Elisabeth Reading

Elisabeth Reading

Élisabethleseur (born October 16, 1866 in Paris ; † May 3, 1914 there ) was a French Roman Catholic mystic of suffering. Your beatification process has started.

Life

Origin and marriage

Elisabeth Arrighi's father was of Corsican origin and a lawyer in Paris. She was the oldest of five siblings and acquired extensive knowledge of literature, art and music. In 1889, at the age of 22, she married the five years older, elegant and intellectually brilliant Félixleseur, also a lawyer, who switched from studying medicine to journalism and became a specialist in global politics and colonialism. The sufficiently wealthy couple frequented intellectual circles in Paris (Félix was a friend of Louis Barthou ) and made extensive trips, including to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth . Elisabeth learned Latin and Russian on her own initiative and read philosophical writings.

The marriage of faith and unbelief

The rift that went through the couple concerned the Catholic faith. He was an avowed atheist, she was a devout Catholic. In order to save their marital happiness - which was apparently never clouded elsewhere - they refrained from any deeper discussion on this subject. The greater reluctance was on Elisabeth's side, while in his feeling of intellectual superiority he allowed himself some remarks, the painful effect of which he overlooked. Contrary to the imagination of her husband, who expected her faith to weaken under the pressure of the arguments, Elisabeth not only held on to her faith, but also studied and deepened it through reading and encounters on trips, including an audience with Pope Leo XIII. She also had the uplifting example of her sister Juliette, who died early, before her eyes, whose death she devoted to the will of God recorded in notes that were later published under the title “Une âme” (One Soul).

The mystic of suffering

While, on the one hand, the fundamental harmony of marriage was never questioned, Elisabeth suffered threefold over the course of time. Once, due to an early illness, she did not have the comfort of motherhood. Second, she was often and increasingly physically ill, made more difficult from 1906 until her death in 1914 at the age of 47. And thirdly, without saying it, as her own faith grew, she suffered from her husband's constant unbelief. In this situation she made the heroic decision to accept her suffering up to death not only in silence and without grumbling (as a “devoir d'état”, that is, as an appropriate task), but as a source of strength and a sacrament , because through the Reading by the holy Cistercian Bernhard von Clairvaux knew that nothing great can be obtained without suffering. The great thing she was striving for, however, was the conversion of her husband, who of course knew nothing about it. From 1910 to March 1914 she wrote 78 letters in this sense to the nun Marie Goby, who she met in Beaune , later published by him under the title "Lettres sur la souffrance" (Letters about suffering). Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, she died in the smell of holiness.

The conversion of the widower

After her death, the widower suffered, not only from the loss of the woman he loved so deeply, but even more from the recognition of his own causation for this suffering. He became aware of this when reading the diary she left behind for the years 1899 to 1913, which was unknown to him, which was obviously written for him and whose posthumous reading actually put Félix Lesur on the path of conversion to the faith. At Pentecost 1915 he entered the Third Order of the Dominicans (professed in 1916). In 1917 he published the diary ( Journal et pensées de chaque jour ), which became a bookselling success with 30,000 copies sold. In the same year he was received by Pope Benedict XV. received in audience. In 1918 he published the Lettres sur la souffrance and in 1919 La Vie spirituelle, petits traités de vie intérieure , each with long introductions from his pen. Then he entered the Dominican monastery Le Saulchoir in Belgium and took the religious name Marie-Albert . In 1922 he published Elisabeth's Lettres à des incroyants (letters to unbelievers), made perpetual vows in 1923 and was ordained a priest in the church of Saint-Maurice in Lille in July of the same year . He lectured on his wife for fifteen years (around 100 a year). In 1930 he published the biography ( Vie d'Élisabethlesenur ) and began working on the dossier to initiate the beatification. In 1938 he had to attend the exhumation of the body. The Second World War made it impossible to close the dossier. Félixlesenur slowly sank into old age problems. He died in Chaudron-en-Mauges in 1950 .

literature

• Else Budnowski (1900–2002): Your example, his homecoming. Elisabeth and Felixlesenur . Johannes-Verlag, Leutesdorf am Rhein 1976.
• Bernadette Chovelon (* 1934): Élisabeth et Félix reads. Itinéraire spirituel d'un couple . Artège, Paris 2015.

Web links

Commons : Élisabethleseur  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Elisabeth Reading website, with literature, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish
• Literature by and about Élisabethlese in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)