BENEDICTINES AND PERPETUAL ADORATION

Mother Nicola Golden Jubilee- Peru

Mother  Marie Adele

Recently I heard from my Benedictine nuns in Sechura, Peru. Their Mother Abbess from England was making a visitation.  Their foundress MOTHER MARIE ADELE GARNIER has been made a Servant of God and evidence for her cause is being gathered.

Mother Marie Adela Garnier was born on August 15, 1838, in Grancey-le-Chateau, in northeastern France (Burgandy). She had three sisters and one brother. For many years she taught as a governess and was greatly loved and esteemed by both parents and children.  From her youth she felt deeply the love of Christ touching her heart, drawing her to surrender herself totally to him. Her devotion to the Eucharistic Christ became the center of her spiritual life.

The Eucharist, the Sacrament and Sacrifice of the love of Christ, and the Sacred Heart, symbol of the love human and divine of Christ for his Father and for all humanity, could never be separated in the soul of Marie Adèle.

Early in her life, she had a vision of Jesus in a Host given to her during Communion, which affected her for the rest of her life. In 1885,  Marie Adèle sought to live this Eucharistic life as a solitary at Montmartre in Paris. Her health failed and she was obliged to abandon this way of life.

Several years later the Lord called her to establish a religious family consecrated to the worship and praise of the Holy Trinity through liturgical prayer and Eucharistic adoration in the contemplative life. She founded her Congregation - the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre, in 1898 at Montmartre, Paris, with the  approbation of Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris. The new Community would be dedicated to the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament exposed in the Monstrance.

Mother Marie Adèle  established this form of contemplative life within the monastic tradition of the Church under the Rule of St. Benedict. In 1901 the young community fled to England on account of the laws of France against religious Orders. The Foundress settled her new community at Tyburn in London, at the famous site of the martyrdom of more than 100 Catholic Reformation Martyrs.

This monastery is now the Mother House of her Congregation which has monasteries in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Italy and France.

Toward the end of her life, in 1923, she had another  vision in the Eucharist, this one of the living heart of Jesus.

Mother Marie Adèle Garnier died at Tyburn in the year 1924 renowned for holiness and virtue. She is honored and remembered especially for her heroic love of God and neighbor, her spirit of prayer, divine contemplation, rich mystical and spiritual doctrine, humility, obedience, patience, simplicity & purity of heart, and above all for her spirit of total "self-abandon" to the Holy Will of God, which she declared to be her unique good.

In a letter she had written to Father Charles Sauve she related the following:

“At the moment in which the priest took a particle of the Holy Host and put it into the chalice I raised my eyes to adore and to contemplate the holy particle…The fingers of the priest held not a white particle but a particle of striking red, the color of blood and luminous at the same time … The fingers of the priest were red on the right of the particle, as from a blood stain that seemed still wet.”