heard the voice of her celestial Spouse inviting her to follow him, and as a wise virgin, carrying in her hands her lamp full of the oil of charity, she rose to go to meet him. She was then forty-one years in religion and fifty-six years of age. Four times she had been elected prioress of her monastery, and even more often mistress of novices. She had, moreover, presided over the foundation of the convent of her Order in Moncalier Moncalieri Place where the saint founded a new convent. i.

The news of her death set the whole city of Turin in motion. From all parts of this great city there was but one cry: The Saint is dead! Crowds rushed to the church of her monastery to contemplate her venerable remains, so much so that it was first necessary to postpone their burial for two days, and then it was necessary to have her coffin guarded by armed force, to prevent the people from dividing her clothes among themselves. This coffin was placed in the common vault, without any distinctive mark. On October 10, 1722, the day the first recognition of the body was made, the apostolic commissioners had it placed in a separate place; and on June 19, 1733, following the second visit, it was transported to the monastery church. This convent having been put to a profane use at the beginning of this century, the body of the Blessed one was transported, on September 20, 1802, by order of the Archbishop of Turin, to the church of the Discalced Carmelites of the same city, and placed to the right of the high altar; it is in this place that it has remained until recent times.

But the sepulchral stone, while hiding her relics from public veneration, did not carry her memory into the depths and darkness of the tomb. The fame of her holiness spread rapidly on all sides; moreover, the report of miracles attributed to her intercession contributed not a little to propagate and increase it.

Of all these miracles, the most remarkable are the instantaneous healing of Mother Félicie-Thérèse de Saint-Joseph, a Carmelite nun, afflicted with a painful hemicrania; — that of a twenty-year-old girl named Marie-Antoinette Masotti, reduced to the point of death by pleurisy; — that of the physician Gianotti, suffering from nephritic pains of the bowels; — that of Anne-Christine Auda, freed from a long-standing heart palpitation by the mere touch of the Blessed one's scapular, and above all the two wonders approved by the Sacred Congregation of Rites for her Beatification.

One concerns Madeleine Cavassa of Turin, a lady of high quality and of the family of the Blessed one. This noble and pious woman, more than sixty years old, suffered from appalling pains caused by an enormous gangrenous polyp which, for more than a year, had invaded the nasal cavities. Seeing herself lost, she decided to have recourse to the powerful intercession of her holy relative. "In the month of April 1788," she said, "I suddenly had the inspiration to recommend myself to the venerable Sister Marie des Anges, and immediately, kneeling in my room: 'Venerable Marie,' I cried out, 'cast a look upon her who is prostrate at your feet to pray you to solicit from the most holy and adorable Trinity the grace of my healing, I will keep for you an eternal gratitude.' And I made this prayer with the firm and unshakable confidence that I would be healed." And in fact, having immediately begun a novena in honor of the Blessed one, she did not have time to finish it before her polyp detached itself from the flesh, all alone and without pain, and fell to the ground in the midst of a strong nasal hemorrhage. Moreover, the patient, whom suffering had almost entirely deprived of the use of her legs, was able to walk with ease: her first journey was to the tomb of her heavenly benefactress, and in this circumstance, the glorious sepulcher seemed to her (and the people who accompanied her noticed it too) to exhale a delicious odor, such as she had never breathed.

The other is more astonishing: it is the disappearance of the cancer from which Sister Madeleine de Saint-François, a lay sister at the convent of the Augustinians of Caprarola, near Rome, was suffering. This pious girl was at the very point of death, when, on the evening of July 20, 1844, a relic and an image of our Blessed one were applied to her body. She fell asleep almost immediately with a sleep so calm and so tranquil that it lasted until the next morning at eight o'clock. "I awoke," she testified at the process of Beatification, "with clear and lucid ideas, without pain, without any feeling of illness. I am healed," I said to myself, "the Saint has granted me this grace, let us rise and go to make holy communion." At that instant, she rose and put on her clothes, feeling no other sensation inside her body than that of a hand that had torn something from her stomach, and, on the outside, than that of an impulse that had been imprinted on her side by a cross placed in her cell by a force superior to her own; at the same time she vomited a mass of corrupted flesh, and she distinctly heard these words: "You are healed; for there at your feet is the chancre that was devouring you." She immediately fell to her knees before her crucifix, and after having spent a whole hour giving thanks to God and to her liberator, she went down to the choir to receive holy communion in the midst of her sisters, who were filled with astonishment and joy.

The Lord having thus permitted that the high holiness of his humble and chaste servant should be further enhanced in this way, in the eyes of men, by the brilliance and splendor of miracles, the Church, our holy Mother, has wished to propose her to her children who groan and weep in this valley of tears, as a new model to imitate, as a new patroness to invoke. And it is very appropriate, one might say; for do we not live in a stormy time where the fury of the impious and the unbelievers seems to be unleashed by preference against these asylums of peace, innocence, and charity, where the Christian virgin, like Moses of old on the mountain of Rephidim, raises her arms night and day toward heaven to appease His anger, where she pleads incessantly by her prayers and her penances the cause of sinners before the justice of the Most High, justly irritated by the crimes of the earth.

Marie des Anges was beatified by Pope Pius IX, on May 14, 1865.

This notice, which we owe to the extreme kindness of the Abbé Duchssain, canon of Angoulêm e, is the a pape Pie IX Pope who canonized Josaphat in 1867. lmost complete reproduction of the notice published at Artigues in 1865. — Cf. Vie de la bienheureuse Marie des Anges, by Canon Labis, professor at the seminary of Tournai (H. Casterman, 1867).