[wood] an URSULINE EPIC 15 



afimities. St. Theresa, who did so much of the woman's work in aid of 

 the Jesuit efforts against the Protestants, was canonized in the same 

 year as Ignatius Loyola. La Mère Marie has been the accepted Ste. 

 Thérèse de l'Amérique ever since Bossuet first called her so; Pope Paid 

 III. told the Jesuits he was giving them sisters when he approved the 

 institution of the Ursulines ; and J esuits and Ursulines worked together 

 as the pioneers of edu,cation and conversion in the early days of Canada. 

 St. Catherine of Siena is the true psychological link between St. Theresa 

 and St. Francis, and the Franciscans were the first of all missionaries to 

 America, whither they went with Christopher Columbus on his second 

 voyage in 1493. 



-«Instances might easily be multiplied; and many comparatively 

 trifling coincidences added, such as that Diego de Yepez, Philip II's 

 confessor, published the Life of St. Theresa in 1599, the year La Mère 

 Marie was bom. But what is most significant to the Church's universal 

 work is that the three women were not really so much alike as comple- 

 mentary. St. Catherine was of lowly origin, only learnt to read after 

 she was grown up, and to write three years before her death. She em- 

 bodied the best traditions of mediaeval sanctity, -and yet was almost 

 Pauline in her exhortation and persuasiveness. St. Theresa was highly 

 bom, well educated, and the first of modern female saints. She did not 

 write so much to exhort and persuade directly as to reveal and justify. 

 She did not live in the tumultuous world as St. Catherine did, and her 

 only statesmanship took the special form of expanding and consolidating 

 her Theresian Carmelites. The St. Catherine we know from her quick- 

 worded letters is a woman appealing to soul after soul to help the Mother 

 Church with their own salvation ajid re-union. The St. Theresa of the 

 autobiography and El Castillo interior is a steward of the mysteries of 

 God, a high priestess who enters the Holy of Holies alone, and afterwards 

 re-tells to the faithful the message revealed to her beside the Ark of the 

 Covenant^ in presence of the Cherubim. 



La Mère Marie was neither highly nor lowly born, though very well 

 connected on her mother's side. She was more statesmanlike than St. 

 Catherine, more practical in worldly matters than St. Theresa. They 

 were of mediaeval and modern Europe : she was a pioneer and missionary 

 in the sternest of the New- World wilds. There, when the colony was still 

 in its impressionable youth, her cunning hand fashioned the moulds for 

 the same work that her two sister saints had done within their own 

 spheres of usefulness, and fashioned them in a spirit at once akin to 

 and adaptively different from theirs. Her pen, too, completed their 

 accounts of Church activities, from a nun's standpoint, by telling the first 

 story of convent life in ISTorth America. It is true that she wrote no 



