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PREFACE
By
RIGHT REVEREND CHARLES WARREN CURRIER Bishop of Hetalonia
Among the many religious orders of the Church there is perhaps none that can surpass that of Carmel in the pursuit of the contemplative life, and in the practices that characterized the great ascetics in the early ages of Christianity. Lost, as it were, to the world and hidden with Christ in God, the nuns of this Order in their solitude have but one thought, sanctification — the sanctification of themselves and of the world. Their prayers, their penances, even their recreations, tend to this one end. Undoubtedly there is no station in this mortal life that offers so many opportunities for the attainment of holiness. The daughters of Saint Teresa have fully profited by these opportunities. Treading in the footsteps of their holy Foundress, countless virgins have run the grand race of the Cross. The vast majority of these live and die unknown to the world; but, occasionally, God lets their light shine through the enclosure that shields them habitually from observation, in order that the outside world may share in the edification they have given. However, we seldom or never hear of them until God has taken them to Himself, their lifework finished.
Among these flowers of Carmel whose deeds of holiness still shed a sweet perfume over a sinful world, beside the holy Foundress, Saint Teresa, I may mention Blessed Ann of Saint Bartholomew, Blessed Ann of Jesus, Blessed Mary of the Incarnation, the holy Martyrs of Compiegne, and that delightful "Little Flower," Sister Teresa of Lisieux, the spread of whose fame is something marvelous.
And now comes to our English-speaking world the knowledge of another flower of Carmel, the subject of this biography. The Carmelite Sisters of St. Louis command, indeed, our gratitude for the publication of such works as the Life of Blessed Ann of Saint Bartholomew and this of the Venerable Sister Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart.
Teresa Margaret was a daughter of the fairest of countries, Italy, that has given so many saints to the Church; she came into the world at Arezzo. There is music in the very name — it tells us of melody, of harmony, of Guido d'Arezzo. A portion of her secular life, and her brief career in religion were spent in Florence. Florence, so renowned for its art, the Florence of Dante Allighieri, the Florence that Saints like Saint Antoninus and the Beato Angelico had embellished by their virtue, that Florence, sanctified by another daughter of Carmel, Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi.
Teresa Margaret was a child of the eighteenth century, a century of deplorable infidelity and corruption, the century of Voltaire and Rousseau, of a Louis XV., the century of the French Revolution — yet saints were not wanting to sanctify it; it was a century that produced a Saint Leonard of Port Maurice, a Saint Paul of the Cross, a Saint Alphonso de Liguori, all, like Teresa Margaret, children of Italy.
When she entered the Order of Carmel in Florence, at the age of seventeen, in all the innocence of an untainted soul, to join other innocent virgins like herself, more than half a century had passed since the death in Paris of another saintly daughter of Saint Teresa. Unlike Teresa Margaret, Sister Louise de la Misericorde had not spent her youth in innocence. She came to Carmel from the splendors of a corrupt court where, alas! her virtue had suffered shipwreck. But long years of sincere penance atoned for her misdeeds, and Louise de la Misericorde, once the brilliant Louise de la Valliere, may be reckoned among the saintly souls of Carmel.
When Teresa Margaret died, another child of Saint Teresa was about to do penance in a Carmelite Convent in Paris, not for her own sins, but for those of her father and of her age. She went from the same Versailles, the same Bourbon court where La Valliere had shone. The daughter of Louis XV., like the victim of Louis XIV., offered herself up to God as a holocaust, the one in innocence and the other in penance. Madame Louise de France, or Sister Teresa of St. Augustine, was perhaps the most brilliant ornament of Carmel in her day. She entered the Order the month after the death of Sister Teresa Margaret, or in April, 1770.
More obscure, our Teresa Margaret followed her calling in silence. What a beautiful life is this reproduction in Carmel of that of the son of Saint Ignatius, Aloysius de Gonzaga! Only a few years in religion and she had done what it takes others long, weary years to accomplish. Twenty-three years of age, of about the same age as Saint Aloysius, her model, her beautiful soul left its earthly tabernacle, in which it had known no joy but the joy of the Cross, to fly to God forever. Nearly one hundred and fifty years have gone by, and still we inhale the sweet perfume of the delicate lily, so soon transplanted. May the odor of her virtues refresh many a struggling soul today! Her Sisters in Carmel have, indeed, an encouraging memory when they think of her, and for many a world-weary soul she may be the means of a return to nobler aspirations of a bygone day.
I now leave the life of the Venerable Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart, with its many virtues, to the pious meditation of the reader, in whose soul, I trust, the flowers of virtue may bloom with all the beauty of her whose deeds are echoed from these pages.
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