Vocation, Depression, Crisis, and Grace Through Mary

A Girl Grieved by Offenses against God

In 1629 Catherine de Bar is going on fifteen years of age. With the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), Swedish Lutheran troops, inimical to the Catholic faith, wreak devastation in Lorraine, pillaging churches and desecrating the Most Blessed Sacrament. Catherine responds to these outrages against Our Lord in the Sacrament of His Love with a profound sorrow, and is moved to offer herself in reparation for so many crimes against the holiness and majesty of God.

The Call of the Cloister

Catherine’s parents want to see her advantageously married like her older sister Marguerite, but Catherine’s heart is elsewhere. She yearns for the cloister. Her father is not at all favourable to her monastic aspirations. After the death of Madame de Bar, Catherine, broken–hearted, casts herself at the feet of a statue of Our Lady, begging the Blessed Virgin to be a mother to her.

Refuse God Nothing

Beset by opposition and difficulties, Catherine, in a dream, sees her deceased mother, who assures her that her entry into religious life will not be delayed much longer At last, in 1631, Jean de Bar consents to his daughter’s vocation. Catherine, wanting to soften the blow of her departure, leaves to her father the choice of the community she is to enter.  Jean de Bar chooses the monastery of the  Annonciade, or of the Ten Virtues of Our Lady, at Bruyères in the diocese of Toul, where the monastic observance is not too rigourous. When, on 4 November 1631, Catherine crosses the threshold of the monastery at Bruyères, one Father Étienne, a Franciscan, says to her: “Have an invincible courage, my daughter, and a heart as big as the whole earth so as to refuse God nothing of what He will ask of you.” Catherine receives the habit of the Annonciades early in 1632, and with it the name of Saint John the Evangelist.

There is no growth without crisis. The vocation of Sister Saint John the Evangelist [for such is now her name as an Annonciade] is purified in the fire of temptations. She finds the monastic routine burdensome. A shadow falls over Sister Saint John’s habitually radiant countenance. The weight of depression burdens her to the point of causing her superior concern. In her crisis, the troubled novice turns to the Blessed Virgin, saying:

Alas, what! Holy Virgin, hast thou made me enter here to let me perish? If thou abandonest me, to whom shall I appeal to obtain from thy adorable Son the succour of which my weakness stands in need?

Our Lady Answers Her Prayer

After her prayer to the Mother of God, Sister Saint John the Evangelist experiences a change; the long hours of claustral silence are no longer quite as unbearable as before. In fact, things begin to go so well that, for a moment, she envisages living as a recluse. The attraction to solitude and, even to an eremitical form of life, will recur under the form of temptations at different moments throughout her life. Charged with a small group of boarding students, Sister Saint John charms them with her happy disposition and winning ways.

Burn–out and Doubts

In 1632 the plague strikes Bruyères. Nearly the entire Annonciade community falls ill, leaving Sister Saint John the Evangelist, who alone is left standing, to nurse them and to carry on the Divine Office at the prescribed hours. Secular help is brought in to look after the ailing community. The flow of new vocations dries up. Sister Saint John, whose novitiate experience barely meets canonical requirements, and who, by this time, is suffering what would, today, be described as “burn–out”, suffers a spiritual dryness, an incapacity even to think of God in prayer, and the moral and emotional suffering of now believing herself incapable of living the monastic life. Life in the cloister of the Annonciade is not the “repose in God” that she dreamed it would be. Again, Sister Saint John turns to Our Lady and, in her doubt, asks to be enlightened with regard to her true vocation.  She speaks to the Mother of God with a brutal honesty:

Would it not have been better for me to remain in the world, if I am not going to find here the means to serve you with more purity and holiness?