OUR LORD SPOKE IN FRENCH TO REACH RUSSIAN EARS

 

In France of the 1840s there was a young Carmelite nun and a hot-tempered Breton with an urgent mission. Jesus was affording her intellectual visions so she could found a movement devoted to His Holy Face with precise instructions as to how to propagate it. Her name was Sr. Mary of St. Peter and her own face bore the blemish of flames, because when she was a baby, another child dropped her in a fire. This ghastly disfigurement gave her the lived experience of having others look with pity on her burnt face.

 

Sr. Mary of St. Peter hurried to meet her mother superior and told her everything; that the Lord wished for souls to do spiritually the pious office of Veronica who had caressed His Face with her veil when He was carrying His cross through the mad mob who jeered at Him. Souls could offer the prayers Our Lord had given Sr. Mary of St. Peter, so that atonement could be made for the sin of blasphemy where people insult Our Lord to His Face by taking His Name in vain. 

Just as Sr. Mary of St. Peter was holding forth on the messages she’d received, a holy picture honouring the Holy Name tumbled out of the book that she held, almost of its own accord. The astonished mother superior said that had she not known Sr. Mary of St. Peter's true character, she’d have thought her a witch. True, Sr. Mary of St. Peter was known as one who spoke the unvarnished truth in pithy tones and was so serious about her salvation that she’d never have cast a spell so that a picture of the Holy Name would jump out from the pages of a book. Her superior took it as a sign and gave her the necessary permission. 

 

In 1843, Our Lord gave Sr. Mary of St. Peter the Chaplet of the Holy Face wherein the verse from psalm 67 is repeated 33 times: “Arise, O Lord, and let Thy enemies be scattered and let all that hate Thee flee before Thy Face.” Our Lord willed that this be offered as a way of attending to His Face, that devotees to His Face may repair the damage done by blasphemy, otherwise “the malice of revolutionary men” was to be visited upon humanity. Our Lord expressly warned Sr. Mary of St. Peter about Communists, before this word was even in common use and over 6 decades before the red army took control of Russia. Ever battle-ready, Sr. Mary of St. Peter said, “God has commanded me to cross swords with the Communists” and she divulged that the Lord called them, “the sworn enemies of the Church.” 

Our Lord instructed Sr. Mary of St. Peter on a 3-fold plan; disseminating pamphlets with the prayers and promises, to make known that blasphemy and the profanation of Sunday are great sins that harm the Holy Face and the founding of confraternities devoted to the Holy Face. There was something of a race against the clock; Sr. Mary of St. Peter was receiving these messages in the 1840s and the Communist Manifesto was published in 1948. 

Tragically, we know which schema won out, at least for a time. Let’s bear in mind that Sr. Mary of St. Peter's heroic efforts to found this work greatly moved St. Therese of Lisieux. She and her family joined a fledgling confraternity, 140 years ago, in 1885, and later after St. Therese had read the life of the feisty Breton Carmelite, did she add “the Holy Face” to her name. 

 

Through all this, we understand that the language Our Lord employed and in which the pamphlets with the prayers and promises were first published was French. Sr. Mary of St. Peter only spoke her earthy Breton dialect with its Cornish roots and French. When I’ve written about this sublime devotion and talked to others they are confounded as to why the tones of Marie Antonette were used to give a mode of spiritual warfare against Communism; why they ask, if this is genuine, did Our Lord not speak in Russia and in Russian? Let’s recall the time frame, the 1800s, when French was the language of the educated class in Russia. The empress of Russia, Catherine the Great had made it the official language of the Russian Court and from then any social climber worth their salt did their utmost to learn it. In Moscow there was a huge appetite for French publications of all sorts, and the middle classes competed amongst themselves as to who was the most knowledgeable in French affairs. 

During Sr. Mary of St. Peter's lifetime, had the revelations of the power of making reparation to the Holy Face made a bigger noise in France, it would have resounded off the walls of many a Russian home. 

 

French was said to be losing its grasp on the Russian psyche in the 1800s, but not as quick as some like to portray. 20 years after Sr. Mary of St. Peter went to her eternal reward, Fyodor Dostoevsky finished The Idiot that has so much French speakers it can sound like it was set in a suburb of Paris. Dostoevsky was from a lower-middle class background and he alone offers a rebuttal to those who say that a Russian who spoke fluent French had to be aristocratic. Tolstoy, however, was nobility and in War and Peace there is something of a running joke about some in the Russian higher class not being able to speak anything but French. And had Our Lord’s desire that his Holy Face be given its due honour been made known by, for example, tens of thousands marching in the streets of Paris in a procession for the Holy Face, it would have gotten the attention of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. That it did not is lamentable, but I believe that when Russia is converted, they will pick up the thread from the 1800s and look to the key French influences in Catholicism of that time; we may yet live to see Sr. Mary of St. Peter become a saint based on miracles awarded modern Russians. 

I’d like to thank the readers of Mass of Ages for their prayers over the many years it has taken me to write my book, Padre Pio and You. It is being published by Sophia Press and hits the shelves on the 17^thJune of this year. 

* * *

This column appears in the Spring edition of The Mass of Ages, the magazine of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales. 

My knowledge of Sr. Mary of St. Peter was informed by reading, Fr. Carney's The Secret of the Holy Face.  Fr. Carney has roots in County Cork! 

The picture of the Holy Face was executed by Claude Mellan and that of Catherine the Great by Georg Christoph Grooth.