La Madre and Mother Mectilde
Mother Mectilde Compared to Saint Teresa
Mother Mectilde de Bar has frequently been referred in the archives of this blog as “the Teresa of the Benedictine Order.” This comparison is not unique to us. Among Mother Mectilde’s friends was a certain Franciscan friar, one Père Luc de Bray. Père Luc de Bray was a Franciscan and a friend of Jean de Bernières, the famous lay mystic of Caen who joined in with Mother Mectilde and others in attempting to live out a deep spiritual life based, in part, on the teaching of Saint John of the Cross’ Ascent to Mount Carmel. Père Luc de Bray was in close communication with Mother Mectilde for twenty-five years of her life. Here is some of what he wrote to the Countess of Châteauvieux in 1671 about Mother Mectilde during her lifetime:
The love of the Cross and of scorn never waned in her [Mother Mectilde]. The greater number of her friends abandoned her and looked down on her. I say nothing, Madame, of her zeal for the reign of her Divine Spouse in souls; your own piety has experience of this. I say nothing of her great conformity to the most holy and adorable will of God in all things; you yourself have witnessed this since for many years Divine Providence has united you with her closely to work together for the establishment of several monasteries of the Institute of perpetual adoration of the Most Holy and Adorable Sacrament of the Altar.And so, Madame, this is what I may say for now of this soul whom I consider as one no longer living, but in whom Jesus Christ lives. I revere her as the soul most united and transformed in God anywhere in the world. I consider her to be a second Saint Teresa on earth: there are many things in common between them about which, for the present, I am obliged to keep secret.
A Century Apart
Saint Teresa was born in 1515. It was almost exactly 100 years later when Catherine (Mectilde) de Bar was born on 31 December 1614. Blessed Anne of Jesus, the hand-picked companion and friend of Saint Teresa, established the reformed Carmel in France in 1604, ten years before Mother Mectilde was born. Henri Brémond (1865-1933), the French literary scholar, used the striking phrase “the mystical invasion” of France to describe the period after 1604 when Blessed Anne established the first five houses of the Discalced Carmelites in France. The convents had begun to proliferate by the time of Mother Mectilde’s birth. But even before Blessed Anne brought the Carmelite reform to France, existing French orders had begun to be reformed in the spirit of the Carmelite reform of Saint Teresa. Among those orders reformed before and after 1604 were Benedictine monasteries, including one Benedictine monastery that would have a great influence on Mother Mectilde, the Benedictines of Montemartre.
Knew of Saint Teresa
Although the direct influence on Mother Mectilde’s thought is easier traced to the writings of the Franciscan Saint Catherine of Genoa, the French Bishop Saint Francis de Sales, and Saint Teresa’s companion in Carmel, Saint John of the Cross, Mother Mectilde does mention Saint Teresa in her writings. Saint Teresa’s writings had already been translated into French (according to the English Benedictine, Dom Benedict Mackey, the first French translation of the writings of Saint Teresa appeared in 1601) — this had been one of the projects of Blessed Anne of Jesus in the decades preceding her journey to France.
It is Significant that Mother Mectilde is Compared to Saint Teresa
Saint Teresa of Jesus, mystic, teacher of prayer, reformer, and Doctor of the Church, has, without any doubt, set the benchmark for measuring the influence of holy women in the life of the Church. It is not for nothing that Mother Mectilde is often compared to her. Like the woman who is simply called La Madre among her Carmelite sons and daughters, Mother Mectilde has became a primary reference for women and men who embrace the life of Eucharistic immolation that Mother Mectilde taught. In addition to the Nuns of Perpetual Adoration, our monastery — like the male Discalced Carmelites to Saint Teresa — looks to Mother Mectilde as a sort of foundress of our charism, and before us there was Abbot Celestino Colombo and a number of lay and clerical men and lay women who found the direction of their spirituality through the life and writings of Mother Mectilde.
Similar Directness
Like the saint of Avila, Mother Mectilde had a remarkable ability to probe souls and to explain souls to themselves. Like the saint of Avila, she was forthright and direct. Mother Mectilde writes incisively to a complicated and scrupulous religious of the rue Cassette:
Truly, you are very far from religious simplicity and from the spirit of your holy Rule, which orders you to obey simply and to submit your judgment to your superiors. I am not in the least surprised that you should have so many troubles, because you foment them in yourself and you attract them to yourself by attachment to your own perception of things. It is absolutely necessary that you abandon yourself in all simplicity to holy obedience, and that you make an effort, with regard to your reason and to the natural lights of your mind, to submit yourself. This is what God wants of you absolutely; you must make up your mind to do this. Otherwise, you will remain yet a long time just as you are, and maybe even your whole life, unless by some blow of the mercy of God, which He can do by His all–powerful mercy, but which He will not do in some miraculous way, because you have the ordinary and actual grace for that yourself.
To Mother Marie de Jésus Chopinel, another religious of the rue Cassette, Mother Mectilde writes with her characteristic honesty:
All your bent must be to get out of your own mind (esprit), by a faithful abnegation and renunciation of your own thoughts and your own lights. Become like a little child in submission. Leave behind your fears; they only get in the way of your going forward. Leave your perfection to the conduct of obedience; do exactly what you are ordered. If only you could understand the inexpressible happiness of being nothing in all things and everywhere, you would find and would possess a good known only to souls who want to lose everything so as to rejoice in the eternal peace that proceeds from the possession of God.
Other Similarities
Many other similarities could be noted, from their extraordinary talents and personalities, to the extraordinary favours they received, to the extraordinary quantity of letters they wrote. They both shared a common doctrine that could be summarised in the words of Saint Teresa: “God alone suffices.” Both of them started reforms that last to this day, and both of them are turned to to this day as spiritual lights and guides. (Though Mother Mectilde is not as known in the English speaking world as she deserves, her teaching is better disseminated in other languages, especially French and Italian.) Both of them had a great devotion to Saint Joseph and entrusted their institutes to him.
Differences
But there are certainly differences. Two key differences lie in Mother Mectilde’s single focus on the Eucharist and her liturgical spirituality. Another set of differences come from the influences in the French School. The “mystical invasion” of France did not simply take the teachings of the Spanish mystics and preserve them. Mother Mectilde’s emphasis on participation in the Mysteries of Christ through participation in His States — and especially the states of the Host — show that she is not simply a French Saint Teresa.
No Saint Teresa, No Mother Mectilde
Yet, it can certainly be said that Mother Mectilde is an inheritor of the spiritual riches of the saint of Avila. All who learn in the school of Mother Mectilde have another reason — certainly among many — to thank Saint Teresa.
