Among the thousands of pilgrims at the canonization of Mother Marie Eugenie were Mark Supple, his wife and his daughter. A good friend of the Assumption Sisters in Philadelphia, Mark reflected on his experience of the canonization and wrote the Sisters this letter. We share it with you.
 
Philadelphia
 
June 23, 2007
 
Dear Sisters,
 
 
I want to thank you all for letting me share in the canonization of your patroness and foundress, Mother Marie Eugenie. It was a great privilege you afforded Michele, Liz, and me and it meant a lot to me to be able to share this with the 6,000 or so people who were there by virtue of what Mother Marie Eugenie meant to them in their lives.

Mother Marie Eugenie had a most unexpected effect on me. I was taken not so much by the sainthood of Mother Marie Eugenie, but the reflected sainthood of the people who were there in Rome and the people touched by Mother Marie Eugenie that were still at home.

Sister Charlotte, you may remember a conversation we had outside of church where you mentioned you were never much of a teacher. In Assisi I had the opportunity to sit at lunch with a woman who knew you when you were at Miami. You had a profound affect on her. She told me how much she loved and cared for you. She told me that you were kind to her. She told me that once she and her friend were playing on the bannisters in school and her friend slid down the banister, right into you. She knew her goose was cooked, but you saw the    transgression for what it was and she and her friend never got in trouble.

Sister Clare, I felt so bad that you ended up tracking down Sister Alice and missed the chance to pray at the grave of your patron saint. I prayed for you that afternoon. You knew that before I did it. And I doubt I was the only one who prayed for you that afternoon.

Mentioned a number of times was the hardship that Mother Marie Eugenie faced as a teenager: a broken home, financial difficulties, a mother who passes away too early. But that pales to the loving suffering I know some of you endured. Every time someone remarked on that fact about Mother Marie Eugenie, I thought of you and prayed to your mom, dad, and grandmother.

In fact, what struck me most was not Mother Marie Eugenie and her saintliness, rather how her saintliness reflected back on all of you and the rest of us there. Sister Clare, when you did the reading at the Mass of Thanksgiving, I felt not that you were up there reading, but that all of us were up there reading. That was not just you, but the entire community that surrounds you.

I think of saints as beacons of light that we look up to. Mother Marie Eugenie was not a beacon of light for me, rather she is a mirror that reflects our saintliness back to ourselves. I was not so much celebrating Mother Marie Eugenie's sainthood as much as I was celebrating the sainthood of Sister Francis Joseph and Sister Sheila; as much as I was celebrating Sister Therese and Sister Mary Ann; as much as I was celebrating Michele's sainthood and my daughter's sainthood, and my own sainthood.

Of the pictures I took, my favorite was one of a young sister. She is talking to an older Religious of the Assumption, but as I pushed the  shutter, she looked straight at me. We were celebrating the life of a woman who was closer to the time of Napoleon than she was to my time, and yet, she still inspires all these people, even this young girl, to their own sainthood. That was the experience I took back from Rome.

    It is as if the gate of heavens had opened up for a moment—as if we were granted the privilege of catching a glimpse of one of us standing close to God. As we give thanks for the canonization of St. Marie-Eugénie Milleret, we are thus in the same position as the seer of the Book of Revelation when he hears “in the heavens a powerful voice, like that of a vast throng,” and we join in the celestial song that proclaims: “Alleluia! Salvation, glory and might be to our God,” and also: “Let us rejoice and shout for joy and pay homage to him, for the wedding day of the Lamb has come! His bride has made herself ready.” What we have been experiencing since our baptism, what we are striving to take part in by listening to God’s Word, by working on ourselves, by trying to conform our hearts to God’s will, by obeying His commandments—all this deep and painful work of grace has been successfully carried out and accomplished in Marie-Eugénie. Her heart has been broadened, purified, magnified. It has borne such fruit that God’s judgement has given her to share His glory, and that God allows us to hear the news and to participate in the joy in the heavens.

    If you are here this morning, brothers and sisters, it is because you have a special link with our sister Marie-Eugénie and her religious family: for some of you she is a relative; many have received the same call to the religious life; and no doubt many more are simply grateful for the education they benefited from, where they could recognize the beautiful fruit borne by the life and work of the founder of the Sisters of the Assumption. But this canonization gives a universal relevance to the joy that each one may feel personally. Our sister is now presented to all the faithful as a figure of the whole Church of which they are the members. She is a model of the Christian life, a soul in which what God wants to make of every one of us has been accomplished so well that she has become transparent to the divine light. United with all the saints—albeit in her own, absolutely unique way—she is the magnificently dressed Bride to whom God has given fine shining linen, and she is going to the wedding banquet of the Lamb. Today we share her joy and we anticipate the eternal joy that we wait and hope for. We rejoice because we know her, because we in her can make out more clearly some of the aspects of God’s work—that mysterious work which nothing has been able to stop since Christ’s Resurrection, but which remains so remote from this world’s logic and pomp.

  Our thanksgiving has an accurate definition in the opening prayer of St. Marie-Eugénie’s feast: “In the faith that she had retrieved you made her realize that all honour and glory are restored to you through humanity regenerated in Christ.” The few words of this prayer reveal Marie-Eugénie’s relevance today. Like many in modern societies, she had experienced the ordeal of a broken family and financial difficulties destroying the initial harmony. Like many again, and although she had been baptized, she had been educated with no religious practice or knowledge of the faith. Yet it should not be forgotten that she found in her mother, even when the family was well off, a model of care for the others and genuine generosity. Even if as a girl growing up in an elegant environment she did feel a hunger and thirst for something different, discovering the faith never was to lead her to scorn or hate the world or declare it worthless. What changed her outlook was a passionate quest for intelligence. She was an eager listener of Fr Lacordaire’s Lenten lectures at Notre Dame of Paris, and she learned to love people as well as to evaluate them.

    In Christ, Marie-Eugénie discovered not only the one who pulls humanity out of its misery, but also the one who reveals to us how deeply the denial of love or sin can destroy men, as he announces the splendour of the destiny which Gods offers them. What we are to find in Christ is not only health. It is rather the ability to give to God “all honour and glory”—which, if we stop to think about it, is a higher and greater calling! What we learn from Christ is not simply generosity, caring for the others or even dedication, since what we receive from him is the grace to love as He himself loves us and thus to enter the mystery of God’s life itself: “If you heed my commands, you will dwell in my love, as I have heeded my Father’s commands and dwell in His love.” This is what we heard our Lord say in the Gospel that has jut been proclaimed. This is the heart of the Good News. It is through such a conversion to love that God’s reign can spread in this world to which Marie-Eugénie was to consecrate herself.
 
    The conviction that “all honour and glory are restored to God through humanity regenerated” is the root of St. Marie-Eugénie’s educational enterprise. The limits of her own training, the ordeals she had had to go through, the loss of her social status because of her father’s bankruptcy—all this had prepared her to realize that women have another vocation than playing, even perfectly, the role society expected them to play. In a strongly hierarchic world, she grasped that in God’s view only the person mattered, with his or her fundamental liberty, and that all that was taught made no sense unless it helped shaping up a spiritual man or woman, that is to say someone capable of accomplishing his or her missions and taking up the challenges of life, not merely to meet the social demands, but out of love, simply finding in the circumstances the opportunities to share that love dwelling in the heart.

    Such a goal may seem obvious today. Yet I invite you to think it over for a while. We must acknowledge the extent to which this vision of life shook up the mentalities of the time. Above all, this perspective introduces a dynamic that goes against the accepted interpretation of history. Marie-Eugénie’s educational enterprise of promoting girls cannot be separated from her discovery of Christ, the Church, prayer and the life of grace in our hearts. Where the historians of social habits tend to see nothing more than the success of a rebellion against traditions and the institutions, Marie-Eugénie operates a lever which commands much more power—that of personal liberty. Liberty usually triggers all kinds of demands; we translate it into rights to be won, which we consider the others ought to respect. The history of women since the middle of the 19th century will then be seen as the story of such a long, fortunately successful struggle. However, Marie-Eugénie reminds us that true liberty, in-depth liberty, the kind of liberty that no one or nothing can take away, the one which can be experienced whatever the social status but which also actually transforms the apparently best established positions—this liberty is that of the person, of the heart which only Christ really reaches, touches and liberates. And the educator can help, so that the genuine educator deserves the title that St. Paul does not hesitate to give himself: “We are God’s fellow-workers, and you are God’s garden.”

    Dear friends, you girls and boys, you first who are being educated in the schools of the Sisters of the Assumption, but also all the others, listen to the message that God is sending to you by inviting you to celebrate St. Marie-Eugénie. The classes you attend, the exams you take certainly aim at making you capable of reaching a social status thanks to what we call “good jobs”—which today often means well-paying jobs. This is not to be overlooked. But what matters most is that you become free women and men, each one of you in his or her own style—women and men capable of acknowledging what God expects from you and to do it. “You are God’s garden, you are God’s building.” You must strive to make the most of what you learn and receive to progress toward greater liberty—liberty from ignorance, and even more liberty from lies; liberty from the needs and worries of this life, but even more liberty from your own cravings, which should not rule you and rather stimulate you to go forward; liberty from social or economic dependency, but even more from narrow-mindedness and hardheartedness.
And you, dear Sisters, you teachers and educators who work within the framework of the schools of the Assumption, you too parents who were educated in these schools and remember those happy years with enough gratitude to have come on this pilgrimage, do not forget what St. Paul tells us and what St. Marie-Eugénie believed with all her soul and through her experience: “No one can lay other foundations than the one that already exist; and these foundations are Jesus Christ.” This does not simply mean Jesus Christ as a character of the past, a particularly important wise man, or a model that we can cast a glance at every now and then to pluck up some courage… No, this means patiently, endlessly listening to Jesus Christ, welcoming Him and imitating Him. This means Jesus Christ reigning in our hearts, Jesus Christ recognized as the one who chooses us to make us His friends. “I call you friends, because I have disclosed to you everything that I heard from my Father.” When you talk to young people; whether they are your pupils or your children, do not forget that what matters most in their terrestrial lives is that they may become “true worshippers in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23; see the opening prayer).

    Dear brothers and sisters, as you prepared within your respective communities the gathering for this canonization, and also during the few days of this pilgrimage, you have had the time to learn about St. Marie-Eugénie’s life and work, or to develop the knowledge you already had. She experienced pain and suffering, both in her body and in her soul. But what is disclosed to us today is that these aches, which are inherent in all the struggles of our torn world, were set against a background of joy—the joy of living according to God’s heart and to cooperate in his design: “Blessed be the people who acclaims the Lord. It walks in the light of your face, o Lord.” The magnificent basilica where we are celebrating this Mass is wholly meant to be a hymn to God’s joy that penetrates the souls and bodies—from the Confession which, under this altar, honours the remains of St. Peter, his martyrdom and the testimony of his faith, to the saints represented above the nave by their statues, some of which seem to be carried away by inspiration. The diversity of the clothing, of the times and of the conditions in life suggests the variety of the fruits of the Spirit. Everything here invites us to join in the praise of God—here and now, without any doubt, but even more in all our lives with their joys and sorrows. May St. Marie-Eugénie teach us fully and joyfully to live human lives regenerated in Jesus Christ. Amen.

by Susan Sanares - Tan

Already before we left for Rome, the weather forecast for that Sunday showed rain. It was on the one day, the one day that mattered. But who puts faith in weather forecasts? The pilgrims that we were hoped that the sun might shine anyway on June 3 just as it had on all the other days because it was the day of the canonization of our new saint, Mother Marie Eugenie, foundress of our Assumption.

Together with three male saints: George Preca of the indomitable Maltese (If you value breathing don't get ever get ahead of them in line or they will crush you as they have all previous invaders to their pinpoint island southeast of Sicily. "But please, come visit us," they counter as they barge in front of you, behind you and to the side of you in a solid phalanx); Simon of Lipnica of the polite Polish though ever festive over their newest saint; and Charles Houben of the drowned-out Dutch (Their cheers rose meekly
above the din)--we believed that they all would assure us of a miracle of clear skies.

But as the Mass progressed that chilly morning, this, after some of us queued four hours since daybreak, only the Pope glowed at the altar with his vestments in summer gold. The rain became a steady torrent. And the more we prayed for the precipitation to end, the more it poured-drenching our heads, seats, clothes and the insides of our shoes. Never mind that you had an umbrella or a rain coat or plastic capote, they were permeable to this kind of rain. So, this is what immersion truly means.

Following the flow of that day, it seemed quite sacramental, especially when we sung the chorus in the litany to the saints--"Ora pro nobis." Even the Vatican cantor's sweet tenor seemed to ease its tempo a wee bit--beckoning us deeper into prayer, though my husband repeated through clenched teeth, "Hurry up, hurry up."

It was the first time for me to receive Holy Communion out in the rain. Being at the piazza where the fountains gushed forth without letup, it seemed so very romantic. All the elements of sacrament were there-from a recollection of baptism, to reconciliation and penance-(someone said the rain was the chastisement), to a strengthening of the spirit, and to the priestly presence from Pope Benedict XVI down to all the ministers, and even the final realization of our own mortality.

His papal blessing capped a morning of effusive grace. Thank the newest saints for this memorable celebration of their canonization. The one thought that carried through as well was the second reading from St. Paul to the Romans [5:1-5] on this Trinity Sunday. How apt a reading it was coming from the pulpit out in the piazza: "We boast in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven virtue, and proven virtue, hope,
and hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." St. Marie Eugenie of Jesus, pray for us.

   
The experience of getting soaked in the rain was for me, a big Canonization grace! It gave me a taste of what it means to be drenched, absorbed and just "melt in His presence' a touch of contemplation! Looking at the big screen in front of me, I delighted at watching the Holy Father smile every time he called out the name of St. Marie Eugenie, which brought the longest and louder cheers from the crowd! Tremendous joy spilled all over the place - a glimpse of heaven!



     Every step if the Pilgrimage which brought our group to France and to Rome was a deep experience of my own inner journey.  The Send-off Liturgy on Pentecost Sunday was a time when God provided a roadmap where He got "in-touch" with me throughout the trip!  Joining the Canonization was the second time I received the opportunity to travel abroad-first to China, this time, to Europe.  But more than the external blessings of traveling abroad, my inner journey became a profound God experience for me.  The task of running a school focused my attention to the externals but this pilgrimage quenched my thirst for the things that last!  The bits and pieces of my scattered self begin to fall in place and like St. Marie Eugenie I recognize the need to let go of the non-essentials so that God becomes my All! Slowly, I feel that my inner lamp sheds light to the dark cave of my mid-life process and  I only need to move on... with the strength that comes from Him.  Thank you dear Sisters and friends especially the AAA for allowing me to grow.