May 4th: Feast day of Blessed Marie-Leonie Paradis - A Life of Dedication to the Priesthood.

My son (7) and I were looking up who's feast day it was today in the Saints for Young Readers for Every Day Vol 1 book and I discovered that it was Blessed Marie-Leonie Paradis's feast day. She was a nun who founded a religious order devoted to the priesthood particularly within their household care and supporting priests in their educational work.
Here are some details I discovered about this humble saintly nun:

Elodie Paradis was a very young entrant into the world of a religious sister, entering as a novice at 13/14 years of age and taking her final vows at the young age of 17 in the order of The Sisters of the Holy Cross.
Her father after leaving the family in the small village of L'Acadie in Quebec Canada to try and find wealth in the Gold Fields in California was not happy on his return to find his Elodie had joined the convent. He went to the convent and begged her to return home with him but she decided to stay. He eventually accepted her decision and was resigned for God take his daughter as His bride.
She eventually started a new religious order inspired by Martha in the Gospel, The Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Holy Family, a community dedicated to serving the clergy.

Martha and Mary with Jesus

(Father, your Son honoured St. Martha by coming to her home as a guest. By her prayers may we serve Christ in our brothers and sisters and be welcomed by you into heaven, our true home. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.)

I came across this blog today by Father Anthony Ho while searching for information on Blessed Marie-Leonie Paradis, here is an excerpt from his article:

"In this Year for Priests it is very appropriate to recall Blessed Marie Leonie’s special love for priests.

  Little Sisters of the Holy Family

Blessed Marie Leonie was born in 1840. At the age of 13 she joined the Holy Cross Sisters. After serving as a teacher for 20 years she was entrusted with domestic work at St. Joseph’s College in New Brunswick.

Believing in the dignity and greatness of the priesthood, Blessed Marie Leonie decided to dedicate her life to the service of priests through humble domestic work. Many young women were willing to join her, so in 1880 Blessed Marie Leonie decided to form a new religious community to serve priests: The Little Sisters of the Holy Family.
The sisters were involved mainly in domestic work. They worked in kitchens, laundries, and sacristies of colleges, seminaries, rectories, and bishops’ residences. Later on the Sisters also started to serve priests as secretaries, receptionists, and accountants. They imitated the example of the holy women in the Gospel who ministered to Jesus and the apostles as they travelled throughout Galilee and Judea.

The Holy Women from the Gospel

One of the sisters summed up their spirituality and evangelical mission as follows:

“Our God is the Eucharistic God, our principle work is charity, our mission is service to the priesthood exclusively, our spirit is the spirit of the Holy Family of Nazareth, our motto is ‘piety and dedication,’ and our duty is to accomplish more than others.”

By their service, the Little Sisters bear witness to the dignity and greatness of the holy priesthood. It is the hope of the sisters that, by their fidelity and faith in the priesthood, priests themselves will be inspired and encouraged to remain faithful to their promises and their mission.

Blessed Marie Leonie died on May 3, 1912. Hers was the first beatification ceremony on Canadian soil."

Pope John Paul II beatification Sister Marie-Léonie Paradis, here is an excerpt from his homily at Jarry Park, Montreal on 11 September 1984:

"Today, to this living record of the saints and the blessed which has been in this land for centuries, a new name is being added, that of Sister Marie-Léonie Paradis.

This woman is one of you, humble among the humble, and today she takes her place among those whom God has lifted up to glory. I am happy that for the first time, this beatification is taking place in Canada, her homeland.

Born of simple, poor and virtuous parents, she soon grasped the beauty of religious life and committed herself to it through her vows with the Marist Order of the Holy Cross. She never once questioned that gift to God, not even during the difficult periods of community life in New York and in Indiana. When she was appointed to serve in a college in Memramcook in Acadia, the richness of her religious life drew young women to her who also wanted to dedicate their life, to God. With them and thanks to the understanding of Bishop Larocque of Sherbrooke, she founded the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Holy Family which is still thriving and is still very much appreciated.

Never doubting her call, she often asked: "Lord, show me your ways", so that she would know the concrete form of her service in the Church. She found and proposed to her spiritual daughters a special kind of commitment: the service of educational institutions, seminaries and priests' homes. She never shied away from the various forms of manual work which is the lot of so many people today and which held a special place in the Holy Family and in the life of Jesus of Nazareth himself. It is there that she saw the will of God for her life. It was in carrying out these tasks that she found God. In the sacrifices which were required and which she offered in love, she experienced a profound joy and peace. She knew that she was one with Christ's fundamental attitude: he had "come not to be served, but to serve". She was filled with the greatness of the eucharist and with the greatness of the priesthood at the service of the eucharist. That is one of the secrets of her spiritual motivation.

Yes, God looked upon the holiness of his humble servant, Marie-Leonie, who had been inspired by Mary's openness and receptivity. And henceforth, from age to age, her Congregation and the Church will call her blessed (cf. Lk 1, 4-8)".

Prayer for Priests and Religious

O Jesus, our great High Priest, hear my humble prayers on behalf of your servants. Give them a deep faith, a bright and firm hope, and a burning love which will ever increase in the course of their life. In their loneliness, comfort them. In their sorrows, strengthen them. In their frustrations, point out to them that it is through suffering that the soul is purified, and show them that they are needed by the Church; they are needed by souls; they are needed for the work of redemption.

O Loving Mother Mary, Mother of Priests and religious, take to your heart your children who are close to you because of the power which they have received to carry on the work of Christ in a world which needs them so much. Be their comfort, be their joy, be their strength, and especially help them to live and to defend the ideals of consecrated celibacy.

Amen

St Teresa of Avila and the Carmel commitment to Priests

St Teresa of Avila

Today is the feast of St Teresa of Avila, a great Carmelite reformer and doctor of the Church.

Often when I think of priests, I remember that they are 'Alter Christi' ~ another Christ. So when I reflect upon the words of St Teresa below, I think of the work of holy priests in particular:

"Christ has no body now, but yours.

No hands, no feet on earth, but yours.

Yours are the eyes through which

Christ looks compassion into the world.

Yours are the feet

with which Christ walks to do good.

Yours are the hands

with which Christ blesses the world."

~ St Teresa of Avila

The Carmelite Nuns of Haifa

The Carmelite community of Haifa is renewing its commitment to priests:

"to offer our humble supplication that you may be holy."

The cloistered religious have made this renewal in a letter marking the Year for Priests, under way through next June.The letter is directed to priests around the world. HT: Zenit

Icon of 'St Teresa de Jesus'

Here is the letter to priests that the Carmelite nuns of Haifa have written and published on their website, The Carmelites of the Holy Land:

"It is with immense joy and gratitude that we address all our brother priests. In you, dear brothers, we recognize the "other Christ", and we greet you with affection in our Lord. Peace be with you!

In our vocation as Carmelite Nuns, daughters of our Mother Saint Teresa of Avila , our essential mission is prayer; especially prayer for the holiness of priests. Therefore, the invitation of our Holy Father to place your ministry, during this year, at the centre of our concern, challenges us deeply.

For four centuries Teresa's voice never ceases to invite us to: " ... be occupied in prayer for those who are defenders of the Church and for preachers and learned men who protect her from attack ... " (Way of Perfection 1:2)

We are aware of the challenges you have in fully living out your vocation in today's society; being in the world but not of the world, as Saint John states. Ecclesial circumstances have changed much due to the accelerated pace of time but your call remains unchanged: " You are a priest … and forever... " (Heb 5.6) Today, we renew our commitment to offer our humble supplication that you may be holy.

Dear priests, you accompany a person throughout his life from his birth till he enters the warm embrace of our Father. You are there everyday, offering us the Eucharist and explaining to us the Scriptures. You are Ministers of God's Mercy. You are fathers and brothers to us. You show us the blank page in which God writes our history. You are the sentry who watches over us while we await dawn after the dark of the night, while we search for the spring of fresh water in the desert...

You are present when we make our Consecration in the Church, offering our lives to the One and Triune God...

Dear brothers, we find no words that can truly express our gratitude to each one of you.

Any one of us can give countless testimonies of the invaluable gift of yourselves: to serve the people of God, to care for the sheep trusted to you, with the wise guidance of a father and the tenderness of a mother. You are the "Good Shepherd" who is not afraid to leave the ninety-nine sheep to go in search of the one that was lost...

Only in heaven shall we know the wonder of ecclesial communion; where now we have only a glimpse of its amazing reality.

To you dear brothers, who are the living memorial of Christ and totally identified with Him, how can we not express our gratitude when every morning, in the Eucharist, you give us a foretaste of the joy of heaven, a foretaste of our homeland that does not belong to this world.

To each one of you: elder priests rich in years and experience, young priests beginning your ministry, those who are in the prime of your life, or enduring sickness. Priests afflicted by trials and persecutions, priest workers, and all of you who share the lives of the poor, the favored ones of the Lord.

Priests who are educators and those who promote and discern vocations; priests whose deeds are visible only to the eyes of God who sees in secret; priests who are monks sharing with us the same contemplative vocation.To each and every one of you, we say with simplicity of heart:you can count on the silent prayer and the hidden offering of your sisters!"

Carmelite Nuns of the Holy Land .

NB: There are four Carmelite monasteries in the Holy Land: Jerusalem , Bethlehem , Nazareth and Mount Carmel . The sisters come from 24 nations and four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa and America .