January 28: the anniversary of Leonie's definitive entrance into the Monastery of the Visitation of Caen

Leonie’s second attempt to become a Visitation nun at Caen had lasted two years, from June 24, 1893 to July 20, 1895. In those years the monastery was administered with a severity inconsistent with the gentleness so characteristic of Jeanne de Chantal, the Order’s founder, and Francis de Sales, her close friend and adviser, who was considered the spiritual father of the Visitandines. Leonie’s novice mistress, Mother Marie de Sales Lefrancois, enforced the rule vigorously, and many postulants left the Order because of her rigidity. 1

Several years later, a new spirit came to the Visitation at Caen. Approached by the nuns’ confessor, Father Enault, the Visitation Monastery at Boulogne-sur-Mer had missioned three nuns to Caen in 1897, and one of them, Sister Louise-Henriette Vaugeois, was made novice mistress. The work of reconstructing the old Abbey was quickly resumed. Under the more liberal superiors, several women who had left the monastery returned. The community now had about forty nuns and was characterized by a spirit of familial peace and fervor. Devotion to the Sacred Heart grews within the community and radiated throughout the whole region. Every year, in June, the community hosted all the local parishes in succession, and many priests wanted to offer one of their first Masses at the Visitation. 2

During her visits to Caen after 1895, Leonie became aware of this transformation. In October 1898, when Therese’s Story of a Soul was published, Leonie read it avidly, finding in its radiant pages new hope for her own religious vocation. On November 21, 1898, the feast of the Presentation (a solemn feast in the Visitation Order), she wrote to her three Carmelite sisters telling of how she had just told her aunt, Celine Guerin, of her desire to enter the Visitation and had asked permission to enter on January 29 or on February 2. Both her aunt and uncle, now her guardians, consented. Escorted by her uncle, she entered on Saturday, January 28, 1899. The enclosure door through which she passed is pictured above.

“Deeply moved, but full of trust,” she threw herself into the arms of her “tender Mother Superior,” saying “I will leave here, yes, but in my coffin!” (Interestingly, her body did not leave the Visitation, for she was buried there). Leonie always liked to be well dressed, and the nuns who saw her arrive, wearing an elegant, tightly fitted velvet jacket, could have believed that she was still interested in worldly fashions.

Leonie was admitted to the novitiate on Wednesday, February 1. The next day she wrote to her three Carmelite sisters:

I am perfectly happy; the strong and gentle direction under which I am is unlike any other. Oh! how can I make you understand the extreme tenderness God has put into the wholly maternal hearts that are directing me, no, never before have I found a truer or more profound affection, it exceeds anything I could have imagined.

My translation; see the original French letter of February 2, 1899. (This letter is online thanks to the Web site of the Archives of the Carmel of Lisieux). Here was Leonie’s true homecoming on earth. We may take note of her writing, at age 35, that she was loved at the Visitation as she never had been before.

1 Leonie Martin: A Difficult Life, by Marie Baudoin-Croix. Dublin: Veritas, 1993, p. 54.

2 Leonie, by Stephane-Joseph Piat. chapter 5.

3 Piat, cited above.