Venerable Agnes of Jesus

From the tenderest age, young Agnes was a prelude to the eminent holiness to which grace was to lead her; her childhood had the wisdom and maturity of the elderly. Early on she lived in God, and at an age when children ordinarily have no use of reason, she already shone with the light of the Saints.

She was barely three or four years old, and already the beauty of nature and grace with which God had adorned her body and soul made her so lovable that she became the delight of her parents and all who approached her. One could not tire of seeing her, of conversing with her, of giving her tokens of a tenderness mingled with admiration. Gentleness, modesty, grace, and piety breathed from her ingenuous and candid features, and the neighbors, charmed by her virtue, proposed her to their children as the model they should imitate.

God, however, who had chosen the young Agnes from all eternity to b la jeune Agnès Dominican nun of Langeac who prayed for the conversion of Olier. e His spouse, was preparing her insensibly, through the painful and purifying paths of the cross, to one day become a masterpiece of grace. Her first trial was a domestic one. One of her brothers, jealous of the affection that this amiable child received from everyone in the house, showed her his hatred and envy by sometimes striking her with a kind of fury, and by imagining every means to persecute her. Agnes would then utter no complaint, and resembling her divine Spouse, that celestial Lamb whose sufferings have blotted out the sins of the world, she bore this barbaric treatment in silence with an angelic sweetness.

Under the direction of a pious master, intelligent in the things of religion, Agnes made rapid progress; her happy dispositions, fertilized by the breath of the Holy Spirit, the lessons of the family and the school, developed and made her an accomplished child. From then on, she possessed to a remarkable degree the practical sense of life, the uprightness of judgment, and the exquisite rectitude that one often encounters in simple souls; and this was always one of the predominant characteristics of her noble and holy countenance. Her answers and her discourses on the truths of the faith cast into astonishment and admiration those who heard them. She confessed with a great abundance of tears and heaved such deep sighs for her slightest imperfections that, to see her, one would have said she was a great sinner: one of the most enormous sins of which she acknowledged herself guilty was the theft of a few pins.

The conversation of creatures caused her extreme repugnance; that of persons of the opposite sex was always unbearable to her. Occupied solely with making herself pleasing to Jesus Christ, whom she called her Spouse, she frequented the churches, loved retreat and solitude, and conceived such a great contempt for the vanities of the world that nothing was able to wither the purity of her heart. One of her favorite recreations was to gather with pious young girls of her age, joining their fervor to her own, and she then initiated herself into cloistered observances and the ceremonies of the Church through ingenious exercises of piety: it was in this way that she would gather her little companions, all dressed in white, and lead them in procession to the church of Notre-Dame du église Notre-Dame du Puy Marian sanctuary to which Agnes traveled in procession. Puy.

What then was the source of such rare piety? It came from above, and from here below it welled up toward eternal life. God communicated Himself to our young Agnes in the effusions of an immense charity and already pressed her with that jealous love which reveals to the soul the secrets of self-abnegation and absolute renunciation. Agnes, solicited interiorly by an all-powerful attraction, had consecrated herself to God by the vow never to marry, and subsequently by the vow of perpetual virginity, under the auspices of the seraphic Saint F rancis, whose saint François Founder of the Order of Friars Minor. church she often visited.

The occasion that God provided for her to ratify her vow and make her consecration definitive is quite singular. Agnes one day perceived in the town square an extraordinary crowd of people, witnessing the execution of a criminal; as she had been given the reason for the punishment of this wretch, she began to weep and to say: "Alas! This is the currency with which the world pays this poor man who was its slave"; and then raising her heart to God, she cried out: "Blessed are those who serve You, O my God!" Struck, moved with compassion,