St. Elizabeth of the Trinity

Who they were

Elizabeth Catez of Dijon was a prize winning pianist with a childhood temper so ferocious that her mother despaired of her, and she mastered it, by her own account, through will and grace, into a stillness that became her signature. The temper belongs in the story, because her serenity was built rather than issued.

Refused permission to enter Carmel until she was twenty one, she spent the waiting years proving her doctrine in advance, living parties and concerts and housework out of an interior cell, and once inside the Dijon Carmel she took the whole programme as a name: Laudem Gloriae, the praise of glory. Her teaching, condensed in letters and retreat notes written as much for laypeople as for nuns, is that the Trinity actually dwells in the baptized soul. Heaven is not later and elsewhere; it is begun inside you and reachable in a kitchen or an office by a turn of attention. Addison's disease killed her at twenty six in 1906, in great suffering, and her recorded farewell was that she was going to Light, to Love, to Life. She was canonized in 2016.

Why people turn to St. Elizabeth of the Trinity

Busy people who cannot get to a chapel, which is her entire doctrine's audience: anyone praying in a car or a break room is doing exactly what she taught. Musicians, with St. Cecilia and St. Hildegard of Bingen. And the gravely ill young, with St. Rafael Arnáiz Barón and St. Gemma Galgani.

How to ask their intercession

Her practice fits in one line: turn inward once in the middle of a task and greet the Guest who is already there. That is the whole retreat, and it takes about four seconds.