Venerable Mother Catherine McAuley on the Happy Thought of Resurrection

In these last weeks of our liturgical year when the Church focuses on the Four Last Things, i.e., death, judgment, Heaven and Hell, it is interesting to look at how unafraid Venerable Catherine was and to reflect on her hopeful and peaceful anticipation of the resurrection of the dead.  While she is often identified with a spirituality of the cross, her congregation being ‘founded on Calvary’, the cross was for her a means of being united in life with the One she longed to be united with in death. The following passages are taken from the Positio, pp. 807 and 813-815.  

Union with the suffering Christ was therefore for Catherine an intimate personal relationship, a self-knowledge of her own sinfulness and of His compassionate love, a recognition of His Mercy as reconciliation and healing” (p. 807).

As the inheritor of a penal tradition in which for centuries Catholics were persecuted and ostracized it was perhaps natural that Catherine McAuley should have regarded the Cross as a particular form of encounter with God.  On the other hand, it would be too facile a generalization to say that she veered more towards the Crucified than towards the Risen Christ; that her spirituality over-emphasized the Cross as against the Resurrection.  A closer study of her writings reveals much that a cursory glance fails to uncover.

The many deaths in her family and congregation, though they exacted her ‘annual tribute to the tomb’ and made ‘sorrow cling close to the poor Baggot Street’ nevertheless built up a community in Heaven where she, herself wished to be, since she was already ‘journeying fast out of this world.

She spelled out explicitly her consciousness of the pilgrim nature of this present life and her constant preparation and preparedness for death and the after-life:

The simplest and most practical lesson I know is to resolve to be good today, but better tomorrow.  Let us take one day only in hands at a time, merely making a resolve for tomorrow.  Thus we may hope to get on, taking short careful steps, not long strides…Each day is a step we take towards Eternity, and we shall continue thus to step from day to day until we take the last step which will bring us into the presence of God.

When the end came, Mother Catherine’s simple words to Sister M. Genevieve, “I am not afraid”, expressed for the last time the peace and serenity of one who knew that her Redeemer lived and that in her flesh she would see her God (Job 19:25-26).  Her spirituality of Resurrection underlay the aura of ordered calm which surrounded her death as it had characterized her life; a life she lived out in Paschal hope.

Posted November 13, 2020