The Catholic Herald is reporting on a recent announcement from the Vatican that they have approved the opening of the Cause for the canonization of Mother Garnier, who died in Tyburn Convent, near Marble Arch, London, in 1924. Church officials have granted her the title, “Servant of God” after concluding that there were no obstacles to her candidacy. As a result, they have instructed Bishop Joseph de Metz-Noblat of Langres, a French diocese close to where Mother Garnier grew up, to establish a tribunal in his diocese to examine Mother Garnier’s life and writings.
Mother Garnier was born near Dijon in 1838. While working as a governess, she turned down a marriage proposal in order to establish a new religious order in Montmartre, Paris, which was dedicated to perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
“The fledgling community was persecuted by the Devil, with cases of obsession and diabolical possession and objects overturned, picked up and thrown around rooms,” the Herald reports. “On one occasion the sisters were coated suddenly with particles of altar breads and one of them was struck by invisible blows.”
Political upheavals in France forced the nuns to flee the country and found them eventually settling in a house just north of London’s Hyde Park, a few yards from the site of the Tyburn gallows where more than 100 Catholics were killed during the Protestant Reformation.
In a spiritual biography of the nun, entitled The Path of Mother Adele Garnier, written by Fr Gianmario Piga, and published in 2012, Mother Adele is described as a mystic who had experiences similar to that of the great mystical doctors of the Church, St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross.
It also details a letter she wrote to a priest friend in which she describes the moment she saw the Blessed Sacrament turn to bloody flesh in the hands of a priest.
“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,” she wrote.
“Oh, if you could know what I saw and how I am still moved and impressed by this vision,” she continued. “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.”
Mother Garnier’s tomb is a place of pilgrimage for the faithful, drawing people from all over the world.
Her order of contemplative Benedictine nuns, called the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre, has spread around the world with new convents opening in South America, Africa, France and New Zealand in the last few decades.
Depending on the conclusions of the local tribunal, her cause for canonization will eventually be sent to the Vatican where it will be scrutinized by theologians and historians. Miracles will then be needed in order to grant her the title of Blessed and eventually lead to canonization.
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