Si quis diligit me, sermonem meum servabit, et Pater meus diliget eum, et ad eum veniemus, et mansionem apud eum faciemus. “If any one love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and will make our abode with him.” — John 14:23
I. A note on this entry
Like Blessed Chiara Luce Badano, St. Elizabeth of the Trinity stands outside the ordinary run of this series. She died in 1906, was beatified in 1984 and canonized in 2016, and so the Missal of 1962 has no Mass or Collect for her. Today, in the traditional calendar, the Church keeps the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, restored to its place before Advent.
Yet Elizabeth belongs to the old world more than most modern saints. She lived and died under St. Pius X. She prayed the old Office in a Carmel that kept the Rule of St. Teresa in its first strictness. Her cause was opened at Dijon in 1931, under Pius XI, and her writings were examined and approved by the Holy See in 1944, under Pius XII. What she wrote about, the indwelling of the Most Holy Trinity in the soul in grace, is not a new devotion. It is the teaching of Our Lord at the Last Supper, of St. Paul, of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, set out for the whole Church by Leo XIII in Divinum illud munus in 1897, four years before she entered Carmel.
As in every entry, what follows keeps apart what is documented and what is devotional. For Elizabeth the documents are unusually rich. We have her diary, her letters, her poems, her retreat notes, and the memoir her prioress published three years after her death. Her words are given here in fresh translation from the French.
II. The captain’s daughter
Élisabeth Catez was born on the eighteenth of July, 1880, at the military camp of Avor, near Bourges, where her father, Captain Joseph Catez, was stationed. Her mother was Marie Rolland, herself an officer’s daughter. Both parents had married late, and Elizabeth was their first child. She was baptized four days later, on the feast of St. Mary Magdalen, in the chapel of the camp. A second daughter, Marguerite, called Guite, followed in 1883. By then the family had moved to Dijon, where the captain’s regiment was posted.
On the second of October, 1887, Captain Catez died suddenly of a heart attack. Elizabeth was seven. The widow and her two girls moved into a small apartment, and from its windows Elizabeth could see the walls of the Carmel of Dijon.
She was not a gentle child. Her family and teachers remembered a fiery, wilful girl given to violent fits of temper when she was crossed. In one well-attested story, she screamed and kicked at the door of a room where she had been shut up for punishment. Her mother threatened to send her to a house of correction. The household had a name for her: a little devil. It would be false to her to soften this. The serenity for which she later became known was not a temperament. It was conquered.
The turning point came with her first confession, in the year of her father’s death, and above all with her first Holy Communion, on the nineteenth of April, 1891. She said afterwards that from that day she began to fight her faults in earnest. That afternoon her mother took her to the parlour of the Carmel. The prioress, Mother Marie of Jesus, told her that her name, Elisabeth, meant “house of God.” (As an etymology this is doubtful; the Hebrew name is usually read as “my God is an oath.” But it is how Elizabeth received it, and the meaning shaped her life.) The prioress also gave her a holy card with a few lines of verse on the same theme: the child’s heart was now the dwelling of God. Elizabeth kept the card. She was confirmed at Notre-Dame of Dijon on the eighth of June that year.
III. The pianist
Elizabeth was a gifted musician. She studied at the Conservatoire of Dijon and won its first prize for piano in 1893, at the age of thirteen. Her mother had hopes of a career for her and, later, of a good marriage. Elizabeth’s world as a young woman was an ordinary bourgeois one: summer holidays in the mountains and by the sea, dances, parties, friends, pretty dresses. She enjoyed all of it, and suitors asked for her hand.
But at about fourteen, after Holy Communion, she made a private vow of virginity, and she felt for the first time a call to Carmel. Her mother refused to hear of it. For years the question lay between them. In March 1899, after a parish mission, Madame Catez gave way: Elizabeth might enter Carmel at twenty-one, but not before, and in the meantime she was not to visit the monastery. Elizabeth obeyed. She waited two more years in the world, and those years were not wasted. She taught catechism to the children of the parish, helped with the choir, and visited the poor. Her diary from this period, which survives in part, records the struggle to master her temper and her will, and a growing life of prayer.
In 1899 she read the Story of a Soul, the autobiography of the Carmelite of Lisieux who had died two years before, and it moved her deeply. In 1900 she met Father Irénée Vallée, a Dominican of Dijon, who would matter greatly to her. Elizabeth told him that she sometimes felt God dwelling within her, and asked whether this was an illusion. He explained to her, with St. Thomas, that it was not a feeling but a fact of faith: the soul in a state of grace is the dwelling place of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. She later said that he had put into words what she had been living.
IV. Carmel
On the second of August, 1901, Elizabeth knelt before her father’s portrait and asked his blessing. Then she walked with her mother and sister to the Carmel, a short way down the street, and entered the enclosure for good. She received the habit on the eighth of December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and the name for which she had hoped: Elizabeth of the Trinity. She made her profession on the eleventh of January, 1903, and received the black veil ten days later, on the feast of St. Agnes.
Her years in the monastery were outwardly uneventful. She did the work of the house, sewed, swept, sang the Office in choir, and kept the long hours of silent prayer that the Rule of St. Teresa requires. The year of her entrance was also the year of the French Law of Associations, and the religious orders of France lived under the threat of suppression and exile. Elizabeth wrote to her family with calm about the possibility that the community might be driven out.
Her novitiate was not easy. After the joy of her first months she passed through a long period of spiritual darkness and scruples. She found no consolation in prayer and feared that she had mistaken her vocation. On the eve of her profession the anguish was so great that the superiors considered postponing it. She went ahead in faith, and the peace returned on the day itself. This, too, belongs to her story. She did not live in a state of continual sweetness. She learned to remain with God in the dark.
On the twenty-first of November, 1904, the feast of the Presentation of Our Lady, at the end of a community retreat, she wrote in her notebook a prayer that was found only after her death. It has become one of the best-known prayers of the modern Church. It begins:
Ô mon Dieu, Trinité que j’adore, aidez-moi à m’oublier entièrement pour m’établir en vous, immobile et paisible comme si déjà mon âme était dans l’éternité.
“O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me to forget myself entirely, so as to establish myself in You, unmoving and at peace, as if my soul were already in eternity.”
V. Laudem gloriæ
In her reading of St. Paul, Elizabeth came upon a phrase in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians. The Apostle says that God has predestined us in Christ ut simus in laudem gloriæ eius, “that we may be unto the praise of his glory” (Eph. 1:12). She took the words as her new name and her vocation. From about 1905 she signed her letters Laudem gloriæ, and she wrote that she wished to be, even on earth, a praise of the glory of the Trinity, as the blessed are in heaven.
She meant something precise by it. A praise of glory, she wrote, is a soul that lives in God with a love so pure and so simple that it does not seek itself in anything, not even in the sweetness of His love. It is a soul of silence, like a lyre under the touch of the Holy Ghost, so that He may draw from it a divine harmony. It is a soul that looks at God in faith and simplicity, and reflects Him as a crystal reflects the sun. Her reading was narrow and deep: St. Paul above all, St. John of the Cross, the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame, and the Flemish mystic Blessed John Ruysbroeck. She did not invent a system. She took what she found there and lived it.
VI. The last two years
Early in 1905 the first signs appeared of Addison’s disease, a failure of the adrenal glands. It brought exhaustion, stomach pain, migraines, and a wasting of the body. There was then no treatment; the hormone therapy that now controls it lay forty years in the future. The disease advanced slowly at first. In Lent of 1906 she was moved to the infirmary, and in the last months she could take almost nothing, not even water, without pain. The sisters remembered her climbing the stairs on her hands and knees after Compline.
She received the Last Sacraments in April and then recovered for a time, and the last half-year of her life was the most fruitful. She wrote for her sister Guite, who was now married with children, a short treatise on how to live with God in the world, later called Heaven in Faith. In August she made a final retreat and wrote the notes since published as her Last Retreat. To her friends and family she wrote letters of extraordinary depth. To the prioress, Mother Germaine of Jesus, she left a note of farewell. In it she told the prioress that God loved her, and urged her to let herself be loved, without fearing that any obstacle could hinder that love.
She understood her suffering in the light of St. Paul’s words that she must fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in her flesh, for his body, which is the Church (Col. 1:24). She did not ask to be healed. She asked to be conformed to the Crucified, and she called the Cross the bridal gift of her Bridegroom.
She died in the early morning of the ninth of November, 1906, at the age of twenty-six. It was the feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of the Most Holy Saviour at the Lateran, the mother church of Rome and of the world. Among the last words the sisters heard from her were these: Je vais à la Lumière, à l’Amour, à la Vie. “I am going to Light, to Love, to Life.”
The child who had been told at her first Communion that her name meant “house of God” died on the feast of the house of God.
VII. The cause
In 1909 Mother Germaine published a memoir of Elizabeth with extracts from her writings, under the title Souvenirs. It went through many editions and was translated widely, and her prayer to the Trinity spread across the Catholic world. The diocesan process for her beatification was opened at Dijon in 1931 and closed in 1941. Her writings were approved on the twenty-eighth of January, 1944. The theologians took her seriously from the start. In 1937 the Dominican Marie-Michel Philipon, a Thomist, published a full study of her teaching, which showed how closely it agreed with St. Thomas on the missions of the Divine Persons and on grace.
She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on the twenty-fifth of November, 1984, and canonized by Pope Francis on the sixteenth of October, 2016. The miracle approved for her canonization was the healing of Marie-Paul Stevens, a Belgian teacher of religion and a Secular Carmelite who suffered from Sjögren’s syndrome, a disease of the glands for which there was no cure. She was healed suddenly in 2002 at the Carmel of Flavignerot, near Dijon, where the community of Elizabeth’s Carmel now lives, and where she had gone on pilgrimage to give thanks for graces already received.
Because the ninth of November belongs in the Roman calendar to the Dedication of the Lateran, the Carmelite Order keeps her feast on the eighth.
VIII. What the old theology sees in her
Elizabeth’s language is the language of a young French nun, warm and sometimes poetic. What she lived is the most solid doctrine the Church has.
The indwelling. At the Last Supper Our Lord promised that the Father and the Son would come to the soul that loves Him and make their abode with it (John 14:23). St. Paul asks the Corinthians: Know you not, that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? (1 Cor. 3:16). St. Thomas explains how this is so. God is present in all things as their cause, but in the souls of the just He is present in a new and special way, as the known is in the knower and the beloved in the lover. By sanctifying grace the soul is able to know and love Him, and so to possess Him (Summa Theologiae I, q. 43). Leo XIII taught the same thing to the whole Church in Divinum illud munus: God is present in the just not only as He is in all creatures, but in a way that is proper to them, as in His temple, by charity. Elizabeth is not a theologian of this truth. She is a witness to it. She took St. Thomas and Leo XIII at their word.
The life of heaven begun on earth. St. Thomas teaches that grace is nothing other than a certain beginning of glory in us (II-II, q. 24, a. 3, ad 2). The same God whom the blessed see face to face is already present in the soul in grace, known by faith instead of by vision. Elizabeth’s Heaven in Faith is a commentary on that sentence. Heaven, she wrote to her sister, is God, and God is in our soul, so that we already have our heaven within us. Her prayer asks to live as if already in eternity. That is not escape from the world. It is the theological virtue of faith lived to the full.
Silence and recollection. The Carmelite tradition, from St. Teresa’s Interior Castle to St. John of the Cross, teaches that God is found within, and that the soul must withdraw from distraction to find Him. Elizabeth gave this teaching its simplest form. In her Last Retreat she takes the Apostle’s word nescivi, “I knew not,” from the Canticle (Cant. 6:11), as a rule of life: to know nothing but Him, to let nothing pass the gate of the soul that does not lead to Him.
Praise as the end of man. The first answer of the old catechisms is that God made us to know Him, love Him and serve Him. The deeper answer of the Fathers is that He made us for His glory. Laudem gloriæ is that answer made into a name. The soul does not add to the glory of God. It reflects it, as the moon reflects the sun. Elizabeth asked to be nothing but that reflection.
IX. What her life teaches
That a temper is not a destiny. The little girl who kicked at the door became the Carmelite whom her sisters remembered for her peace. Grace did not change her nature by magic. It worked through her first confession, her first Communion, and years of patient struggle. No one who is fighting a fault should despair.
That God is not far off. Most Christians pray as if God were somewhere else, and they had to call Him across a distance. Elizabeth teaches what the Church has always taught: if we are in a state of grace, He is within, nearer to us than we are to ourselves, as St. Augustine said. Prayer begins by turning toward Him there.
That interior life is for everyone. Heaven in Faith was written for a young wife and mother, not for a nun. Elizabeth told Guite that she too could live with God amid her household cares. The indwelling of the Trinity is not a privilege of the cloister. It is the inheritance of every baptized soul.
That darkness and suffering do not mean God has gone. Elizabeth passed through months of desolation in her novitiate and two years of a painful and incurable illness. In both she held to God by faith alone. She shows that faith is most itself when it feels nothing, and that suffering accepted in union with Christ is not lost but given for the Church.
That death is the door of the house. She went to God, as she said, to Light, to Love, to Life. For a soul that has lived with the Trinity within, death is not a journey into the unknown. It is the moment when faith becomes sight, and the guest who was hidden in the house is seen face to face.
Practice
Examine. Do I pray as though God were far away, or do I believe that He dwells in my soul in grace? Do I guard that state of grace as the most precious thing I have, and go quickly to confession when I have lost it? What fault of temper or will have I stopped fighting because I think it is simply who I am? How much noise, talk and distraction do I allow into the house where God lives?
Do. Before your morning prayer tomorrow, spend one minute in silence, recalling that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are present within you, and adore Them there before you ask for anything. Learn by heart the opening lines of Elizabeth’s prayer. If you know someone who is chronically ill, send them her words that God is with them within, and pray for them.
Pray. St. Elizabeth has no Collect in the 1962 Missal. Pray instead the Collect of today’s Mass, which asks God to guard His household:
Familiam tuam, quæsumus, Domine, continua pietate custodi: ut quæ in sola spe gratiæ cælestis innititur, tua semper protectione muniatur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“Keep, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy family in Thy continual goodness: that, leaning solely on the hope of heavenly grace, it may ever be defended by Thy protection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Ô mon Dieu, Trinité que j’adore. “O my God, Trinity whom I adore.”
Devote. It is Sunday, the day of the Most Holy Trinity in the old devotional week. Pray the Gloria Patri slowly and attentively three times, once to each Divine Person. Tomorrow the Church keeps the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, on which Elizabeth died, and sings in its Introit: Terribilis est locus iste: hic domus Dei est, et porta cæli, “Terrible is this place: it is the house of God, and the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:17). Let that Mass remind you that your own soul, in grace, is such a house. And in this month of the holy souls, pray for those who have died, that they may go, as she did, to Light, to Love, to Life.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the indwelling of the Holy Trinity in St. Thomas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 43) and Leo XIII’s Divinum illud munus, and grace as the beginning of glory. The Lives of the Saints path sets Elizabeth beside St. Thérèse of Lisieux, her contemporary and inspiration, and beside the Carmelite masters St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross, from whom she learned. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats the prayer of recollection and the practice of the presence of God. The Sacred Liturgy path follows the theology of the church building in the Mass of the Dedication, the house of God built of living stones.
Sancta Elisabeth a Trinitate, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 43 and II-II, q. 24; Leo XIII, Divinum illud munus (1897); the writings of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity (diary, letters, poems, Heaven in Faith*,* Last Retreat*, and the prayer of 21 November 1904), in the French critical edition of her complete works; Mother Germaine of Jesus,* Souvenirs (Dijon, 1909); M.-M. Philipon, O.P., La doctrine spirituelle de Sœur Élisabeth de la Trinité (1937); the chronology published by the Discalced Carmelite Order and the Postulation General of the Order; contemporary reports of her canonization. St. Thomas, Leo XIII and her own words are given in paraphrase or fresh translation, except for the opening of her prayer and her last words, which are given in her own French.