Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois

Excerpt

Having read a French edition of the Life of Venerable Sister Bourgeois, published in 1818, the translator of the present work was so charmed by its perusal that she resolved on rendering it into English for the spiritual edification of others.

Many years ago the work of translation was commenced, but from some preventing cause or other, was as often laid aside. Yet the idea of presenting it to the public remained, as no English Version of Sister Bourgeois' life exists, at least in the United States.

Therefore determining at last to obey an impulse of long standing, the scattered translation sheets have been prepared for publication, with the humble hope that the reader may derive as much benefit from their perusal as did the writer.

In this age of miscellaneous and corrupt literature, when people of every condition of life are literally devouring irreligious magazines and serials, it surely cannot be amiss to add another volume to the already rich store of our libraries in order to help roll back the torrent of universal depravity that threatens the rain of our beloved country, and also to place before the minds of the young, the glorious example of one of God's heroines.

The Second Centennial of Sister Bourgeois' advent to America is already past, and more than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, was she laboring in the cause of humanity for the glory of God in the New World.

If reading the lives of such women as Mrs. Seton—a Protestant American lady, who after her conversion to the Catholic Church in Italy so burned with the love of God, as to return to her native land in her early widowhood to form a flourishing religious sisterhood in New York; of Nano Nagle, an Irish aristocrat, who turned from a useless fashionable life to the lowly spirit of the gospel on seeing the poor artizans of Paris crowding to early Mass in the Church of Notre Dame before beginning their daily toil, while she lolled weariedly in her carriage after a midnight ball; heroically putting her hand to the plough, she never turned back, and left behind her another religious Sisterhood in Ireland to perpetuate her philanthropic sanctity: of Catharine McAuley, who receiving from her adopted Protestant parents a princely fortune, expended every shilling of it in building up the Order of Mercy, one of the latest and most flourishing outposts of the Church of God; of St. Jane de Chantal, who after having been tried in the fire of affliction for years—founded in her advanced widowhood the Order of the Visitation, under the direction of St. Francis de Sales—and who attained such an extraordinary degree of perfection as to be seen ascending to heaven like a luminous meteor after her happy death.

If the perusal of the lives of these, and a host of other sainted women, such as the Catholic Church alone can produce, has filled many a young heart with high and holy aspirations—perhaps the contents of this little volume will not be less efficacious for the glory of God, the interests of religion, and the salvation of souls.

A literal translation has been adhered to as far as possible—one or two remarks at the close being the only additions. So if any defects exist in the work they belong solely to the translator, whose aim has not been rhetorical composition, but the greater glory of God....