| Marie Thérèse de Lamourous
This
week (September 14) we celebrated the anniversary of the death
of the Venerable Marie Thérèse Charlotte de Lamourous, lay foundress
of the Family of Mary. Our partners at the North American
Center for Marianist Studies have recently published A Spiritual
Crucible: The Life of Mlle de Lamourous During the French Revolution
by Benjamin Dougherty. Below is an excerpt (p.9) but you can
find the entire essay here.
This is only a small part of the way Marie Thérèse said "Yes."
At one
point during the Revolution, Thérèse began sneaking into the
offices of the Committee of Surveillance. She would pretend
to empty wastebaskets and clean desks so that she could read
the lists of people the police were going to be arresting. Then
she would warn them to go into hiding or to leave town before
they could be caught. It is impossible to know how many innocent
and holy lives she saved acting as a spy for the underground.
Had she been caught, she surely would have been guillotined.
Playing up her role, she often chatted with the secretaries
to make them less suspicious.
One
day in the offices of the committee, a few of the men were bragging
about how many anti-revolutionaries they had executed that day.
Thérèse, being overcome with grief at the loss of her friends,
began to cry. One of the men noticed her crying and said, "Citizen,
why do you bother yourself with crying? They are only worthless
rascals!" Without skipping a beat she simply replied, "You
men are made of tougher stuff than we women."
She
herself was arrested one day and brought before a municipal
court. The "trials" that were held in these courts
bore little resemblance to what we in the United States understand
as a trial. In most cases, the accused was brought before magistrates,
a charge was read, and the accused was convicted and sentenced
either to jail or death. In many cases, to be brought before
a judge was the same as being guilty. Thérèse was accused of
associating with non-juring priests and being noble. Not wanting
to respond to the charge, she requested permission to ask the
judge a question. When he granted her request, she asked him
what that mark on his cheek was. He replied, "Why it's
a mole." She questioned further, "Where did you get
it from?" "From my mother, of course," he replied.
Thérèse said, "So it is with my nobility, I got it from
my mother too! And it's no fault of mine." The whole court,
including the judge, broke into laughter, and the judge said,
"You are a good woman! Leave, and do not be bothered."
Marie
Thérèse, who lived from 1754 to 1836, left her noble surroundings
and spent much of her life as director of the Maison de la Miséricorde,
a home for the rehabilitation of prostitutes in Bordeaux. She
was known by her contemporaries the as "Saint of Bordeaux."
peace
and love,
aj
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